Blundering about in the dark...

Today has been long and disheartening and without studio time.  ;o(  Well, no time in my own studio that is, although I have been at life class this evening so I am sneaking that in as my 30 Days of Get Your Art On time, ssssssh, no one will notice!  ;o) 

This evening's model was the lovely Clifford who I always enjoy drawing and who is always interesting to chat with.  ;o)  We had some great subdued lighting for the class tonight which gave some lovely shadows for tonal work.  Mind you, I confess that my position in the class didn't afford me much light to draw by at all and by the time I'd finished drawing the first two poses I practically had my nose on the paper!  ;oD  So, after some judicious light bulb tinkering I had some light and swiftly whipped my early efforts off the easel and this was my next drawing...

Trust me, it's miles better than it's predecessors!  ;o)  I was relatively happy with this one, I think I'm improving (albeit at a snail's pace) on the shading front.  I remembered the squinting technique to see tonal values this evening and spent alot of time peering out from behind the easel with half closed eyes, goodness only knows what sort of freaky sideshow appearance I have!  lol  After this pose we moved onto a standing pose to finish and I did a more scribbly tonal drawing...

And, no, he wasn't wearing knee pads!  lol  Another area to add to my To Improve On list me thinks...

Day 11 in the studio...

Had to have an essential early night yesterday so catching up with blogworld for both days this afternoon.  ;o)

So, I'll kick off with a little update on the metal tags.  I decided to glue them together in pairs so that I can have text on both sides.  There's not as many pairs as there might be because I was a bit slow gluing and, having put glue on all of the tags, by the time I got to the last ones the glue had gone off!  I may do them again once I've decided what text I'll be using and have more of an idea how any I'll need.  Here they are having a little trial run at being confined to a binding ring....

I devoted most of my studio time yesterday and today to getting some more sorting done, I have successfully emptied and sorted the biggest of my cupboards which had lots of bags of miscellaneous rubbish... ahem, I mean valuable art materials, filling it's shelves.  Along the way I did actually do a fair degree of art journaling as I kept happening upon things I'd been meaning to use in journals but forgot about as they got shoved to the back of the cupboard so that was nicel serendipitous!  ;o) 

Today I find several things that I want to work on as I enter the second week of 30 Days of get Your Art On.  I found a couple of old linen backed maps gathering dust in a corner and will be prepping them as bases for some collage work.

I've torn the maps (that's upset any cartographers in the vicinity!) into their individual sections of the maps which are roughly 3 ish inches by 6 ish inches with losts of nice dangly threads on the edges!

I'm loving the texture of the piueces and I'm looking forward to splashing some paint around on them tomorrow.  ;o)

Another find, this time buried in a box of papers, is this poor lost soul...

It's part of the stubby bit of a book of raffle tickets, I say part because it was chewed by one of our lovely dogs who mistook it for a snack, and some of it was beyond saving and had to be laid to rest in the recycling bin.  However the surviving stubbiness is destined to become certainly the narrowest, if not the smallest, book art project I've embarked on.  ;o)

It has a glued spine of course so some reinforcement may be required once I get going on it otherwise it may not stand up to the rigours of it's transformation.

Size wise, it's about a quarter of an inch wide by about 5 or 6 inches (can you tell I didn't have the foresight to measure anything before I came to blog and now can't arsed to go back up to the studio and do it?!) so loads of room for textual play!  ;oD

Lastly, yes, I know I'm harping on a bit today but I'm nearly there so bear with me a teeny tad longer... lastly, I came across these concertina books from a recent Fenland Arts event. 

 
My fellow Fenland Arts artist in residence, Fred White, and I were at a local Cultural Olympiad event where we were encouraging folk to be creative with a selection of materials we had available.  I had taken a stack of beer mats generously donated by my friend, Richard, (well, I say generously donated, what I really mean is fished out of his recycling bin in a strop because he didn't ask me if I wanted them first!  lol) and in the few slack moments during the day I used them as bases for making concertina books.

 
I hadn't made any little books for a while before this event and would like to finish them off as samples for a prospective kid's workshop. 

Ok, aaaand relaxxxxx, end of blog post!  ;oD 

Soooo, the metal tags are progressing... yesterday I cut them all out, trimmed them to within an inch of their lives and swore my way through getting the holes perfectly finished.

This afternoon I wielded some colour and painted the little poppets, I wetted the watercolour paper first and then sprinkled over dry Brusho powder in brilliant red, black and turquoise.

In my usual thrifty way the mountboard I used to paint the tags on is destined for another project.  ;o)

And, lastly, you can't beat a dirty artist's hand photo!  ;o)  Or do I mean the dirty hand of an artist?  Lol

It's been nine days since the start of 30 Days of Get Your Art On and I've so enjoyed getting back in the studio, getting my head down and doing, yay!  ;o)  I do, however, feel that this week has just been about easing myself back into the regularity of daily doings so all I can say is roll on the next 21 days!  ;o)