a little lime

A quick one that I blocked in yesterday and finished off this morning. It was fun to play with a couple of patterns I haven't used before, though I did manage to get Chard in there - I think I have used this pattern on just about every graphic style piece that I've done. love. it. Sometimes when I work on these more intensely patterned pieces, I waver between shading the patterned areas as well as the overall design. The times I have attempted this it has ended up looking too busy without the strong distinction between design elements. Today I stuck with shading the block elements and am happy with how it came out. Have a great weekend! hx

I love the school holidays, I love that we're having mild, sunny winter weather and I love pods. Yep, pods. I haven't drawn them for a while and I think I had kinda forgotten about them. If you want to check out some of my previous pod drawings go: here and here What prompted a renewal of the pod romance? This pin  of an amazing drawing by Irina Vinnik - I love how her pods had a calyx attached to them and right away wanted to have a play with this idea. I really like the flow of this one and may re-do something similar with flowers. I was a little slap-happy with the drawing and the perspective is out of whack here and there. If you want to see a couple of in progress images of outline and shading they are on my facebook page Hope you're having a great week! hx

I have been listening to "The Wall" on almost constant repeat for about a week - Erin bought home a tape from a garage sale and as soon as she started playing it I remembered how much I used to love this album and headed straight to iTunes to download it. That was over a week ago and I have really immersed myself in it. Re-watched the movie and have been reading an in-depth analysis. Ah, such is the way of a compulsive person. Another week or so and it'll be out of my system. Anyway, over the weekend I drew this - I started off thinking about the loopy paisley shapes of my last drawings, but wanted to play with weaving the lines in and out of each other: So, then I shaded and added the straight detail lines. My husband took one look and said it looked like worms. Gross. So not the effect I was after, and, possibly the subliminal result of all that Pink Floyd. So, I added the random-ish checks which hopefully gives it the more loose, organic, non-worm appearance ...

Not a lot of drawing happening around here, though, I AM right at the middle of term! Once I get through todays classes I can start counting down to the June/July break - I'm really looking forward to the 3 weeks off, though I can barely comprehend that we are almost half way through 2013. Wasn't it just Christmas? A quick, simple bit of spirally cone love that popped into my head last night - I did remember to shade this one before patterning: Ah, and some scolls.......my (not so secret) obsession...... It's not complete yet - I did the outline for this one yesterday, hopefully I will have a chance to shade it tonight - it always amazes me the difference that shading makes to the drawing. I'm almost to the end of another journal - it's time to take a look back through and see what needs to be finished off, or ideas worth resuscitating. hx

I'm tired. Soooooooo tired. Milking. Bah. John and I are up every morning at 5am doing the first milking - the cow still needs us both to get her in and John has been in the kicking zone putting on the cups, etc for most of this week - I have just started to do this over the past 2 days. We need to get it done before John has to get ready for work, hence the early start. The cow has been great (no kicks!) and is getting into the routine - after about another week I'll take over the morning shift by myself and move it to a much more respectable 6am. Anyway, all this = both of us very tired. At least I've been able to have a quick nap most days. And, on the plus side I have fresh milk, cream, homemade yogurt, ricotta, and today - as I have about 20 litres of milk and a litre of cream in the fridge - icream and butter! Now, onto this weeks diva challenge   which was to take inspiration from the Chinese Year of the Snake. Snakes - I don't love them - but living in a ...

This weeks diva challenge ........Tangle Patterns String 003. So, a string..........yeeeeeah...........I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with strings. They push me way outside my comfort zone and make me really work to come up with something that is still "me" - sometimes this helps me to create something that I absolutely love. But on the flipside they're hard work for me. I hate hard work. LOL. I thought about this weeks string for a while. Well, actually - I just sketched it out on a bit of scrap paper and pushed it to the far side of my desk and tried to ignore it. Last night avoidance was no longer working for me and the string demanded its share of attention. So, I sketched it out a few times in my art journal. After I played with a few ideas I had a bit of an epiphany. These lines were basically cone shapes. And, you know, I love, love, LOVE cone shapes. After that, it was full steam ahead. Here's the result - unfortunately the pattern sections did...

It feels like ages since I've posted a random drawing. Here's a couple I did this weekend. Bunzo weaver : in the most recent diva challenge, which was to use bunzo and auraknot together, I really loved the way  Margaret Bremner  extended the tips of some of the bunzo into a "thread" on her zendala. I wanted to have a play with this idea - here's the result - my bunzo "weaver".  Collage: On Saturday I decided to play around with another layered design. This one uses a couple of the patterns that I posted last week - Olb & Drack  . I love using "windows" in these type of designs and must have had the lovely Dawn's wonderful postcards in my mind as I echoed hers here. hx

A busy weekend. Not only did I go on a field trip to buy a 300+kg bag of pig feed, John and I got out in the veggie garden and put up our new raised garden bed this morning. I was so glad to get back inside to my nice, warm wood heater and my pjs. Luckily John is back at work tomorrow and not able to distract me with moving cows, building garden beds, having coffees and spending time together :) I've tracked down a "follow" button that wasn't the bulky, default one offered in blogger gadgets and it's now sitting proudly right column above the Pinterest button - I'd love, love it if you want to keep up to date with what I'm doing. I have plans..........oh so many (evil) plans........unfortunately probably not enough time implement them all, so I may have to cross "take over the world"  off the list. (Just having a bit of a Pinky and The Brain flashback here! My kids - yes, ok, and me, too - loved that show!). So, I did get some time to draw t...

Well, I do love my cone shapes. This is one that I did a week or so ago, it has been in my journal waiting to be scanned. Love the cones in various formats - lily, spiral and gramaphone :) I am reorganising. Currently I have tangle patterns in a spiral bound log book (sort of alphabetically) and also scattered throughout my art journals. It's not a great system, and I'd like to have them all in one place, in alphabetical order, which means being able to move them around when I find new patterns. I also don't want it to be too bulky, as I think a card, or pattern to page binder system would be. I think I have the answer: This  idea that I spotted when surfing the web yesterday designed by Sandy Hunter at Tanglebucket. Brilliant idea. Love it. It ticks all the boxes for me, reasonably compact. Easy to look through. And, most important, I can reorganise the tiles so that they always remain in alphabetical order. I know. I'm unbalanced. I ...

I had to jump out of bed early one morning last week and draw the outline for this. I don't know where the idea came from, no correllation to anything I was thinking about, I was probably just reading at the time, but sometimes images just pop, fully formed, in my head and I am compelled to go with them. I still seem to have cones on the brain. Such a cool, and, (to me) elegant shape. This ws pretty quick to do, though some of my striping is not quite right. Foiled by the black marker again! Oops! I can usually reshape, or just make something a little larger, but not in this case. I call him the..........Bubble-ator. I often use Finery on the more graphic drawings that I do, it works so well for long skinny shapes like leaves. When I was drawing "Growing Tube" I changed it around a bit by adding a curved, blacked out bit under every 2nd line. On "Pinwheel3" I played around a bit more by alternating the s-shapes, and adding the curved black shape under ...

I have another terrible drawing pad - the last one was good, but this one - Jasart - is no good for shading with markers - it causes the ink to smudge from the line drawings when I work with the markers & also breaks down a bit when it becomes saturated. O.k. for just drawing/inkwork. Ah well, I will just have to work around it (I hate leaving a journal 1/2 full, so will persist till I finish it) - at least I know not to buy it again. I have a couple of moleskine journals on the way and am excited about trying them out next. Growing Tube: I have a fascination for playing with perspective, and I had fun with this one, making it look as if the various elements were sprouting from the tube - the shading on the holes in the tube took a bit of work to try and get right - still not 100% happy but I have a pressing need to move onto my next drawing, so have pronounced it "done". hx

The drawing that I was working on before I started on the challenge this week, I just had to complete the shading. I wanted to try the more graphic style that I used on PODS with something a little more organic, so I started with trumpet flowers and added cones that echo the shape. What I love about this type of design is that it doesn't have to make any sense - 2 flowers are connect to each other and looped around the cones, another is connected to a cone. I also have the chance to try out lots of different patterns. I shaded with promarkers this time, rather than greylead. Easier as there is no rub back or smudging, more difficult controlling the bleed. hx

What strikes fear into the heart of control freak like me? Has me waking up in a cold sweat? Well, I'll tell you.........having to cede control (well most of it), by closing my eyes and drawing a string, THEN figuring out what to do with it! Hmmmm....this is not how I normally operate.......I thrive on preconceived ideas, and this challenge turned that on its head. So, I closed my eyes, and tried to stick with organic, flowy motions (sharp corners are not my friend). Unlike some of the amazing strings/results that I have seen from this challenge, I kept my string continuous and fairly abbreviated (yup, I was running scared). I worked on one piece (which I am still yet to colour/shade and will upload later), but before completing that, I was compelled to switch gears and go in a different direction (o.k.,I did scan and print out a couple of copies of my string - did I mention ...... control freak...). I started with some cones (I LOVE, LOVE drawing cones) and went from there. ...