Teabags, Florabunda and Waterfalls

On Thursday evening I attended a craft group from church which was tremendous fun – it was billed as a “knit and natter” evening and we could take along anything to do, or nothing, if we wanted. I took some more of the prints of my Florabunda drawings to paint, and made a start on one of them – the top left one in the following photo.

All the top row are painted with Perfect Pearls, and the bottom row are watercolours with a touch of Perfect Pearls in gold and a couple of other colours to give a bit of sparkle. I haven’t had my watercolours out for ages and thought it would be fun to use yet another medium on these pictures, and I love the way you can shade with them – on the bottom left one, you can see this, and some colour blending, on the flowers, and on the bottom right one you can see this on the leaves, providing more dimension.

Including the four mandala ones I did recently with Perfect Pearls, I now have a total of 10 florabunda paintings to be made up into cards, so I shall soon get the 2016 Card Factory going!

Tea – The Cup that Cheers

Today I did a bit more work on my art journal page using teabags – not a lot of work, because I spent some time searching for inspiration and trying to decide what to do with the teabags.

A couple of days ago I made the saucer for the cup. This was formed from a teabag cut across the diagonal to get sufficient length. It was applied with regular matt gel medium, the same as the cup, and I added shading to both, using Inktense pencils and my grey watercolour pencil.

I was thinking that the glitter steam coming from the cup wasn’t quite distinct enough so I added a bit of outlining with my Faber Castell sepia Pitt pen. In this photo the gitter looks silver, but it is in fact gold.

Then I took my sanguine pen and added the “tea” to the cup. I may need to emphasise this a bit more.

Now it was tme to work on the teabags. I began by layering them diagonally and sticking them together with a small amount of matt gel medium, and cutting off the top point so that the cut edge will lie along the top edge of the page. The teabags looked too pale (like the teabag under the ink pad in the next photo) so I added some Tea Dye distress ink (appropriately). The ink pad was pretty dry so I re-inked it.

I like the way the gel medium soaked through the teabags and acted as a resist to the distress ink. I wanted a bit more colour so I “splatted” them with the Tea Dye distress stain – I also splatted the craft sheet and spritzed it with water and smooshed the teabags in it.

I spritzed the teabags with more water and blotted them off with kitchen paper to give a nice mottled effect.

I was thinking that if I was going to paint them, they were a bit dark in the middle now, so I repeated the process with Picket Fence distress stain.

I was really in playing mode by this time! I decided to add a bit of bling with two of the metallic distress stans – Antiqued Bronze and Tarnished Brass.

Here is a mock-up with the teabags placed in position on the page. I am still toying with the idea of doing some machine embroidery on them but not sure whether to do this in combination with some painting, or to choose either painting or machine embroidery alone. Decisions, decisions… I shan’t attach the teabags to the page until they are embellished anyway, and either way, if I don’t like what I have done, I can always ditch it and start again!

The final bit I did today on this project was to paint the piece of chicken packaging with gesso, and then a coat of white acrylic. My plan is to make a representation of a red and white checked tablecloth but if this doesn’t look right, I can always add another layer…

Water Feature

My hubby has been working hard on the water feature in our garden. The first photo was taken on Wednesday 27th in the evening – it was rather dark so I edited it a little so you could see what was going on!

You can see that he has added some rocks at the top, and the new black liner down the cascade. The circular black thing at the very bottom that you can see the edge of is the top of the reservoir.

The next photo was taken on the same occasion, after he’d turned the water on.

It is positively gushing out of the pipe and not at all the effect we want, and it needed some rocks on top to direct the flow downwards and to spread it horizontally too.

The next photo was taken on the following morning. The water is now being directed underneath some more rocks, and on top of the wall in front of the fig tree is some of the original liner which, although damaged, does have a nice natural brown gritty look.

Here is my hubby placing some more rocks along the side of the cascade. This photo was taken this morning.

My hubby left the water running and went out, asking me to keep an eye on it because he wasn’t convinced it wasn’t still leaking. The flow did start to diminish, and by the afternoon it had stopped altogether so I turned it off. Back to the drawing board!

I know he will fix it in the end. Great progress has been made so far, anyway. He has to grab every opportunity when it decides to stop raining!