SOLD!

Hurray! I had my first sale of a canvas with Pure Crafts! I also managed to sell one to a friend for a Christmas pressie. Im so chuffed to have the validation that someone other than friends and family like my work. In fact the canvas that went was one that I made ages and ages ago, when I first started with mixed media and it was quite personalised. It has a picture of our friends daughter on it so I was beginning to think about covering it over and redoing it but there you go. You never know! Its taken me 22 days in the shop to sell one. Hopefully it wont take another 22.Here are the two that have sold.

I think once my 2 months with Pure Crafts are up I will pull them out of the shop and try my luck at Bath Artisan Market instead. Its much more local and I think the face to face contact with people means that its much more successful.

To the shops!!!

So I saw an add on a Facebook group I am part of where a shop in Finedon, Northamptonshire called Pure Crafts rents out space to crafters looking to sell their wares. I sent them an email thinking that I would get something back in about a months time but instead I got a reply the next day saying they loved my style and would love to put my canvases up on their wall. So ive taken the plunge! I wasn't a lot of money really and they don't take commission so I will take 100% of the profits....ha profits, that's if I actually sell anything! Im now having a mini melt down thinking that there is no way in hell they are good enough to sell in an actual shop but we will see. Im feeling rather exposed all of a sudden. Anyway I made 5 new canvases to send to Pure Crafts of varying styles so hopefully they will appeal. I feel like im improving all the time at the moment, especially now ive started looking at other artists rather than mixed media work exclusively. So here are my most recent ones:

Inspired by Julie Ryder

I have recently come across work by an Australian artist called Julie Ryder who I just LOVE! Her work is amazing. She uses relatively simple products but produces such beautiful and colourful pieces which sell for up to $300! Amazing. Here is a link to her blog.

 

http://made-by-me-julieryder.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=32

 

I looked at her work and decided I would like to try and replicate her style. I wanted to do a canvas in Autumnal colours for my Dad's wife and I also had a commission due for a Christmas present which I thought would be good candidates for this style. For my dad's wife I have also included a cat. Although im not keen on it being there, she is bonkers about her cat and I think it makes it really personalised. Here is the finished piece, not bad for a first attempt I think.

 

The commission piece was done for a friend's daughter. The brief was good. She wanted pinks and purples with two butterflies and the phrase 'Love you to the moon and back'. She also wanted 'Mummy and Faye, best friends' somewhere very small on the canvas. She is yet to see the finished piece but I am soooooo pleased with the finished result with this. Up until this point I felt it was the best canvas ive made. Here is the finished piece.

 

 

After that I had some time to be arty for my own sake and continued on the same theme. I found a photo on Pinterest that I just loved and since its Autumn and my favourite time of year I liked the idea of trying to recreate it, originally to keep for myself. In the end its probably the most artist piece I've ever done. It feels like I'm actually creating art rather than just crafting. I did all the dots, both large and tiny by hand and wrote by hand two quotes down the trunks of the trees. One says 'My favourite colour is October' and the other says 'Change can be beautiful'. When I finished it I posted it on my Facebook page and within 10 minutes it sold to one of my colleagues at work! Oh well, I would rather have the money than the canvas! I always say I could make another one but I never do! Here is the photograph that inspired me and the finished piece of art! Yes Art!

 

 

 

On all three pieces I've used a lot of metallic paints and sequins which don't show up in the photographs but they are a lot more shimmery and sparkly in real life. This is now the favourite piece I've done!

A Marathon Effort!

Here is my latest commission for a friend of mine. This is by far the hardest and most stressful piece of artwork I have ever had to do. Totally goes against why I do my crafts in the first place but I couldn't say no to my friend. She commissioned it for her husbands birthday and wanted it to be masculine and abstract with a running theme to go with the quote. She also specified a colour theme of blues, greys and white. I think I found this canvas so hard because I had no clear vision for it at all from the beginning to the end. My stash revolves around butterflies, flowers and nature so finding things that were appropriate for this canvas was extremely difficult.

 

 

I started by tearing up some patterned paper in a kind of chevron pattern and a cris cross blue pattern and stuck that down. I then found some pictures of people's feet in running shoes from one of my husbands running magazines and stuck them randomly all over the page. I also printed off the series of pictures of a man running in time lapse to go on the background and stuck these down randomly too. I then used liquid acrylics in blue and white and applied them with a pallet knife. Unfortunately due to my lack of skill with this particular tool I pretty much obliterated the papers I had stuck down by adding too much paint! I went back to the patterned papers and added the torn chevron pieces back in the top left and bottom right.

 

New to me for this canvas was the tape I used to make the white arrows. I got it from a DIY store and it is used for plaster boarding. It provides great texture though and sticks down really easily with tacky glue. I cut the ends into vague arrow shapes and stuck them randomly around the canvas. Next I watered down some metallic blue acrylic paint and put it into a spray bottle intending to create a mist effect in a few areas, however the spray didn't work how I envisaged and instead I got lots of large paint splatters instead which I thought actually looked better so I left them.

 

I knew I wanted to put some footprints on it and tried making my own stencil but this turned out to be too complicated. Instead I ended up painting my own running trainers with black paint and walking on a piece of white tissue paper. Some of it stuck to my shoe but this added to the abstract effect although if you want to try this I would recommend putting newspaper down first as it was quite messy! Also don't use a pair of shoes you are precious about as cleaning the paint off resulted in the laces and fabric going all grey where they soaked up the painty water! I cut around the outline and stuck them down with gel medium.

 

To make the letters I used some white card and some watered down purple acrylic paint and sprayed the card at random. I also used he Crafters Workshop 6"x6" Mini Texturized Stencil and some grey acrylic paint to make it look like someone had run across the page. I printed the actual quote off the computer and tore round the words. I used micro glaze to go over the letters so the printer ink wouldn't smudge before sticking them down with gel medium. I wanted the footprints to stand out more but also blend better into the picture so I went round the tread roughly several times with gesso. To try and blend the trainers into the background and to try and make the whole canvas more harmonious I went round the edges with a purple soft pastel. At that point the lettering was still spattered with purple and didn't look right on the canvas at all. Once I put the purple round the edges I decided that didn't look right either and blended it into blue with a soft black outline.

 

The canvas still looked too busy so I decided to paint the plasterers tape white which made the whole thing look a lot more balanced. I also outlined the arrows with the soft black pastel. I decided I wanted to reintroduce the slow motion time lapse runners so printed them off again and tore round the edges and stuck them down, blending them again with the soft black pastel.

 

I mixed some modelling paste with a yellow gelato and used the Dylusions Number Jumble stencil to add the yellow numbers all over the canvas as well as the borders around the edges. However all the yellow was too overwhelming as well so I used acrylic paint to paint some of the numbers black, some white and some silver. I then went around the wiggly borders using posca pens in black and white to alternate the shapes but then decided that didn't look right either and eventually painted them blue.

 

Because I had gone over the words with micro glaze when I eventually decided I wanted them to be yellow I had a very limited choice of mediums I could use to colour them without the purple splatters and the grey texture disappearing. I eventually decided on a watercolour pencil which worked surprisingly well. As a finishing touch I stamped 3 old fashioned clocks onto the canvas using a stamp from my stash and a Faber Castell Big Brush marker in cobalt. Lastly I went round the edge of the canvas with my black archival ink stamp to create a rough border and varnished it.

 

As you can see ive struggled with bringing this together to be a homogenous and balanced piece and changed my mind about a lot of things a lot of times. I am happy with the end result although I don't really like it, its not for me therefore not my style.

The one with the dogs

I was recently commissioned to do a canvas for a friend of a friend. She had seen one I had done previously which has the quote 'Be your own kind of beautiful' but preferred the quote 'I am entitled to be me' which comes from another canvas I have done for myself. Anyway, this is the amalgamation of the two. It is extremely personalised with the women done in the image of the person it is being given to and dressed in clothes that she would wear and of course the dogs! Im really not sure about these dogs. They look very cartoony and are not something I would ordinarily include but because its a commission they were requested as she owns two cockapoos (one copper, one black) and a copper spaniel too so that's what she got! I'm yet to find out if she likes it but I hope so. Its an interesting result either way.

My first attempt at a tag

This is my first attempt at a mixed media tag. It was instead of a card for a couple we know who have recently had a baby. I have deliberately blurred out her date of birth for data protection. Im pretty disappointed with the general outcome. Its very mainstream and not particularly innovative or imaginative so I hope I can do better next time around.  Pretty but definitely not perfect!

Spread your winds and fly

This canvas is waaaaaaaaaaay out of my comfort zone! Its not bright or colourful like my usual style. I started it as part of the commission I did for my friends daughter's 13th birthday but it was coming out far too vintage and adult so I put it to one side and finished that first before coming back to this. I wanted to keep a kind of olde, antique feel to it and I had no idea where I was going with it, I just let myself create and this is the finished result. Not anywhere near as colourful and I don't really like it personally but ive had a lot of great verbal feedback so who am I to argue!