Two finished- two progressing

 

We are fast approaching our departure date from heading to the cottage - so many things are on the list to be done. Much jumping around from making an additional leaf form artists' book, finishing the concrete crack repairs on the path sculpture and finishing off a series of watercolours.

So today's blog is about progressing watercolours - two that I have finished and two that I hope to finish next week. The opening photo is of a postcard sized watercolour of the Old Bus Stop in Armadale  based on a photo I took last visit - more of a side angle. Note that I have actually put in background on the most recently finished watercolours.

The other finished work - Moine House in the Scottish highlands.

A progress photo of the lot

And photos of the other two in progress.

Finally a couple of additional photos of the finished pieces. None of the photos in this blog post are particularly good - all taken in a bit of a rush!!!

Abundance

The stand out feature of recent walks has been the abundance of blossoms. Usually I focus on the individual blossoms buy today I pulled back and just celebrated the masses of flowers on trees and bushes. Just sharing some of the abundance of beauty here ...

Looking up and looking at the crowds of blossoms  can remind us not only of beauty and hope; but also that there are many who offer beauty and hope. 

Merging of ideas and designs - unbound artists' book

 

I have decided to create a third artists' book to submit it for inclusion in a NZ exhibition. The opening photo shows the 5 leaf forms with a poem stamped onto the flat leaf forms.

I have decided to combine a reworked version of my leaf poem that was used in the trio of copper books and the leaf form I used for my mighty river trees artists' book. As you can see from scribbles in my wee journal the idea came to me during one of our Biblio sessions.

I significantly reworked the original leaf cycle poem - it is now a stand alone version titled Leaves. Reworked with some comments and feedback from Fiona - grand to have a word person to bounce ideas around with. See the photo of the text below.

Process-progress photos follow including marking up  from a template, cutting with hand shears and marking up the cleaned blanks for stamping.

Hand stamping does not always go as planned - the s, p and e in whispers were just too close - so I decided to restamp the whole verse - before and after versions of 'whispers' appear in image below. Probably doesn't appear to be greatly different but it mattered to me.

Following are a couple more images of the stamped leaf blanks.

I hope to grab a few hours in the coming week to make the flat leaf forms into their concave shape and then planish the back to create the faceted look.

Sorting layout

 

I want to print an A7 sized booklet of 4 poems and matching photos - but the catch is I want to print it on our inkjet printer using one A4 sheet of high quality art archival paper. The printing needs to be two sided.

So to arrive at the mock up of the booklet in the opening photo I started with the A4 sheet and cut it into sections that result in 4 pages - two sides.  I was careful to write how the sections related to the two sides of the A4 sheet.

After glueing photos and words in place on the sheets I reassembled the A4 sheet and then photographed both sides to see that the images and words would in fact land in the right spots if created a Word document to match the placement in the photos.

Well I guess the next step is to create the word document; and print both sides on a cheap test sheet. Hopefully it will result in a booklet similar to the mock up in the photos below.

If you have already done a layout and print like this feel free to give me comments!!!!

Common but not ordinary

 

Sometimes because particular species of flowers are in abundance my eyes can drift over them because I'm looking for the exotic. 

But this morning after night rain for some reason my eyes were drawn to Tibouchina, Camellia and Crucifix Orchid flowers. Diving in close showed that because of their abundance these flowers could appear to be common; but up close individual blossoms radiated such beauty.

I hope you enjoy the extraordinary beauty in the opening and following images.

And a succulent flower blossoming on a plant of a wall!!!

'Ordinary' beauty can remind us of hope - and at the moment with all the madness of men we need as many fragments of kindness, joy and hope we can get.

Repurposing salvaged objects

 

Many moons ago I had removed the bowl sections off a few vintage champagne coupes - yes there are such things - certainly a thing in days gone by. They were wider and shallower goblets!!

Anyway I digress. I thought if hammered the bowls to create a deeper shape and planish the back surface, the coupe sections would make good deep ladle bowl sections.

As you can see from the opening photo I have made three deeper ladles. These can be used for ladling hot soup, or stews or ladling jams or sauces into jars - very versatile!!! The handles are a bit longer than usual so one can keep one's hands away from hot or boiling liquids.

A few of the process photos follow: forming handles, formed bowls before planishing, the planishing process and back and front of the bowls after planishing and polishing.

A few more images of the finished ladles. I have used 2mm thick copper rivets on these ladles - cut down copper nails.

These ladles have been put into my online shop under the Culinary Metal category