Christmas Craft Fair:
A couple of weekends ago, I went back to South Yorkshire to visit family and help out my parents and sister at a craft fair at Langlands garden centre.
Being our first 'selling at a craft fair' experience, our stall was rather improvised (as you can see!) We used everything we could find: from a school display board, sets of mini drawers and laundry baskets to contain and display everything.
We also had a dilemma of how to display Karis' oil paintings, as we soon realised there was no space available to prop them up anywhere. Luckily I was prepared with an 'emergency kit' of glue, twine, scissors, tape etc. so we soon devised a way to string them up behind our stall.
All this of course made the aesthetic appearance of our stall, well…a bit haphazard to say the least...
But despite the random aesthetics of our stall, it was at least bursting with lots of lovely products!
We were selling (among other things): handmade jewellery, Christmas decorations, recycled paper badges, dreamcatchers, paintings and lots of cute wooly baby clothes and decorations made by my Grandma and Aunty.
Although we had a lovely time, the Christmas Fair was in an outdoors marquee which was freeeeezing!
I'd of course made the mistake of wearing converse and the rubber toe part got so unbearably cold I was trying all sorts to warm them up, including wrapping my feet in paper gift bags and putting my feet inside dad's gloves >.< I'll definitely be going in some sort of furry lined snow boots next time!
Balloon Designs:
Here are some balloon designs I worked on for Artquirk cards in June that I've finally remembered to blog!
Although I began with a cute, cartoony look for the designs, the client decided they would prefer a more photorealistic interpretation of balloons. So I put my digital painting skills to the test and created some different artwork. I was asked to design the alphabet, numbers and some balloon objects like the star below:
Creating this artwork was quite a challenge for me, as I had to balance trying to make it appear as realistic as possible but also retain the digitally painted look. Making that twisted balloon effect was the hardest part!
Porcelain Pottery:
The porcelain vessel I made at a ceramic workshop has finally come back from the potters!
Unfortunately they mixed up the glaze I requested with someone else's pot, so instead of turquoise crackle I have blue flowery decals with a clear crackle glaze. The result is lovely though so I'm rather happy they made the mistake! ;) I also wasn't aware that it would shrink in the kiln, but this again was a great thing, as my pot is now the prefect size to hold my mini cactus which is what I made it for, woohoo!
Work Progress:
It's impossible not to get into the Christmas spirit when you've been designing cards for the occasion for 3 months! Recently I've been experimenting with how to tell a narrative through the cards, especially through the use of light and shadow.
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| Bethlehem card design in its early stages |
Above are two rather different 'partridge in a pear tree' designs I painted a few weeks ago. As a lot of themes for cards (eg. Nativity, 12 days of Christmas, 3 Kings etc.) are repeated year after year and lots of charities want the same themes in their range, it's important to try a different style/media/composition for each design where the subject matter is the same.
It's quite a hard thing to do every day but certainly enjoyable and it's definitely testing my skills as a designer in terms of my idea generating ability as well as my improving my painting skills!
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