Footprints

These are the little footprints of my new wee grand- daughter Harriet Isobel. My daughter and I had fun with printing them. I have used black screen ink and painted it on with a sponge brush. She was not happy. We were going to print her hands as well but she was a bit distressed with the process. I got the bottom two feet prints as the second print . The first went onto a nice piece of card. These are on 100% cotton for me to do something with.
She was four weeks old when we did this printing ‘challenge’. Will try for her hands later.

Textures

After participating in a Japanese style of Yoga I went for a bush walk on the new Spotted Gum Trail at Mt Coot-tha. Saw many beautiful specimens of Spotted Gum. They are easy to pick because of the distinct markings on their trunks.

Amazing texture. The dark almost looks like the charcoal remaining after a bush fire. I am now thinking of how to reproduce this bark feature in fabric and thread. The lighter part looks like small mosaic tiles with the darker ones laid over the top in random areas. Rich dark colours , velour or velvet.

View from the riverbank at Yerongpilly where we do the yoga. River , birds ,eucalyptus’s, grass, sun and gentle breeze.  I won’t mention the ants 🐜 and the bumpy bits under the yoga mat which need adjusting occasionally .

Avocado dye

I made some avocado dye from 2 pits I had saved in the freezer. Chopped and boiled on the stove until water reduced then strained. Then when I saw the left over pieces of avocado in the pan  looking red and soft and full of luscious ness  I decided to print into my journal/ ledger / notebook / sketchbook. When printed I was going to draw a grid with a black pen but suddenly I saw a chicken. So with a beak and some legs she came to life. Then there was another chicken , and another and a little bird, then an owl and before I knew it the ink blots had all turned into some kind of feathered friend.

Tea towel stitching

I have been slowly stitching, adding elements and mending holes on a vintage french linen tea towel. This is following along with India Flint for her online Nomad arts title sailing in the armchair as during Covid lockdown no one could sail anywhere.

This little section is of a moth that I put near a swathe of tiny rusty stains. A patch covers a larger hole and a tiny scrap of vintage french edging covers a little section of a frayed end.
Stitching randomly in place using some cotton thread I had ecodyed with the last avocado dye pot .

Draw along : bad drawing

This morning I participated in a free drawing class presented by QAGOMA. The artist was Bill Platz and it went for an hour. These classes will be held every Saturday in June. It was a lot of fun. He also discussed making ink from tea and bamboo dip pens.



FOCUS ARTWORK: – In the first session, we’ll be taking inspiration from Francois Boucher’s Venus avec deux angelots (Venus with two cherubs) c.1740. 

We did three drawings the second two were deliberately meant to be bad by exaggerating , distorting, blind contour, useing non dominant hand or stick figures for example.