Ending the Year in Fantasy Land - Why Not...?!

2020 may almost be over, but we are not quite out of the woods yet, so I decided to end the year as I began it - with total fantasy. I was tasked with making another dragon so here she is - her name is Firenza. My fairy, Blaze, had some success training my puppy dogs a few months ago, so she took to dragon training very quickly….!

I think Blaze has some dragon treats in her pockets ;)

Firenza the dragon seems very amiable - training is going very well!

In the making of this dragon I decided to do a better job on the feet/claws and instead of wholly felting them like last time. I made each toe individually with wire and wool and then put them together. I bent over the toe ends and painted them with black acrylic so that they are claw like, but not sharp. Doing paws/hands this way is fun but quite fiddly. I used some dilute Modge Podge on the claws to smooth the wool and stop it unravelling as it is impossible to felt those tiny bits of wool over the wire. Another thing I did differently was to make the eye more elaborate. As soon as I did the eyes I realized that this dragon was going to be female!

Firenza discovered I have another dragon. Serentity is a somewhat lazy dragon though, and seems reluctant to give up her creature comforts and go play.

Blaze and Firenza seem made for each other and they are off on a fantasy adventure together….

Happy New Year to everyone - may 2021 bring you fun and fantastical adventures of your own!

Christmas Catchup

Around this time of year my creative juices kick into high gear and I decide to hand make all my Christmas cards and some Christmas gifts - never mind that I should have at least started these BEFORE Thanksgiving! Where does the time go? One minute it’s halloween and BOOM, next thing you know it’s Christmas already and you don’t have a single thing done!

Anyway, I had an epiphany regarding my Christmas cards - having made this lovely set of Carol Singers I thought a photo of them would make a cute card. I photographed them in the garden, but was not thrilled with the results. Then I had the idea of taking them down to the lake and photographing them there. As you can see, they enjoyed the scenery and caroled away quite happily for me! 

Woodland Carol Singers at the Lake

Snowman at the Lake

Santa brings gifts for folks at the Lake

After my success photographing the Carolers I took my Snowman and Santa down there. I was pleased with my wintery looking wooly snow and these made great Christmas Card pics too.

A Wassailing we go....

So I had a crazy idea (what’s new?!) …. I wanted to make some woodland animals and decided to make them a Carol singing group that I would gift to my Son and Daughter-in-Law for Christmas (whether they want them or not!) These are all about eight inches high and made with wire armatures so they are posable.

Oooh, a poor naked, headless squirrel - Don’t look!

I made my rabbit before I had the genius idea of carol singing. As I made the other two I thought in order for my carol singers to hold their music they must have flexible hands. I had made individual fingers for my fairy and menfolk, but they are not posable, so I set about learning how to make wire fingers and wrap tiny bits of wool on them. I have learned that the bigger you make things the easier it is to do tiny details (Duh!) but having already set the size for my characters I had to make do as best I could. I don’t recommend it if you have little patience for fiddly stuff, but I’m sure I’ll get better at it over time. I do love a challenge! A secret I learned was to paint the fingers with a little dilute Modge Podge after applying the wool in order to make it stay in place. Hopefully over time the fingers will stay fingers and not turn into a wooly fringe!

Ha, the squirrel did not lose his head after all!

Here is my squirrel fully formed and finished and perfectly capable of holding things in his little paws! Someone asked me how I figured out the proportions on the creatures I make and that was amusing as I had just finished the squirrel’s head and I realized it was way too small for his body. It’s darned difficult to take away wool after the fact, but fortunately fairly easy to add to needle felted things. I had to add quite a bit to the shape of his head to get it right. Note to self - spend more time making the proportions correct before wasting a lot of colored wool on details! To finish him off I added some horsehair whiskers, made him a little red scarf and used an adorable acorn cup from the local park as a bobble hat.

Badger says Hi!

Here’s my English badger. As you can see he has a wonky pinky (he’s a bit put out about it) - victim of my learning experience, but we’ll just say its a battle injury!

Badger and Rabbit getting acquainted

The rabbit is the second bunny I have made so he was a bit easier to make than the others because I knew a bit more about his structure and there was a tutorial I was following. I decided to have fun and make him a little coat and hat. The clothes did not turn out as well as I’d hoped and further down the line I actually cut his hat way down. Both items are removable and I thought that the carol singing rabbit could also double as the Easter Bunny and hold an easter egg or something later in the year.

In finishing up I found some tiny carols to print out and stick on to red card for the singers, and to complete the set I added a little felted Christmas tree with bead decorations. These little characters are now on their way to their forever home bringing Christmas Cheer to one and all.

On an interesting note I discovered that wassailing can refer to going on a friendly drinking binge as well as going from house to house carol singing. This year we might need a bit of both!

Peaches visits the Merfolk

This is Peaches. She’s a mix breed pup with boundless energy and severe mistrust of hardwood floors!

I had fun trying to recreate her in wool - it was not an easy thing trying to get those skinny legs felted!

Peaches has fun with Kai, my merman.

For some reason Dogs and Merfolk are drawn to each other. After Peaches had chewed Kai’s tail a bit, Sealia seemed more than willing to give up her throne. Peaches of course hopped right up there. She looks very much at home and seems to be holding forth on some subject dear to the heart of dogs and mermaids (whatever that may be!)

Doggie days of Fall

It’s been a while since I had anything to post, but now I have another puppy dog felted. This little black and white spaniel was tricky. I learned not to make my critters too small - it’s way too difficult to do details like eyes and noses! I tried something different with this little dog and bought some nice wool “fur” thinking it would look really cool. However, my first attempt was awful and I quickly gave up on trying to make the little dog too furry. Because the “fur” resists felting through handling, it also meant it was hard to apply to something so small. Consequently I overfelted my first try, and despite the armature it became to stiff to pose - another learning experience. On to round two, and I used a combination of small quantities of the “fur”, curled by hand, and black batting which felts readily. It worked out fairly well.

My next character is another cute doggie called Peaches, who came for a visit this weekend. More on that in the next post.

Spaniels get acquainted…

One little spaniel wants to play

This one might have a bossy side!

Paw-sitively Fun!

Each week of felting brings new challenges and furthers my skill level. Having seen a photo of the Dachshund I made last time, a friend threw down a challenge for me to make two spaniels. I had some good photos to work from, but wasn’t sure I could make the curly fur. As usual my first reaction when getting a commission is to do anything but the commission….ooh that shrub outside needs some trimming, oh and I’d better get some shopping - no procrastination going on here at all! Lol! A few days go by…..

Easing in gently, I began with some research to see what a spaniel’s skeleton looks like and what the proportions are. Let’s face it, looking at Pinterest and other internet goodies is great fun and uses up many happy hours …. but eventually I had to start for real. I began a wire armature and wrapped it in core wool. Then came the tricky part of making fur. I found some videos online showing various methods of making curly and wavy wool for fur and then tried some out. Firstly I plaited some wool. This gave nice waves, but were too big in scale for my spaniel. I already had some sheeps locks, which are white and naturally curly, so they were what I was aiming for. I found the best method was to wind the wool in small strips around a skewer, wet the wool throughly and let it dry overnight. Below is the result.

Natural sheepy locks on the right, my fake ones on the left.

Not only did I have to make curly locks, but I didn’t have the right color of wool for the brownish fur so I had to blend two colors. I discovered that, just like paint, the perfect color you think you made is somewhat darker when it’s applied to the subject…and you have to blend it a lot more than you think.

Many hours of fur application, ear making, head shaping, and angsting over eyes and nose and - voila - a spaniel is made. He doesn’t look exactly like the photos, I need to work a bit more on his face - but he’s pretty darn cute. And of course, procrastination not withstanding, I really enjoyed making him.

Now time to have fun with him.

He’s a handful!

Getting a bit rambunctious with my fairy Blaze.

Oops - need some training here!

Making his presence felt in many ways! My merman is like - Oh careful little guy, you nearly got my tail there!

Blaze looks a little concerned.

Sit! Good dog!

I think Blaze will have fun training him - who could resist that cute face!

Now on to spaniel #2 who is black and white. Off to make some curly black fur…..

A Dachshund is born...

Well, look at this puppy who is just so excited to be in the world! I made this little fellow for my sister’s 60th birthday. She occasionally gets to pup sit for her daughter’s dogs and I thought she might like a Dachshund pup of her own! I had a lot of fun making this little guy. He has a wire armature, so he’s completely posable. It was a challenge finding enough photos to work from for a complete three dimensional model. I hope I got him mostly right. It was also bit of an adventure getting the supplies of wool to make him. I placed an order with a great company https://feltingsupplies.livingfelt.com/ and waited anxiously for the wool to arrive. It normally only takes a few days. But this time tracking showed the parcel unmoving more than a week later. I contacted the post office, but still the parcel stayed in limbo. Living Felt were great and sent a repeat order straight away. In the end it took close to 3 weeks to get my wool, and then a day later the original parcel arrived! A post office employee informed me that some places have huge backlogs of mail.

Pup meets the merfolk

My new made pup had to meet my other characters, and like dogs everywhere - stole every heart!

He even deposed Sealia from her throne - something I never expected to see! Quite the cheeky chap! Animals just twist us around their little paws….

Who could resist that little face?!

The little dachshund is now living in England with his new family. Happy Birthday to my little Sis - I sure hope this guy brings a smile to your face!

I make another throne - and a shocking discovery

I was excited to use part of a horseshoe crab that I found on a beach back in New England many years ago, as the back for my latest creation - the Tyrrhenian Throne. I didn’t know anything about horseshoe crabs so off I went to the internet to be educated. I learned that the part of the crab I have is called the Opisthosoma - the abdomen carapace where the crab has its gills and the tail is attached - it’s back end in other words! Horseshoe crabs are Arthropods, not really crabs at all. They are more closely related to spiders and scorpions - aargh! BUT, they don’t sting or bite us so are quite harmless to us. Phew! Like other creatures with hard exoskeletons they must molt in order to grow and so they shed their carapace periodically. That’s usually what you and I find washed up on the beach. Horseshoe crabs can live up to 20 years, and have as many as 16 or 17 molts. They live along the East coast of North America, and the East coast of Asia.

Here’s my opisthosoma - try saying that three times fast! I topped it with a spiral shell (turittella). All painted with metallic copper paint.

Now for the ”WOW!” part. Did you know that horseshoe crabs have blue blood? No, it’s not because they are “royal” (haha, they wish!)  but because they have copper based blood, as opposed to iron based blood like us. I thought this was very exciting - until I read more about it and discovered that their blood is used by the biomedical industry to test for toxins in medicine like vaccines. Apparently a compound in their blood called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) clumps in the presence of minuscule amounts of bacterial toxins. Well, that seems like a useful thing right? And yes, for us it is. However, for the poor horseshoe crabs it’s not such a happy story. A quart of Horseshoe crab blood can be worth as much as $15,000 so they are harvested in their thousands. The crabs are hauled from the bottom of the sea, tossed into trucks, and transported for up to 24 hours to biomedical bleeding facilities where their blood can be taken. Once there they are milked of up to 40% of their blood. Many die from either being crushed/damaged during transportation, from the bleeding process, or die later when they are tossed back in the ocean. A horseshoe crab needs to breathe in water, but they don’t get to do that after they are removed from the sea for bleeding. Hypoxia (lack of oxygen) is a problem. Unsurprisingly, abnormal behavior, including the inability to spawn, has been observed in horseshoe crabs after they have been bled and returned to the sea. Reading this I immediately imagined how I would feel if someTHING took me from my natural habitat to a place where I could barely breathe, drained 40% of my blood and then threw me back! 

Seeing the pictures of rows of horseshoe crabs suspended over their jars of milky blue blood was so horrific that I didn’t want to use my horseshoe crab part after all. I almost threw it away. But then I thought some more, and decided to make my throne a monument to the Horseshoe crab. I was originally going to use it au naturel - it was a dull grey brown color, instead I painted it copper to make it look beautiful and valuable.

Horseshoe crabs are a keystone species, which means that a lot of other animals depend on them to survive and maintain the environment. Sadly, with upwards of 50,000 dying each year in service to us, their numbers are being depleted. I wondered if we could manufacture a blood alternative - and yes, in fact one was developed over 10 years ago! Because of depleted numbers and more environmental protection the biomedical industry are finally getting on board with the idea of using the alternative. Horseshoe Crabs have been around for 300 million years. Hopefully, soon, horseshoe crabs will be able to live their lives in relative peace for another 300 million.

Anyway, next time you get a flu shot (or maybe the Coronavirus vaccine!) remember that horseshoe crabs gave their precious blue blood so that you are not poisoned by injectable medicines.

Here is my merman Kai, enjoying his new throne. I think he looks pretty happy with it.

Diamonds, pearls, and beauty from the ocean...

The Aegean Throne among the splendor of colorful coral. A grand place of repose for discerning wooly creatures everywhere!

Throne dimensions 16 1/2 inches high x 9 inches x 5 inches

One of my friends thinks I’ve gone completely off the rails - now I’m not just off the rails but fallen into the ocean! You cannot believe what fun I had with this little project, especially with making the coral. Who knew there was such a thing as hyperbolic crochet - which handily makes the loveliest coral very quickly and easily. (The internet is a magical source of wonderful and amazing things to learn!) I combined many objects into this throne - twigs, shells, wire, beads, felted wool, yarn, and fabric. Then of course I had to have a little fun making the grand announcement from Twigge Towne Furnishings, and got some good use out of our old Thesaurus!

Hyperbolic crochet - yes, that’s a thing. Fun, easy and a perfect way to use up small quantities of yarn. My only regret is that the yarn is all acrylic, if it had been wool I could have felted it and made it look even more organic.

My version of brain coral on the left. This was a left over piece of felting from my fairy making. On the right is a length of trim from Michaels which I sewed together. It was originally stitched together to make a flat trim, but I took off the top edge stitching and fluffed it out.

The tubular coral was another use for left over pieces of felting. I just bunched them together and added the wispy blue “tentacles”. Spot more hyperbolic crochet, and the blue and white fluffy coral is another length of trim from Michaels.

My attempt at red branching coral, plus some invented undersea plants. All needle felted.

If you are interested in knowing more about hyperbolic space and the collision of math and crochet check out this cool Ted talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_the_beautiful_math_of_coral?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

The Artful Rabbit

This week’s creation is an artful rabbit, made as a birthday gift for an artist friend. He is made with a wire armature and therefore very posable as you will see in the photos below. It was fun to learn how to blend wool colors for the nose, ears and tail. The white wool I used was batting, which is short fibers that felt really well to make a smooth surface, hence he is not a very furry rabbit. I also got to practice eyes again. A while ago I ordered some glass eyes which I thought I would be using for all my creatures, but I actually prefer to felt the eyes myself.

The happy rabbit dancing!

Rabbit meets Serenity the Dragon and learns a few things about the felted world of the fairies.

Rabbit has had enough of posing for photos….

Ok, just leave me alone to sleep!

It was a busy day for this little rabbit - too much painting and dancing led to a whole lot of snoozing. Hoppy days! :)

A Thoroughly Modern Merman

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been busy creating a merman - as per instructions from the mermaid (Sealia - yes she got a name finally). For my sins I had to spend long periods of time staring at photos of male anatomy to get the musculature right (I know, poor me right?!!) Making a male figure is a new thing for me so I had fun trying to get it right. Making a male face was a challenge, still not sure it’s perfect, perhaps I should have given him a beard…?  I had a lot of fun searching the internet for male hair styles and I was very pleased with the whacky hair do I ended up creating. I gave him a nice modern undercut with his anemone dreads!

He seemed to enjoy his photo shoot, and looks good with the shell full of “pearls”. I hesitate to say he has a necklace - lets call it a chest adornment - another score for my extensive beading collection. Next step is the making of the merfolk “throne”. This is proving harder than I thought, but I have some ideas percolating.

I gave him a couple of arm tattoos, and fins on his back and tail. Lots of fun playing with ideas. His body and tail have a wire armature so they are posable. I am rethinking my previous dislike of armatures as I started another creature this week with a complete armature and the possibilities for movement and posing are much more satisfying now that I am more skilled with the needle felting. More on that next week…

A Siren Call

This is fulfillment of an earlier blog promise to make a creature without feet! I’m still refining my fairy making technique and the muse said to create a mermaid. This delectable creature is currently nameless. I spent a lot of time making her head and decorating her tail with seed beads (not an occupation I can recommend to those of us with vision issues!) After completion I messed around with photographing her in different poses and tried to get her “swimming”. Lighting is an issue, especially when your subject has to be suspended from something (that took some working out).

The hardest part of making these wooly creatures is the sheer time it takes to get the wool felted into the shape you want. My mermaid took over a week to make - not working 8 hours a day, but doing as much felting as my hands will let me! I am rather pleased with her though. It still amazes me how you can sculpt a body out of wool. The faces always take a long time to come together and look really quite ugly and downright angry in the middle stages. She’s still a little haughty looking, but that’s her personality. She’s a princess of a mermaid and has already put in an order for a throne and a merman companion (so not demanding all…!!! >.< No one warned me about that! The fairies are laughing…)

A Punk Fairy called Blaze

Meet Blaze, my latest fairy creation. I didn’t set out to make a “punk” fairy, but once you start making creatures they take on a life of their own. This one, quite early on, decided to be a bit punk and adventurous. I think she’s my alter ego! She is made entirely from needle felted wool (apart from her clothes and decorations) and has moveable joints. This technique I learned by watching instruction videos by Kay Petal on her wonderful needle felting website - feltalive.com.

There are so many stages to making a fairy in this way, but it is totally worth it. I am blown away by just how realistic (or fanciful) you can make various features as you learn the techniques. Making the head was the most amazing as it starts out as a small white egg shape and as you add the nose, lips, chin, cheeks etc it becomes more grotesque and bizarre looking. BUT, eventually (after many hours of felting) it take shape and becomes a character. Thank you Kay for your instructions to stick with it - I almost started over several times, not quite believing it would come together! I watched at least 9 hours of Kay’s instruction and learned sooo much doing this whole fairy. My previous fairies were all made with wire armatures and I hated working around the wire, but couldn't figure out how to make moveable arms and legs without it. This is the way to go!

WARNING - creepy images below! :)

Oooh yes, so very creepy looking at this point!

To make this fairy required lots of separate parts - just like a real body - upper arms, lower arms, separate hands and feet etc. The parts need to be felted fairly well so that they will support the body and head, but not rock hard. Only experience tells how big, how much felting to do etc. I hope to get better at it. Once you have the separate parts made, then you get to join them and make more realistic limbs. Then you get to add bulk for the butt, belly, and boobs (if you want them). It’s a miraculous process that each bit of fluffy wool becomes like muscle and gives shape to the body.

Fairy “parts” joined to the body. The head is still separate at this point and the hands have not been made.

Once my fairy was assembled and covered in more skin- like tones I could think about clothes and hair. The instruction video had the fairy wearing little slippers, but my fairy wanted boots and I embellished them with little bits of chain and bead spacers. I felted underwear on her - a simple bra top and panties, then added fabric for a skirt, which is just held on with her leather belt. I put her head on and had intended to give her blue and green hair, but again she decided it was to be red and orange - and who am I to argue! She has a mountain of hair that I could only dream of…. The very last thing to add was her wings, which I struggled with. These are the second attempt, the first turning out too large and clunky. Live and learn. Anyway, I love my new fairy. I’m wondering what sort of furniture or goodies she will want from “Twigge Towne Furnishings”. :)

Happy furniture making

Fairy bed from found objects. 7 1/2” x 9 1/2” x 7”

Well, cases of Covid are on the rise, so I have retreated back into fairy land (not that I ever fully emerged!). I am back making stuff with sticks and flowers. Really, what can be more fun than that?! One of the first things I made with twigs (months ago now) was a baby fairy bed. This time I decided to go bigger. I had some nice pieces of bark to use as the footboard and my daughter pointed out that it actually looks like a bird (serendipity). I decorated it with pressed flowers from the garden. I made a cute little mattress with felted wool and then found some fabric scraps to make a pillow and coverlet (having way to much fun!) This bed is 7 1/2 inches high, 9 1/2 inches long and 7 inches wide. Plenty of room for a fairy and their wings. Although I only have one bed, so they’ll have to take turns - a bit of “hot bunking” for the fairies! Lol! (no doubt there will be complaints!)

Here is the bed without its covers. I need to find a source of more interesting shaped twigs, so I might have to venture further from home on my foraging trips. This one was harder to glue together than other pieces of furniture I’ve made. I think the glue wasn’t sticking to the bark on some of the twigs, or it wasn’t getting hot enough….I hope my glue gun isn’t on the fritz. Anyway, it seems sturdy enough now it’s all dried. I used some acrylic varnish over the flowers to help preserve them. When I put it on it looked all gloppy and ugly so I thought I’d made a mess of it. Now it’s dried it looks ok - phew!

Twig Towne Home Furnishings

My friend Sue had a great idea for the name of my fairy furniture company - Twig Towne Home Furnishings. “The ultimate in cozy, comfortable furniture for creative creatures of wool.” As you can see below my latest creation is enjoying his custom made Redberry bench. I learned that snowmen are rather less demanding than fairies - no cupholders were required! I had been waiting for an opportunity to use a small, uniquely shaped piece of wood that I found on the beach near me. It makes a great seat back for this little bench. I attached a twig of dried berries to the “flagpole”, for a splash of color.

Snowman, felted wool. Christmas tree, felted wool and beads. Bench, found materials

Well, here I am getting a jump start on Christmas goodies - dunno why I’m thinking of snowmen when it’s 90F outside! (actually maybe its a good thing, I might actually be ready for Christmas by the time it arrives. Only 188 days to go as of 6/20!)

Uppity Fairies get cupholders

This last week the darn fairies were getting uppity, it must be the influence of the feisty dragons I’m making! They got tired of sharing one little seat and demanded a bigger bench so they could all sit down. So I built them another bench - oh and they insisted on cupholders (as I “haven’t made them a table” !) Who knew fairies were so demanding… I’m a slave to their needs  ;)

All this stuff I made since March! (Waaay to much time on my hands.)

Here’s an update on all the stuff I’ve been making since the shutdown in March. I’ve never made fairies or done any needle felting before, so these are new skills - with varying degrees of success. It’s also new for me to be working in three dimensions as opposed to painting/drawing. I am really enjoying the challenge. (just hope I don’t have to start making chairs for the dragons. Dragons don’t need furniture right….?)

Fire Dragon

Dragon No. 2 is born! This felted dragon is bigger than my first try and a bit more complicated. I learned a lot making him. I did find some wonderful instruction videos online about felting creatures and it helped me make this guy a lot better than he would have been otherwise. Kay Petal is the artist I spent a lot of time watching. Her videos are lengthy but have so many great tips for wonderful felting. I really admire people who share their expertise freely so that others can get started. So Thank you Kay Petal!

https://feltalive.com/learn-how-to-needle-felt/

So my new dragon is a Fire dragon and his name (courtesy of my daughter) is Firenze. I made him using a wire armature for support and pretty much made him up as I went along - looking at some images for inspiration of course. I thought long and hard about his wings, at first thinking I would felt them. However, I like the look of the transparent “tulle” wings I have made for my other dragon and the fairies, so I just went with that. I’m still struggling with feet. His turned out a lot clunkier than I hoped, so I need to figure out what to do about toes. However, I’m thinking my next creature will not have feet at all, so that’s a solution right…?! ;)

Sacred Space

Back in 2012 we had a wonderful trip to Japan. While my husband was busy with conference meetings, I took off and visited a lot of the sights in Kyoto. One of them was the Fushimi Inari - taisha, shrine to the Shinto god of rice. The day was overcast and rainy, but the tranquility, beauty, and sense of peace has stayed with me as a strong memory of my trip. There are two paths up the mountain to various temples, each has hundreds of vermilion Torii gates along it. It is a remarkable sight. Since 2012 I have tried to capture my feelings about this place in paint, and failed miserably numerous times! However, since getting into the “abstract” mode with the two small canvases I did the other week, I had an epiphany and swiftly painted this canvas. I did have a tiny 2” x 1” thumbnail sketch in oil pastel to work from which gave me some colors and shapes as guide. Translating something so tiny onto a bigger canvas gave me lots of scope for texture and runs of paint to create atmosphere. I had a blast with it and finally created something I am happy with.

A long time ago I wrote some lines of poetry about my experience at the shrine and had these in mind while painting.

Fushimi Inari Shrine

Climbing silently, through green shrouds and offerings

Vermilion gates rise into infinite tranquility

A shrill cicada sings, solemn temple bells respond deep and low

A soft temple rain, holy water, bathes the emerald light

These are the oil pastel thumbnails which I did last year. I chose to work from the bottom right image.

Below are some of the plein air paintings I did on my Japan trip. Posting these just for atmosphere, even though they are from waaay back when…!

Fushimi Inari Shrine. Torii gates ascending the hillsides

This painting I did at the halfway point going up the hill. I sat under my umbrella, got out my paints and sketchbook, then realized that I had forgotten my water bottle. Watercolor is not much use without water - but hey it was raining, so I just stuck my paints out in the rain for a bit to moisten them! Plein air is always a challenge, and you have to learn to adapt.

This was such a peaceful place, with the only sound that of rain pattering on my umbrella.

Heian Jingu Shrine Temple buildings

Heian Jingu Shrine covered bridge

Lots of sweet Japanese ladies sat next to me while I was doing this and asked me questions in Japanese. Sadly I have no Japanese so had to make do with sign language. Fortunately Art transcends words and we had a good time admiring the view!

Nijo Castle moat and bridge

Nijo Castle Gates

Here be Dragons... well, one at least!

I’m still coping with our current crisis by staying firmly planted in fantasy land. In exploring needle felting I decided to make a dragon. This was a little different to making the fairies as I had no firm idea of what my dragon should look like. I looked at some reference pictures for inspiration, but it mostly just evolved. Just as with the fairies, I began with a wire armature.

Wire armature for dragon - and yes, my table is a complete mess!

I learned a lot from making this creature. One thing I will never do again is make the feet out of wire. Its so hard to cover the wire with a small amount of wool. I’ve seen information on the internet about using wax to fix wool over wire for bird claws, I’m thinking that’s the only way to go with this. My dragon feet turned out to be stumpy things, hard to shape with the wire to stab around. I like having the wire in the tail for posing, but again its awful trying to needle felt around that wire.

Ooh, a nekked dragon….

I used white core roving wool to create the shape of the dragon, and then added thin layers of colored wool. This was harder than I anticipated because as you can see in the armature picture I only had tiny amounts of the colors I wanted to use. I bought that bundle of colored wool samples to see what it was like, but there’s not enough of any one color to make anything substantial.

This was the first time I had really tried to decorate, or make patterns on felted wool using thin strands. It was surprisingly easy, and I ended up giving the dragon a flower “tattoo”! The eyes are tiny black beads sewn into place. It was fun to “sculpt” the face adding brow ridges and nostrils. The wings are made from Tulle, wired along the top edge and decorated with splashes of colored acrylic Iridescent medium. the dragon went though several stages of being quite dinosaur like, then a lot like a hairy horse, but it got there in the end. It’s not perfect. I’m sure I’m still not felting the wool enough, but at least I’m hardly stabbing myself at all now!

It’s a very friendly dragon, even has a name “Serenity” - fitting companion to my “fairies”.

Abstraction

It’s a lot of fun playing with paint and letting it drip, run and flow around and you get some visually interesting effects.

I would love to be an abstract expressionist painter. I love painting abstracts. Unfortunately, either painting from life, or using photo reference tends to have me glued to realism throughout the process. I constantly try to make my art more abstract and expressive, but often it seems the harder I try the more realistic the painting becomes! These two little paintings started off abstract and managed to stay that way - but then I was commissioned to paint two abstracts, and my reference pics were all abstract too. That’s obviously the answer for me - Duh!