Fish Talk!

Its been so lovely to have a day to myself just getting back in touch with my pen!

I love trying different media and get so excited about combining them but sometimes the simplicity of just a pen and paper and time to doodle are are one of life's little luxuries.

I can't get enough of looking at Fish and trying to capture their lovely sleek scales and the infinite forms of their shapes and colours. The more you look, the more you see all kinds of repeating patterns and the more we observe the details the better we get at drawing. 

The section below shows the repeating patterns and the lines that give the fish its structure and shading. This is the fish before I cut it out.

The collaged page is in my Fishy Sketchbook. A whole book of fishy moments! It's good to return to it when I need a fishy fix!

From my Heart 

I am always doodling, drawing and making hearts so it probably is no surprise that I have an Altered Book with the title From My Heart which has LOTS of hearts in it. I wanted to experiment with lots of different textures for the backgrounds of the pages and the hearts are all made with different materials. 

Some are found fabrics, some are Kantha stitched, some are paintings or drawings. I've used some of my precious scraps and embellishments too because there is no point in having a stash that I never use! Ha! Good resolution!

Some of the background textures in the book need something added to them and the great thing about sketchbooks and altered books is that you can keep going back to them and adding to them. Many of mine will probably never be  properly finished.

So today I decided to do a little flower sketch on a painted cotton gauze background. 

The gauze was cut up and pasted onto the gessoed book page and then dry brushed over with white and duck egg blue matt household paint. Yes! the stuff we paint our walls with!

It  gives it a really tough finish and great texture.

Today I sketched the flowers around it with a black drawing pen.

This was a bit scary... firstly I knew I needed a robust but fine nib to draw on such a rough textured background. My usual favourite Pigma Micron pens wouldn't have stood up to the job. So I used an Edding 1880 pen with a 0.7 nib. These are amazingly tough for a drawing pen and the ink lasts really well. It is still as good as new after me treating it so badly and will live to draw again! The second scary thing was that I kind of liked the background as it was and I knew that there would no turning back. 

It is worth embracing the scary stuff sometimes. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out and will sketch some more stuff on the facing page sometime soon.

I'd love to know what you think.

Oops! I forgot to say how I made the heart! I will do it tomorrow and show you some of the other hearts in the book if you like? x