Wonderful Patterns.

A walk in the park with the dog this morning was rewarded by a very happy dog, but also photos of some astonishingly patterned toadstools.

I suppose the white marks are from the top of the toadstool cracking, but I need to return to the park to take a few more photos, close ups this time.

Maybe I'll get there tomorrow, weather permitting. I do hope that it doesn't rain over night and turn the toadstool to mush!
 

My Mornin Walk.

Someone has a bit of imagination! How about these flower filled jeans up against a sunny wall?

There are various dragons on the ridges of old houses in my local area, but this one particularly caught my eye with it's belligerent expression. For some reason it looks to be a young dragon, so perhaps it's just scared up there on the roof. I love it's lichen covered scaly tail too.
 

Next Steps.

  By carefully lining up the previously burnt screen, I stenciled in the colours of the various flowers and the leaves in what I thought were the correct positions.

                       Here I've added the final flowers  all ready to overlay with the screen. Below is a print of the screen on it's own and I'm quite pleased with how it looks.

 Just for fun I hand coloured in the various flowers with alcohol inks, but the purples are all wrong, as
the colour on the ends of the pens do not reflect the actual colours of the inks!

Steps 1 and 2.

 Above is a selection of printed backgrounds for the new project. There were done on a gelatin plate with a piece of textured wallpaper that I had stuck to cardboard and sealed with shellac.

 The next step was to stencil the poppies, but looking at them here I can see that colours aren't much like the ones my original photo, but who is to know that, and does it really matter?

I wanted the colours to be pretty opaque, so that the background didn't show through, but as the final key stencil will be over the top of all the painting I don't think that a bit of show through texture will matter at all.

Stencil Cutting.

I thought that easiest way of adding specific colours to my image was to cut stencils for each area, the poppies, the nasturtiums and the nasturtium leaves. I printed the image onto Yupo paper, thinking that it would make a good stencil medium, but being so shiny, the ink didn't soak in, but rather it spread out from each line. It took 48 hours for the ink to be dry enough to cut out the shapes, and even then it smeared quite a lot, clearly visible in the lower paper. I outlined each section with red pen to make it easier to see what to cut out and that too smeared resulting in a rather messy looking image! I've marked the middle of each stencil to that I can line them up, I hope that it works out as I intend!

New Project.

 Walking past a neighbor's garden this week,  I couldn't but admire her wonderful display of Iceland poppies. You don't see them very often in private gardens these days, but these are so colourful that I just had to take a photo of them.

The colours reminded me of the colours of nasturtiums, so I decided to make some art combining the 2 types of flowers. The top paper is a design that I made with both the plants in it, and below is the small screen that I burnt on the Gocco machine of the original drawing. I think that I'll cut stencils so that I can print several different colours over the black outlines. More fun in store tomorrow!

More Walking Photos.

 I rather liked this painted letter box that I spotted on another of my daily walks. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make a very rustic metal letter box into something a bit more artistic!

These plants which I'm not sure what exactly they are, perhaps a type of Aloe, are showing off their extremely tall flower spikes in front of the old City Town Hall.

Happy Faces!

I spotted these happy faced wooden-spoon people on a nature strip near home while I was out walking the dog. Some small person must have had so much fun making these, and as a result anyone walking past would surely have a smile on their face. I know that I did!