Know your materials

I love making reference pages of my paints and materials in my sketchbook. I spent most of Sunday adding some more paint boxes (and discovering some long forgotten ones), and some of my growing collection of watercolour brushes. It seems I now have watercolour paints for every occasion and sketchbooks; cheap, expensive,tubes, half pans, full pans, big boxes, travel kits...

New year, new word

I've been taking a little blog holiday and have been enjoying a two and a half week's holiday of day trips, long walks and lazy days. No blogging, no painting, no drawing. Just relaxing, and enjoying the time and company (and struggling with a nasty cold). Oh and taking tons of photos. A few with my rather neglected camera, and loads and loads with my iPhone.

The holiday is over, the new year has started, and with it come new plans, dreams, wishes, resolutions - and a new word. This is the third year that I've chosen a word to accompany me throughout the course of the year. My first year's word was Inspiration. I wanted creativity, painting, drawing, photography back on a regular basis in my life, and I was looking for inspiration all around me to get me back on track. It worked. Last year, I chose the word Journey. I wanted to continue on the path I had begun following the year before. At the end of the year, I wanted to find myself in a distincly different place from where I started 12 month earlier. I invited changes, big and small. It worked.

After those two quite successful years with my words, I felt it was time for a bit more action, as they both were somehow rather passive. So my word for 2013 is Do. This year, I want to get things done. No more procrastination, no more waiting for things to happen. Do it.

There are so many things I want to change this year, so many plans and dreams, some of them more realistic, others maybe more wild and adventurous. But we'll see. I'll definitely give it a try, and DO what I can to make things happen.

As for the blog, there are a few things I want to change this year, some of them long overdue.Well, two main things, really:

1. blog more often
2. give my blog the makeover I've been wanting to give it for the past one and a half years

Have you chosen a word for 2013? What is it?

Grunge brush set & my first texture

I've been busy all evening - while watching Miss Marple solve mystery after mystery :-) - with creating a first proper set of brushes. I call them Seaside Grunge Brushes, because I used an image of some very rusty texture which I took last autumn on Torquay pier as a base. I haven't had much time yet to try them out and see if they're actually usable, but I'm nevertheless quite pleased with them :-). And now that I've got a first taste of making brushes, I certainly will do more of them :-)

Here's what they look like:

Seaside grunge brush set

Feel free to download here (or click on image) and use them - and let me know if they're any good :-):

Of course when I had finished them I wanted to try them out quickly, so I created a simple brown background and started stamping them down - and out came a texture :-).

Texture No 1

Again, feel free to download here (or click on image) and use it. I hope it's useful... I only tried it out once and very quickly to see if it worked at all:

 

I hope that I got all the download links right here. Let me know if there are any problems.

Well, making brushes and textures certainly is great fun, and not as difficult as I thought. It's fun to do them all in PSE, but I must say that I'm also looking forward to making some brushes and texture using good old paper and paint and other stuff.

Anyway, time to turn in, long day tomorrow... Have a wonderful start into the new week!

Doodle Brushes

I've learnt how to do brushes and turn them into a collection in Kim Klassen's e-course The Art of Texture (where, of course, I'm way behind. The class ended last week, and I'm only about half through. 3 more weeks time to finish...). But anyway. I've figured out (I think/hope) how to turn the brushes/collection into a Zip-file/folder and found a free file sharing website, 4shared, to make them downloadable. Of course I managed to register with a wrong e-mail adress (wrong country code ending, which is the thing that easily happens when you have too many e-mail accounts with too many different country codes and a "midget's brain" (Muggehirn, as  we say). It doesn't seem to be possible to change the e-mail in ones account. Ah well, it seems to work alright, I suppose I just won't get any e-mails from them. I think that once I start seriously uploading stuff for free downloads, I'll just have to create a new account. I certainly have enough spare e-mail addresses...

The brushes I made are just some doodles, and I don't really know how or where to use them myself, to be honest, and I don't expect that you'd actually want to download and use them. This is rather experimenting with it all and seeing if and how it actually works. So these are the doodles, they come as a collection in one ABR-file, which can be used as brushes in PSE (I created them in PSE8, so I haven't really any idea in which versions they can be used. I'm still learning...):

Doodle brushes

Anyway, here's the link for the download: Doodle brushes.zip or just click on the image. If you like, download them and try them out, and if you do, let me know if it actually works or not. As I say, it's the first time I'm doing this and I haven't really got a clue... It's all a big learning experience at the moment.

As I'm writing this I just realise that I might have made a bit of a mistake when creating the brushes. When selecting them and saving them as individual brushes, I think I should have made them a certain size, instead I didn't define the size of the selection tool. So I've no idea what size they are and they may just be far too small. Well, I'm afraid this comes from when one's just of a very impatient nature and never really reads through things/instructions/tutorials/one's own notes properly. Did I mention that I'm still learning and pretty much clueless?

But I hope to be able to make more of these brushes (and nicer/better ones), as well as textures, in the future and share them with you. I also have to see about a scanner. I used the one at work and I'm not happy with it at all. I don't know if it is just an old one, or not working properly anymore or, more likely, I just don't really know how to use it properly.

{Day 18} ~ Centre of Attention / {January} ~ The Beginning of a Year full of Inspiration and Creativity

Prompt for Day 18 of Picture Winter: "Centre of Attention"

Today's assingment was to "pay attention to one subject that tends to keep showing up in your work - something that captures your eye, time and time again, and begs to be the center of attention for your creativity".

Well, brushes might not be the thing that most keeps showing up in my work, although I have taken far more and regularly ictures of painting brushes and other paining stuff than you've seen here on my stream. However.

I painted long before I picked up "serious" DSLR photography last spring, but my creativity has been suffering for a long time. 2011 will be my creative year, so I've decided, and already in the first three weeks of this new year, I have found so much inspiration around me which has helped me to develop my photography skills.

I know that I will never be an artist and never be able to produce true real art, and I don't aspire to do so, I'll always be an amateur. But I very much hope that I will also find the inspiration this year to make painting again one of the centres of my attention and the passion it once was, along with photography. And I'm looking forward to combining the two, I already can see so many ways in doing so.

And I just love images of painting brushes and painting stuff :-)

Texture by Shadowhouse Creations.

*  *  *

I am also using this image for my "Beginnings" page for One Little Word. My word for 2011 is Inspiration. The prompt for this page actually was to take a self portrait. And I will. Later. But I felt that this would be a so much more fitting image, as this is the beginning of my year full of inspiration and creativity.

I haven't really taken the time to work on this project until today. I always wanted to but then all the photo post processing got in the way. And I was also unable to order the supplies as all the three main thing - the album, the plastic refill packs and the card stock were not on stock. And although I kept receiving messages that some small quantities of stock had come in, they were sold out again so quickly that I never managed to order them all three together. And with the shipping costs from the States to Switzerland being what they are, there was no way I was going to order them individually. But album and cardstock at least are now on their way, together with some other scrapbooking stuff, and the refill pages I'll hopefully soon be able to order over here in Europe.

I'm so looking forward to start to get working on the project. I think it's a wonderful idea to have a special word for the whole year and I think that this class will really help to keep focused on it.

I'll soon write more and in greater detail about this class and project, and will be starting at the beginning, but I just had to create this page today and add it here as when I did the processing work on this photo today for Picture Winter, I just felt that I had finally found my "beginnings" photo.

The Wine of Life

Die Kunst ist zwar nicht das Brot, aber der Wein des Lebens (Jean Paul)

I have tried to find a good English translation of this quote, but although I found a great number of Jean Paul quotes in English, I didn't find one of this particular one. It means something like "Art may not be life's bread but it is its wine". Well, I think you get the meaning.

My painting teacher had this quote, scribbled on a piece of paper, stucked on to the wall for ages. Didn't see it today, but it might just be behind some other stuff on the wall :-).

Texture by Shadowhouse Creations.