Motivated

Hello! Ooh, it does feel good to finally feel 'human' again. I think I've had more than my fair share of illnesses recently.  In a way it's my own fault.  Previously I have been months without so much as a sniffle and had been feeling just a little bit too smug about how 'I never get ill' - so, 'just to show me' I was given 3 lots of the dreaded lurgy during December and the start of January.

I have to say there is one good thing about being ill and that is that it can give your diet a good kickstart.  If you can't swallow, even chocolate loses its magical appeal!  :-O  Now I'm better I'm not even back on it but I'm sure over time it will sneak its way back in.  Meanwhile I'm just appreciative of the loss of 5lbs...

I'm feeling invigorated and motivated to create again (yay!) and so as a kickstart, I decided to hunt out some artwork that I have done years ago for some ideas.  When I say years ago, I really do mean years (like 20, or some, gulp, 25 years ago!) I scanned it in and simply tidied it up using Picnik.

This one was originally done by simply scratching the surface of the magazine picture with a slightly dampened Brillo pad (a kind of stainless steel scrubbing cloth).  Nowadays, people would probably use Photoshop or the like but its fun to actually physically do it to the picture.

You can get unpredictable results that aren't correctable! But that's all part of the fun.

I do fancy doing some more of this kind of experimentation... and you can of course work with the image afterwards, paint on top, add further images, text around it...

Some of the work I have done in the past isn't really suitable for showing here (ooer) but I have done a sort of summary sheet of a few of the things I found.

The rather strange display of bird claywork (Top Left) was a photo of an exhibition I went to. No idea of the artist. The facework pics were part of my Foundation art course. The rather gruesome doll pic was part of my 'A' Level Photography. It was actually 2 negatives printed onto one piece of paper, again, something done with computers these days.  Top right and bottom left were my experiments with encaustic wax painting (love the textural look).  Bottom middle was a photo I took in Scotland (Balmoral estate) and the last one is of some random textural painting showing the brushmarks.

Phew! What a lot of talking! But seeing all this past work has got me all fired up into creating, which is good because the resolution word I have given myself for this year is MOTIVATED.

Thank you for reading and for any comments,

qwiksave