At last

At last I am just starting to work on and finish some of my projects. I did some work on Pandora fromd Marilyn Radzat's online class. Sorry for the terrible pictures. I think I had the settings wrong on the camera. It is still not finished so no doubt I will be taking some more pictures at a later date sometime and I promise to take better ones next time. I completed and set these Paverpol figures up in my garden. They have been sitting indoors in a corner for more than a year now. I didn't put them out because I found out that I had not soaked the cloth well in Paverpol so white patches kept appearing at places. I have now painted them with acrylics and weatherproofed them and stuck them on that ballard. Lets hope they will survive the winters. I want to actually put them a bit further into the foliage so that the green foliage will cover the concrete ballard eventually. You see the almost empty patch at the back of the figures. We had a big bush which I thought was a Lilac. I kept waiting for it to flower every year but that never happened. I found out recently that it was a wild variety of Lilac which basically doesn't flower much and keeps putting out suckers. So we took it out last week. Only after it came out I realised how much of space it was occuping. Now I have planted some rhododendrons and Azealeas and a Japanese acer there.

This is my Peony. It is for the first time that this has flowered so well since we came to this house. It was being overtaken by another bush that we had to remove. Now we can see its beauty and smell the fragrant flowers.

Bonjour

Bonjour messieurs et mesdames. Enchante. Je m'apple Lumiere. J'habite a Woking en Angletrre. Je suis neé 25 Avril 2009.Je vais pour une compétition aux Etats-Unis. Me souhaiter la chance.

Lol! he is a bit of a show off isn't he? So this is Lumiere. I made this for Creations in Fibre Doll Conference. Since I couldn't go he went to represent me. This year's theme for the challenge was musicals so I made this character from The Beauty and the Beast. He is the flirty French butler turned candlestick. When I saw the play in London I absolutely fell for the candlestick. The actor played the part superbly. There were others too but he stood out from the others.

Since the conference is well on its way I can now show him to you all too as I don't think anyone gone to the CIFI is going to be looking at blogs .They will be having far too much fun meeting friends and being creative.

A treat!

Today I had a treat. In the afternoon I went into the garden and suddenly I heard a flutter of wings and something flew past me. It was nothing other than the elusive wood pecker that has been eating up most of the bird feed that I have hung. I have never seen him so close. The head was bright red with a body bright yellow and the wings were black and white. I have always seen him from far and he disappears as soon as we go into the garden. I think I took him by surprise this time as he must have been on the lawn near the hedge which is close to the rear window so he did not see me at once. It made my day. These are some flowers that are blooming in the garden. I planted the roses last year and they are beautiful and fragrant. Except for the last one I am not sure what has happened to it, it is not healthy and not the right colour either. It is supposed to be almost black in colour.

Project finished

I finished this project today. I think it is finished but yet I feel something is missing from it. I have not done this sort of art before so what do I know. Anyway I don't think I am going to add anything more to it. I might work on the sides a little bit more but as far as I am concerned it is finished. I added some highlights in gold which are not visible in the picture. I didn't follow the instructions to the T as given in Cloth Paper and Scissors project but I am like that I just tend to go off in a tangent lol! I call this project Garden of Memories. I added lots of bits that I had written as a high school student in Hindi. Unfortunately all that sort of got hidden but it is there the only thing that is visible is the one that I added later which I down loaded from the net. It is a hindi poem. I forgot to note down the web page that I took that from so lost it sorry about that.

Too late....

Only yesterday I was telling my friend MaryO that I was hoping the magpies don't find the nest that the blackbirds have in the near by bush. But looks like it was wishful thinking sadly. Today I heard a lot of commotion from the garden and went to look what was happening when I saw all the black birds trying to attack the magpie which was raiding their nest. I think I was too late. I can't see if the chicks or the eggs were taken. This morning however I did find a dead chick in the front of the house. Not sure where that one came from but it does seem these birds are going on a rampage. Oh how I hate magpies.

My homework

Our home work for this week was to paint something that gave a sense of space. Well I thought and thought finally came up with this. Last year when I was at CIFI we went on to visit Pamela Armas's shop in the mountains of Albuquerque. I remember driving on this long endless so it seemed road, with vast spaces and with the mountians in distance in various shades of blue purple and green. The sky was intense blue in colour. The experience was awesome because we stopped on the side and I walked right in the middle of the road and took some pictures with not a vehicle in sight and no noise except for a distant call of a bird. Here one can't stop let alone walk on the highway. Even if you were mad enough to try, you would be flattened in a second lol! I have tried to capture the same sense of space and vasteness and the distance. Not sure if I have captured it here but hopefully it will be ok by my teacher. I will now go and paint something mundane as a window but I must say it is not easy to paint a window in water colours.

Picture a week challenge

I keep forgetting to take pictures for this challenge and end up showing same old stuff. So I just remembered I may not have shown you this picture of the skies that I caught in the car mirror. I took it sometime ago and I don't think I have shown it to you. A pity the mirror was a bit dirty otherwise the photo would have been clearer

Working on it

Thank you first of all to everyone on your kind and helpful comments. As you can see I managed to take that offending picture off lol. It came out quite easily with water. Now I have worked on it a bit more and toned it down. I have other ideas on the figure that is supposed to go on it. I hope it will work out the way I want it.

Last week's water colour painting

Last week we did some atmospheric painting of St. Paul's and buildings across the Thames. So here is my not so great attempt. The conditions were not easy to paint as it was windy and what with pollen flying all over I was struggling to keep my eyes and nose from dripping lol! We were also asked to paint a brick wall as homework. So I did my garden wall. I think I would like to paint it again with all the creepers going over it but since the teacher wanted only the brick wall I had to leave out the plants.

Out and about....

I am sure there is no need to tell you where these pictures were taken. Have been painting outdoors. The weather was quite pleasant today and not so windy like last week. Inspite of all the sneezing and sniffing due to the pollen, I did enjoy the day as the view was stunning in that light. The day turned out quite good although rain was forecaste. I didn't take my camera with me. It was because I find it difficult to keep an eye on everything while I am painting. So I had to make do with my mobile phone hence the pictures are not great. Anyway it was a lovely way to start the weekend. Have a lovely weekend all.

New Project

Just trying out a new project that was given in the free digital version of Cloth Paper and Scissors. It is a project by Pam Carriker. I am not good at following instructions so I find myself doing things. Lets hope I don't mess it up. But I made a mistake of sticking that piece of paper without cutting it out so now I have to improvise and make it look better lol! Any ideas to get that piece of paper out without tearing it?

Saying it with flowers

My garden is just begining to bloom so I thought you might enjoy looking at some flowers of my garden

Things I have been doing....

Friday was a beautiful day and we went out to a park in London to do some painting. I have started my painting classes again. I am a bit rusty so I was struggling a quite a bit. This is supposed to be a tree and some plants lol!

This is the park we were in and you can see from the shade how sunny it was.

Today we went on a drive and ended up in Tetbury. This building was an old Toll house..There was some sort of local artists exhibition going on in there. Didn't stay around too long as it was freezing and windy.

Below is the spire of the church in Tetbury which I took from the car as we approached the town.

Most of my Bank holiday went in gardening. Hopefully I shall have some flowers to show you when they start blooming.