St Peters Snow Scene

This is the St Peters snow scene I mentioned last week. Colin Bradley refers to them as Christmas cards but the finished artwork is far too big to fit on a card as each picture is almost A4 in size. Maybe he is thinking that you could scan your finished artwork and then resize the images for Christmas cards. Not that it's very useful for us Aussies as we don't see snow on the winter, let alone at Christmas! If you don't want to try your hand at doing your own artwork, you're welcome to download the images of mine. (Actually, I'd be chuffed if you used them!)

By the way, Colin is happy for people to post or even sell the artworks they create using his lessons, as long as they credit him, which is why I seem to be name dropping a lot. His lessons are very reasonably priced considering the cost of art lessons, either on line or "real", so I think it only fair that credit is given where it is due.

Pastel Art - The Old Barn

I've been so carried away with pastel pencil art that I've done no cards for weeks but I have managed to finish a quilt top.... but of course now the weather has become too hot to quilt it!

So this is what I've been up to. It's another of Colin Bradley's lessons - The Old Barn. I've changed it a bit by removing the bath tub, mainly because I'd stuffed up the pallet and tyres on the right and didn't want to ruin the picture further. I also didn't do a very good job on the barrel.

I've nearly finished a snow scene and will post that next week. I'm becoming more confident now which is partly what led to the stuff ups on this because I've been anticipating his next move and not actually following his instructions closely enough. But I'm taking that as a good sign, because in the main, I'm doing pretty much what he is doing, one step ahead of him. With each picture though, I'm learning something new, so the plan is to keep going until I run out of Colin's landscapes and then embark on some of my own.

Waterfall Pastel Art

This time another landscape exercise from Colin Bradley's lessons.

This one was very hard. The bushes in the background are a challenge at any time. then there were the rocks. I couldn't seem to follow what Colin was doing and mine was very different to his in the end. What he started out with and which I did, was patches of pale colour which were then blended into the paper with a colour shaper - all looking very vague and a bit of a mess. then he started shaping the rocks and that's where I got lost. What I ended up doing was rounding off my rocks that looked all angular and darkening the areas between them. I was just about to rip it up in frustration when the phone rang. When I got up and  looked back on it from a distance it looked like real rocks! It was all done by sheer accident - me just messing around with the shapes because I didn't like the angular look of what I had drawn originally. So I started scribbling with a variety of colours, darkening the shadows between the rocks, rounding the rocks off and adding some highlights just below the darkest parts and miraculously it looked a bit more real.

Then of course I messed it up again with the waterfalls.....

Pastel Pencil Art - Harbour Scene

I've stumbled across a great site for learning how to draw in pastels. Colin Bradley does the most amazingly lifelike pictures using pastel pencils. This is my first attempt at a landscape following his free video tutorial. I'm planning on using the scan I made of it on a card - probably a DL sized card.

You can get a 300dpi scan of my original as an image to use on your own card here.