70th birthday

A 70th birthday card for a man...not so easy! I eventually settled on a satin look background and kept the whole design very simple. Not wanting to use an actual bow, I simply tied the ribbon into a knot with tails.

Pastel Art - Holly

More of my Colin Bradley art. This time still life. This was easier because I'm a bit more used to drawing plants.

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.

Old Man

I seem to have a run of cards to make for men lately. This one is for a birthday. It has to be posted so I've kept it to a standard size. I haven't distressed the edges of the image layer - just badly inked it but i rather like the jagged effect. Sometimes mistakes work in my favour!

The image has been coloured with copic markers. I don't have many skin tones so that was done with Prismacolor pencils and zest it blender. Despite all the warnings about the paper needing tooth for pencils, it was fine done on smooth blend it card. In real life the skin colour is not quite as dark as it looks here in thee photo.