Currently...

I am flat out preparing for a show next week, so things have been a little quiet around here on the blog.

Here are a few quick progress shots of my current pieces:

Lots of fun! These are the willy wagtails that flit around outside my studio window catching bugs. They are complete cheeky, show-offs. 

But, I must get back to it. More info and updates coming soon!

Sneak Peek

It's an art weekend around here for me. I have the house to myself, and it's supposed to rain, and that's my favourite kind of combination for art-making :)

I'm working hard to get as much as I can done for a show at the end of next month, so here's a peek at what I was experimenting with today:

Plenty more peeks to come! (It will finally give me something to blog about!)

Fixes and Freak outs

Ok, I'm a little bit late with this one, but it's still Thursday in some parts of the world!

So, after this artwork ended up being damaged upon it's return to me, I decided that the only way to try to fix it was to add another levelling layer over the top of the whole damaged area, to try to hide the bubble-wrap texture. This is how it looked when I'd first layed it down, and plenty of people thought that I'd painted smoke over her to make it look like she was a genie emerging from her teapot 'bottle!'

The levelling medium dries clear though, and I used the same product that I always have, and have never had a problem with it, until this time. I left it to dry overnight, but we had our coldest night of the year for our area (0.6ºC) and that was apparently too cold for the medium to cure properly without disaster:

This is the point at which I taught the studio pup some new words. The cracks were so deep and sharp, that it looked like they'd cracked all the way down through the paint. Luckily, luckily, luckily this proved to just be an illusion created by the shadows on the cracks, and I've been able to 'fill' them with more levelling medium, and they've all but disappeared. The bubblewrap texture that I was trying to fix in the first place is completley gone.

Now, I want to add some extra details and change a few little areas that have been bugging me. I won't be able to get to this for quite a while, as I've got a few other pieces I need to finish first, but I'm anxious to get to it! I'm also going to be testing some alternative levelling mediums, so I can hopefully avoid this whole awful scenario in the future!