My works are still showing at the Art Factory Gallery, Merivale St, South Brisbane.

I had a good time at the opening night and enjoyed spending time at the gallery on the weekend, but would be happier if I had sold something!  The art will be there until Sunday evening if you’re interested in checking it out.

With all this going on as well as lots of stuff for school, I am proud I managed to get something done for Inspire Me Thursday this week.  The topic was “wardrobe” – I had to think for a while but finally came up with an idea I liked for this:

I took some photos of the different patterns of clothes in my wardrobe – As you can see I wear a lot of flowery things – more than I thought I did, actually!  I played around with the images with photo program to make them a bit more interesting.

Then I printed the images onto some scrapbooking paper (which has a linen like texture).  I used a few different colours of paper.  I painted a canvas with dark blue paint (it looks black here but it is actually a very dark blue), and then glued the paper to the canvas.  I added some details using “dimensional magic” and some silver paint.  I also draped some threads over the top and attached them with dimensional magic.

I’m quite happy with the finished project – let me know what you think!

You’ll notice that the background is made up of overlapping circles.  I don’t know if they really count as polka dots seeing as they overlap, but oh well.

I will be entering this painting into a community art exhibition at Bella Art Gallery this coming weekend.  Let me know what you think!

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve played around with melted crayons…

I remember very distinctly one winter morning when my brother and I were little, we woke up before mum and dad.  We sat up next to the old oil heater and for some reason came up with the idea of creating our own multi-coloured crayons: by melting them on the heater and mixing the colours together.

Of course, we didn’t quite perfect the process of catching the melted wax – so basically mum got up to find wax crayons melted all over the heater and into the carpet.  Let’s just say, we never tried that little trick again.

This time around I was a little more sensible in my approach, and I melted the wax with a teaspoon and a candle – and it still felt a little naughty.

I used a technique I do all the time with the kids at school – draw a picture onto a piece of paper using crayons (I used oil pastels here because it’s the closest thing I have). Then, paint over the top of it – the paint will not stick to the spots with the oil pastels. It’s great for doing seascapes with kids, but I chose to do some trees using my white oil pastel & watercolour paints:

Let me know what you think! (I think the top one is the better of the two)

I decided I’m not very good at painting actual doors so this is a doorway:

After a bit of thinking, I remembered and idea I had a while ago. Matt and I have a great book with photographs ranging from the microscopic level to pictures of outer space. A while ago I thought some of the pictures in the book would be a really good inspiration for abstract painting – many of the images are quite abstract already.

These paintings are not exact copies of the photographs (I wouldn’t be able to make an exact copy and wouldn’t want to anyway – then it wouldn’t really be my art) – they are inspired by the photographs.

Anyway, here goes…

This first painting is my interpretation of a magnified view of a liver cell. I think of all the paintings I have done for this topic so far, this is my favourite. I like the abstract nature of it – it could be a birds-eye view of a landscape, with red mountains and blue rivers.

This is my interpretation of a magnified view of blood vessels. When painting this I was struck by how similar they are to trees (I paint a lot of trees and found the technique to be very similar). The colour is blue because that’s the colour they were in the photo I was working from. I think it was a dye to make them show up for the picture. I think the colour is fantastic with the black background.

Couldn’t have all these magnified body parts without the most important one… the brain!  This one is a magnified human cerebellum.

The only one of my medical artworks that isn’t part of a human body – this is my interpretation of a magnified photograph of heat-loving bacteria.  They are called “extremophiles” because they life in such extreme environments, like volcanic hot springs.  I think I liked painting this one the most out of the all the paintings I did for this challenge.  I had to experiment a bit to get the texture I wanted for the background as well as the texture of the inside of the bacteria.

After feeling overwhelmed by the topic this week I’m amazed I was able to come up with so many different artworks for this challenge – there are a few more ideas I have up my sleeve along the same lines and I’m really glad I challenged myself to try something new.

We always get lots of junk mail at our place (which Matt loves by the way!). We always recycle but this week I recycled the junk mail in a more interesting way:

I was thinking about the theme of reducing, reusing and recycling, and why we do these things. My goal was to use recycled paper (from a Big W catalouge) to show an image of what we are trying to save.

The background is made up of scraps from a Big W catalouge which I soaked in water with blue paint mixed in. I then stuck them down and covered with acrylic medium. When it was dry, I painted some blue paint over for the sky, but I left some of the paper visible. When that was dry I painted the tree.

As it happens, tomorrow is Mum’s birthday, so I decided to make a birthday card and matching envelope for her.

Here’s how it turned out… (and let’s hope that Mum doesn’t read this post before tomorrow – although it’s not very likely!):

“This week, our creative prompt is the Peace Symbol. This universal sign of peace turns 50 years old this year (although there is some controversy that it has been around for much longer); whatever its origins, let us be inspired by what this symbol represents — to you personally or to others.”

Here’s the two paintings I came up with:

This one is just called “peace” – the colour blue always makes me feel peaceful.

This one is called “Groovy, Baby!” because I thought it looked like something from an Austin Powers movie (or something that belongs on the side of a VW).

As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

The first thing I thought of when I read this topic was a reflection. I realised I had a box of watercolour paints I had never even opened, and thought this would be the perfect challenge to use them. I have used watercolour pencils before, but not watercolour paints, and I was quite surprised at how much more difficult I found them compared to acrylics.

Here’s what I came up with:

I wasn’t really quite happy with it and wanted to see how it would look with acrylics, and seeing as the theme was ‘two’, why not do two paintings?

So that’s what I did – this is the acrylic version:

I think the acrylic one is a lot better than the watercolour one – what do you think?  Whatever the outcome, it was fun to step out of my comfort zone (although I admit I did like stepping back into my comfort zone again!)