Wednesday, May 09, 2007

My Day of Fame

My day of fame began with an email from the crew at Webshots letting me know one of my albums had been selected as one of the three Featured Albums of the day. The album in question was; 'Natures Textures and Patterns'. The album was featured on the Webshots Community home page on the 8th of May 2007. It has now been archived in their Featured Albums archive. I feel very honoured to have been chosen for this distinction as there are many superb images to be found in amongst the webshots Community.
This album has been a recent addition to my collection on Webshots and contains the images of nature in all its variety. The beautiful textures of bark curls on a gum tree, the symmetry of leaves on the Jacaranda tree and even the beauty you can find in a dried up puddle. The following images are some of the ones I have in my album.
Jacaranda Leaves


Mud Art




Bark Curls



Sunday, February 25, 2007

myspace site [no longer active]

All decked out in my tribal belly dance outfit. This photo was taken at the Woodford Folk Festival on New Year's Eve before we headed down to the site to party 2007 in.
Belly Dance Logan City. This is where I go to learn about belly dance with the wonderful Debbie Larcombe.

Today I decided to enter into the myspace blog world. Not as easy to navigate around as this one but its all a learning curve. This week I started back at belly dancing after a long time away from it. It didn't help when at the begining of December last yearI fell and took a small flake of bone off my left ankle and tore a ligament.
On Saturday Debbie, my belly dance teacher, had the first of the tribal belly dance classes. We spent some time sorting out how everyone wanted the class to run then did a workout and discovered all those muscles we hadn't used over the christmas break.


Sunday, January 07, 2007

Woodford Textures







The first few days at the Woodford Folk festival were rainy and cold ,unseasonal weather for the 'sunshine' state. It didn't take long for the dust to turn to mud, mud which threatened to suck your shoes off and squelched up between your toes if you were wearing thongs. While the music from the venues filled our ears with glorious sound, the stalls dotted around the site provided our eyes with a colourful diversion. The rough textures of colourful bags hanging out side the stalls, colourful clothing hanging inside, racks of scarfs, and a jumble of hats teetering in a large pile on a table.









Once the sun began to shine and the raincoats came off the colourful parade of people filled the streets ,the stalls tempting then with their wares. Small butterflies on sticks beckoning to children with their gaily
wings.



Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Playing with Textures

The dawn of a new year.At the end of December 06 we headed off to the Woodford Folk Festival to spend the end of the year and begining of 07 relaxing and enjoying the sounds of music. The above photo ,taken from near our campsite, is the first rays of the sun on January 1st 2007. As well as all the great music we listened to I also did a workshop with local artist, Noela Mills, but more about that later.
The above piece of collage I made before the festival, little did I know it would be a similar technique to the piece I would do at the workshop! After a recent spate of buying books on collage art I decided to try out a few techniques on a small frontspiece for my Woodford journal.
I covered a piece of paper with craft glue and after crumpling up a piece of tissue paper stuck it down onto the glued page going over the page with a glue loaded paint brush pushing the tisuue around forming interesting shapes and texture.I also added chipboard letters of my name. I let the piece dry and then painted it. A coat of brown paint first and when that had dried, painted green,copper,purple and pewter paint across the crumpled surface. The paint picked up the ridges creating a great textural finish. The look was metallic.To highten the semigloss finish, and to seal it, I then painted the page with varnish.

Now to the workshop with Noela. I learnt lots. The techinque Noela used was similar to the way I had done my pre-festival journal frontspiece. We used PVA glue to stick our bits of tissue paper to a page of copy paper. The resulting page in the above photo.When it had dried we scrumbled metallic paint across the surface and finished the piece with highlights of gold foil.
The page was then cut to size to fit on an A5 book and glued into place with double sided tape.



The above photo shows the final art piece. Noela's workshop was delightful and enthuses me to try more of this type of techique and to see what else I can discover while playing with textures and paint.