Tale of a Tree

No classes for the next few weeks so I am going to publish a few of the pages from my first assessed book. I have decided to base it on the English oak tree looking at the tree itself..leaves, bark, branches etc.... at the life that lives on, in and around the tree...birds, plants, animals, lichens and so on.....and then look at the way the oak is, or has been used.....buildings, ships, furniture and as a symbol.... That's the plan at any rate. I have mapped out the pages and have gathered information and pictures...in fact, I am thinking of putting myself up for Mastermind with the oak tree as my special subject, I could become quite boring on the subject. Anyway, here are a couple of pages from the book...more to follow.
Have a good Christmas if you celebrate the festival...if not I hop your days as we approach the end of the year are peaceful.

End of term

Last class for this term. I was not sure whether I would be going to class as we had our christmas lunch with people from Penny's painting classes and, to put it plainly, I pigged out. I think three mince pies may have been a little greedy. But it was a lovely meal and nice to get together with other class mates. I was so pleased Mo could come. Her hat was a winner.
Anyway I managed to drag myself to class this evening...or rather, I managed to drag myself out to Penny's car. We were recycling today. We started by tearing pictures and text from magazines and sticking them into our work books. The pictures and text had to have a theme. Mine was travel. The photos are not wonderful but I think they are good enough to get a rough idea of what we were doing. The second thing was creating something from papier mache but I did not have time so I will do that during the Christmas break.

I can't resist it!

Sorry about the pun. This week's class was about using resist techniques such as wax, masking fluid, masking tape and frisket film. A certain person, namely Penny, also used sun block. That woman never ceases to amaze me with the ideas she comes up with....and they mostly seem to work. I wish I could post pictures of what she did rather than what I did! Betty had some lovely oil sticks which were lovely to use....in the photos it's the sample that looks like red and blue mountain ranges. The colour in the other samples is watercolour apart from the oval picture which I did using red and blue watered down acrylic ink which was applied to the page with a diffuser. I learnt this latter technique from a collage workshop which I attended a couple of weeks ago. I love the effect and am going to try it in more of my paintings.
On the cake front we had mince pie made with Betty's home-made mincemeat which was delicious. If I could only have one thing to eat at Christmas it would have to be a mince pie....I love 'em