Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope or Mandala using a sketch app on my phone, I think as I draw I try and create an interesting and satisfying pattern. You don’t know what you will end up with when you start, but I think it does help relax you. The app allows you to draw symmetrical patterns by repeating one line over and over again round a circle. I love playing with apps.

Hubby drawing

We went out last weekend and I suggested that my hubby did a drawing while we were out. This was me looking back at him as he sat and drew. I think drawing helps calm you down. Takes your mind off things, helps you concentrate. I think people should take a pen or pencil and some paper out with them. Just look at something to draw, it could be a tree, a statue, a building, a flower. Look at what you are drawing and try and understand it. Try not to make it up but really look. I think everyone should learn art. The world needs Art and artists. Sculptors, photographers, printers. Those skills help coordination. That’s what I feel…..

Lost lens and Masking tape….

Screaming for help from hubby this morning. I was just cleaning my glasses but with my shaking arm I wobbled and dropped them onto the kitchen floor. I picked them up, but a lens had come out. I tried to find it but having one focused and one unfocused eye didn’t help. Started shouting, but hubby was upstairs and is deaf. I looked all around, the eye with the missing lens closed so I was just looking out of the lens still in my glasses. I moved the fridge back a couple of inches very gingerly and moved the bin, no sign. I shouted some more and went upstairs and woke my hubby. Help! Please help! He came down and straight away found it! Half way down the kitchen under the overhanging base of the sink (how did it get there? Must have skittered across the floor). The lens wouldn’t fit in very well. So.. Tape? I found masking tape, and parcel tape, then a very broad roll of sellotape. I managed to cut a thin strip. The lens is just about in place. I’m going to get the opticians to fix it later…. So of course I decided to illustrate the glasses!

Sister Dora

Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was history. I drew Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison, better known as Sister Dora (16 January 1832 – 24 December 1878), she was a 19th-century Anglican nun and a nurse who worked in Walsall, Staffordshire. She nursed miners after mine disasters. She is known as Walsall’s Florence Nightingale. I remember this statue in the town centre in the 1970’s. One of a very few statues of women in the UK. She died of breast cancer aged 46.

Bluebell walk

We visited Betley Court and walked around the bluebell woods. It’s a private property so it only opens twelve times a year so we were really lucky to get in today. We will go back! It’s on the road from Keele in Newcastle under Lyme towards Nantwich I think. Its in Staffordshire I think (but its really near Cheshire). Its a lovely place. I really love this Spring abundance.

Process

Series of digital finger paintings and photo edit to show how I created the eye drawing in my last post. I used artrage oils to start, then a flood fill in rainbow colours and a black pen and black flood fill in my sketch app. Finally added the texture with a style then grime option in Photodirector.