New paintings and regular art updates.
Traditional hot cross buns, soft sweet fruited buns marked with a cross. Eaten generally at Easter to commemorate Jesus dying on the cross. I like the normal ones but they have started coming up with chocolate ones, or even ones with a creme egg in the middle. I’ve also heard of ones with cheddar cheese! Might as well have a cheese scone.
Today is pancake day in the UK. The chance to eat something nice before Lent starts. Lent is a Christian tradition where people give up a favorite food until Easter. I guess in some ways it’s comparable with the tradition of Ramadan in Islamic culture, where people do not eat between sunrise and sunset until the end of the period of time when they celebrate the end fasting. I don’t know much about either religion, but it’s interesting that both are movable feasts (related to the phases of the moon).
Going back to pancakes. UK ones are bigger but thinner than the ones in America. The crepe suzzette in France is even thinner and served on a more regular basis. We tend to mainly eat them on Shrove Tuesday. Served with sugar or sweetener and lemon juice. Some people add blueberries or other fillings.
Today I went to a craft group.
It’s something I sometimes go to, it’s the chance to experiment without doing anything serious. The group has lots of different materials and today it was scraper board. It’s a black coloured layer over the top of holographic metallic board. You scratch through and add shapes or texture. I found a stencil with patterns punched into it. There were rabbits and daffodils, tulips and egg shapes. I drew an Easter egg and added the stencils inside it. Then added spirals and Happy Easter to it to finish it off.
Can’t stop playing with my phone apps. I don’t know where I get all my ideas from. I hope you enjoy them. I like using multiple apps to get different results. Then you can use various filters. I really like the freedom of finger or stylus painting. I have only ever “built” an image with CAD when I did a course in computer aided design several years ago. Yes I could build boxes into a house, or circles and elipses into a face, but it’s not the same as the freedom of drawing. Yes I’ve used flower templates here, but I had to change and add to it. I get bored otherwise!
An Easter symbol, digitally manipulated. Today is Christian Good Friday when Jesus was crucified. I thought I would try creating something that looked slightly baroque but combined with a simple brown cross shape. I added light on the final panel. I’m not religious, but at this time of year the symbology and ideas of peace and love stick with me. I hope this is OK and does not cause offence.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was Easter. Instead of using felt pens, I give you the Artrage app. A mixture of metallic and non metallic textures and several different pen types including a digital ink roller, a brush, and other pens. Happy Easter!
Never seen a tree trunk like this before. It’s like a hand reaching down grasping something protruding from the earth. The limbs explode above waiting to burst into leaf. I could see catkins but could not identify this gnarly tree. Bishton Hall near Rugeley, Staffordshire was holding a craft fair. Very interesting and enjoyable.
Tried to do a celtic cross (wonky). Sponged black paint. Black ink, then watercolour and finally a bit more black ink on top…
#bandofsketchers prompt today is Easter. I did try and copy this from a photo, but my left hand and arm wobble and shake so much its affecting my right arm. Very fed up. Would love to do something more accurate. I think I’d better try and get in the doctors.
When I was a child I looked forward to Easter, not for religion, although I did understand about Christianity, but because of the Easter eggs we used to get (I was a child, forgive me).
As I got older I realised that Easter wasn’t on a set day, like the 25 December for Christmas. But it seems to be that it has to run Friday Saturday and Sunday and is linked somehow to the Jewish Calendar? But also to the phases of the moon, so Easter drifts a slowly, then jumps around. Any time between late March and April if I remember. It used to make the Easter break at school a bit odd too. If anyone knows the correct reasons let me know?
My friend made a beautiful picture of some tree branches, she mirrored them (flipped one side to mirror the other) then somehow surrounded the image with a black egg shape which was fuzzy at the edges. It’s beautiful and complicated.
I asked if I could use the idea. But didn’t want to copy. She said yes. So I put two photos of helibores through layout, an app where you can add different pictures together. I had to crop the image in my editing app, I then opened it in another sketching one. I drew an elipse round one side of the image, and freehand filled the background in with black. I used a spray tool so the edges were softened. I made sure to narrow the top half to give it more of an egg shape. Finally I cropped the image so that only half an egg shape was in the image. I went back to layout and duplicated the image. Then I flipped one side over so that there was finally an Easter egg shape on a black background. I don’t know how my friend did hers, but I respect the effort she must have put into it, and I thought I would describe what I had done in case anyone else wants to have a go.
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Mallaband-Brown