Author: Alison M Williams

Well I still haven’t had any divine inspiration for my colleague’s piece and have been periodically looking at it in puzzlement all week 🙃 I’m beginning to wonder if a complete paint over is in order 🥴

Fortunately, it hasn’t stopped me creating altogether as I thought I ought to make a start on another painting a friend has asked me to do. I thought this one might be easier as she didn’t really give me any criteria for what she wanted. I knew she liked another piece that a mutual friend of ours has and that her living room has lots of red decor, so I came up with a spiral heart design that uses similar techniques to those I used for our friend’s piece. I have always loved the colour red but for some reason am not often moved to use it in my paintings so I have been tinkering around with ways of using different shades and doing some red doodles.

Anyway here is the painting so far. It still has a long way to go and I’m really not sure whether I like the spiral or not!

I’ve actually worked on quite a few different bits and bobs this week. My arty neighbour and friend Jan and I have begun travelling altered books, so I did the first page of that and we swapped them over yesterday. The idea is that we have an old book each and we choose a word from the page we intend to work on and create something based on that word, then we swap them over and respond to what the other has done. I can’t wait to get going with mine now as Jan had done a beautiful page based on the word ‘agate’. So lots of possibilities with inspiration from rocks and crystals there, right up my street!

I also had another go at a piece which has had a few incarnations already. I’m not sure why but it’s one of those that is proving to be hard work!

I’ve decided it’s going to be a case of layers upon layers until it feels done with this one!

I’m not sure if I mentioned before but my Mum gave me an awesome Christmas present- a ‘one sketch a day’ journal. I am usually dreadful at making myself draw even though I know how important it is to draw regularly as an artist and I was a teeny bit daunted by the idea of having to do it every single day as I’m also usually dreadful at sticking to things like that! I decided to take it as something fun, that I wouldn’t put any pressure on myself with and that I would just see what comes out each day and so far, I’ve absolutely loved doing it! I think it’s really helping to keep me in a creative mindset so I intend to continue. I think it’ll be great to look back on a year’s worth of drawings and see what happened from one day to the next 😊 Maybe I’ll do a post at the end of the year showing my favourites.

I have a couple of finished pieces to show this week, I got all excited about trying to make things look rusty, so these happened…

I might change the frame as it’s a little too deep really and takes away from being able to see how vibrant the colours are.

Here was some of the process…

I was so engrossed I forgot to take many pictures! I didn’t use many materials, just a baby wipe that had been used to wipe up some spilt hair dye, some old cement sand mixed with paint, some old tissue paper and a variety club charity heart badge which I removed the pin from. I quite like how it turned out but felt it could have looked more authentically rusty, so I then continued working on my old cake board…

It turns out old cake boards make great canvases! I just need to find something to put on the back so it can hang.

I definitely want to work on the rustiness technique more, I was looking at lots of rusty paint pictures on Pinterest and there’s so much more I can explore with this.

Some pics of how this evolved:

My mission for the coming week will be to continue with the two commision paintings I have on the go and to see if I can get at least one of my other unfinished paintings done and dusted. My studio space looks like a frame and canvas graveyard! I have a bit of a problem! 🫣

Hello again, well, this week has been a very busy week full of creativity and I’m pleased to say I finally finished the pyrographed box I’d been working on for my best friend Liz. It took a very long time but that might have been because of the cheap tool I was using, may have to invest in a proper pyrography kit! Anyway, here it is, along with the original drawing which I coloured for her as well:

As I said before, I was aiming to finish a painting I have been working on for one of my colleagues this week, unfortunately it still isn’t done but I have added a fair amount to it this weekend, I’ll have to give you a work in progress picture instead:

For some reason my camera doesn’t seem to pick up the green shades in this that well, it looks a lot bluer here than it does in person.

It needs an enormous amount more work and it’s really puzzling me, I can’t seem to get ideas very quickly with it. It’s probably because it’s something I’ve been asked to do, I seem to go to pieces with the pressure of a commission! I worry so much that the recipient won’t like it that I can’t seem to make decisions!

So instead of focusing on that all weekend as I intended to, I upcycled a hair clip, re-made a brooch from ages ago that I wasn’t happy with and painted another small painting, just so I wouldn’t fail my goal of one painting per week! Oh, and I started working on a new painting which I’m doing on an old cake board.

I may redo some of the hearts on the hair clip, it was my first time using Lisa Pavelka’s Magic Gloss and I think I could improve upon them. This hairclip’s been hanging around for years waiting for me to fix it, it originally had pink heart gems but one had fallen out, so I made a mould of one of the remaining ones and had a play with the resin stuff and adding some other bits. The green and blue ones are a bit iffy!

The brooch turned out okay though, I used the magic gloss on that too as a varnish and it gives a much nicer effect. It’s made of cut out pizza box hearts, paper mâché, old beads, paint and glitter with a brooch back I got in a pack from a charity shop. I made a whole load of them a few years ago to go on valentines cards but I never really felt they looked professional enough, so I’ll have to go back and redo the others now!

So here’s my painting for the week, which I have called, ‘Procrastinocean’!

Maybe I’ll have the courage to finish my colleague’s piece before I see him at work on Friday!

See you next week 😊

Hello again 😊

So with my new year’s challenge in mind, I have been frantically trying to finish a painting each week and have produced 2 odd looking things…

I had had both of them on the go for a very long time but somehow had gotten either stuck or bored, I’m not sure which but both had ended up in the growing doom pile of unfinished work. I don’t know whether I really feel like either of them are finished enough, but I usually feel that way about my work, whatever it is, so, I’m calling them done anyway.

The first image in the heart frame was just made to fit the frame, which I found at a car boot sale and thought was cute as I’ve always loved anything heart shaped. It’s composed of a plastic sweet packet which I covered with tissue paper then burnt holes in, a twisty tie thing that might have been holding cables together at some point, some old beads, a washer with a pretty patina that I’ve just stuck on as it was rather than painting over it as I like it so much, some old cement and tile grout, and acrylic paint.

The second image seemed to take a ridiculous amount of time… lots of layers of paint on this, the colours were inspired by this bracelet that I found, also at a car boot sale:

There’s plenty of junk in this piece including a weird circular plastic thing I found on the pavement, (not a clue what it was for) a large stick-on rhinestone, a strange circular bead, some little balls from one of those silica gel packets (I often use these) some old cement and a baby wipe (which hadn’t been used for anything disgusting!)

I usually start by layering up the texture and then painting over the whole thing, and this one I was really happy with until I started painting it, then I struggled to get it looking as nice as the unpainted version, so I think that put me off finishing it. It also outgrew the frame I had planned for it, well the mount anyway- I kept adding more to the edges to try and balance it out a bit and then it didn’t look right within the aperture! So I will have to make a new mount.

I think they both look better in person, it’s quite difficult to capture all the detail and texture.

The plan for this week is to try and finish a commission that one of my colleagues asked me to do many months ago as I’ve taken way too long over it. It’s very colourful so I’m actually really looking forward to working on it and seeing what it becomes. I have a lot of other things happening and I’m going to be very busy but hopefully I will be posting it here next Sunday!