Exploring: Oil Pastels
There’s nothing quite like opening a new set of crayons and seeing them laid out all beautiful and pristine ready to use for the first time. I was offered some art materials to test out for Caran d’Ache, and was happy to do so, because although I don’t do a great number of reviews on [...]
Pin ItChoosing a Sketch Book
Sketch books come in many sizes and shapes – the sheer choice out there can sometimes be bewildering, but at the end of the day, what is a sketchbook? At its simplest level, it’s just a plain paper book – so what’s all the fuss about, surely one sketch book is as good as the [...]
Pin ItExploring and using Found Textures
I’ve recently started collecting my own photographic texture images. For no particular reason, since I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with these, but I find so many of them beautiful for their own sake. Once you start looking, beautiful textures can be found everywhere in the environment. Most people are familiar with [...]
Pin ItFun with Frottage
One of the things I most love about art is its sensual qualities. Art can be many things, but for me it’s the visual and tactile elements of art that I especially enjoy, and which I think are also particularly fun for children to explore. I’ve always had a particular attraction to texture especially – [...]
Pin It3 Ways to paint with Bubbles
Bubble painting is a classic children’s art activity, and it’s easy to see why – it’s easy, cheap, kids love it, and the results are pretty good too, but bubbles are also amazingly versatile, we’ve tried 3 different techniques now, and each one has distinctively different results. Bubble Painting #1 The first [...]
Pin ItValentine Heart Canvas
This canvas was created mainly as an excuse to experiment with acrylic string gel medium. I saw the following video on YouTube, and was inspired to try it out for myself. String gel is basically an acrylic painting medium that makes your paint more ‘stringy’ or stretchy, allowing you effectively to ‘draw’ directly with the [...]
Pin ItWatercolour Spray Inks
Ever since I first heard about watercolour sprays, I’ve been wanting to try them out. The ones you can buy ready-made are I discovered quite expensive, so I decided to create my own using the new powdered water-colour inks I’ve recently treated myself to. That way I can control the dilution I want, mix the [...]
Pin ItDip-dyed Landscapes
I love water-colour, I love landscape art, and I also love the dip-dyed effect. However in spite of my love of watercolour, I’ve never really mastered it as a technique – as a medium it can be difficult to control – and perhaps that’s where my problem has always been, I was trying to control [...]
Pin ItThe Art of Mud
Mud is a versatile and under-rated material, and lets face it there’s a lot of it about. It has (and still is in some parts of the world) been used for a huge variety of purposes by mankind for millennia, for building, medicinal and beauty purposes, and making pots to name just a few, and [...]
Pin ItHome-made Bath Crayons
I came across this post for making home-made bath crayons the other day, and was inspired by the photograph accompanying it to try my own. In the end I used the post more for inspiration rather than anything else, because my bath crayons looked absolutely nothing like the beautiful translucent ones shown in the photograph [...]
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