I Used to Draw Like This

I posted this on Facebook last week. My friend and framer Ljubica came over to deliver a picture and while chatting about art, this and that, I pulled out an old watercolour from high school.



It was good for a laugh! You can see that I liked Breyers as well as horses a lot back then! It made me a little sad too - even back then art programs were pretty underfunded. We did most of our projects on manila paper and it was almost always watercolour. Manila paper is a poor quality choice - it doesn't hold water very well - and, well, it's off white! Occasionally we did get real watercolour paper or a Fredrix canvas, but I was kind of disappointed by how little I learned about drawing, technique or materials. I sense this is why a lot of people never practice art - they figure that just because they were not good at it then, they never will be. Chances are they just didn't have good instruction or materials :)

3 Easy Ways to Cut Tissue Paper for Crafts

Every now and then I enjoy making a craft video. I am by no means a pro at it, but each one gets a little better every time. There are so many factors such as audio, lighting, camera positioning and complaining cockatiels :-D

I finally made a title card after noticing that some craft videos have some pretty snazzy introductions. I made a black & white drawing, cleaned it up in Corel Photo Paint and then converted it to a vector image in CorelDraw so the colours could be changed easily.

Inspiration came from a video that suggested putting the camera tripod on top of the desk. It's hard to craft with a tripod between you and your hands, so this worked well, except the video is upside down and rotating it can look funny. Time to do things the left handed way until I get a fancier set up :-D

I'm pleased to show off this technique for cutting tissue paper. I figured it out back in spring when making a card for my friend Always Artistic and taking photos just didn't seem to do. Take a look and let me know if this is a technique that you would like to try as well!

Oh Canada!

I hope everyone had a lovely Canada Day yesterday. Our weather was up and down with being brilliantly sunny in the morning to humid and overcast by the afternoon. My husband and our friends covered 5 km from downtown to Prince's Island Park and back. I finally got to see the iconic Peace Bridge, built in 2012!

Being an earlybird, I started on this papercut, or scherenschnitte, yesterday morning, drawing all the letters by hand. Once we were worn out and overfed, it was relaxing to come home and finish it off. If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you know that I am often late for holidays, so finally I was just in time :-)