Waking up early

On Easter Sunday I woke before 5am and readied myself for an outing with my friend Donna.  You see for my birthday, Donna had gifted me, quite generously,  a hot air balloon ride over the mountains. Here you see Pumicestone Passage, Bribie Island and then the Pacific Ocean in the golden light of dawn.

The trip remained overcast but dry as we headed north towards the mountains. For my overseas readers, our mountains in this neck of the woods are actually volcanic plugs, remains of a super volcano from back in the Dreaming. 

 

I just love the sight of them.  

We took a direct course here, straight over the first hill and then in between the other mountains - which are much taller than the hill. Distance distorts their size here.  Our path was quite convenient too as my sister and her family were chasing us in the car for photos and for the little ones to wave and watch.  Very exciting!  If you click this link you can pop over to Susan's blog and see my trip from her perspective.

Looking straight up into the balloon was just so cool. Not literally. For those of you who have never done a balloon flight - it's as hot as blazes up there. The circle right at the centre is an little adjustable piece that helps the balloonist to release the air from the balloon upon landing. Getting closer to home now we go by Beerwah Mountain..........

and land in farmland very close to home.  In fact, if they were not whisking us away for breakfast, I'd have been able to enjoy a jaunty little walk home.

Thank you so much Donna!  It was a lovely way to celebrate a belated birthday. :)

Kingfisher

 

This sweet kingfisher has been lurking around in my photos for some time waiting to be included in my blog.  He's smacked himself into one of our windows and rather dazed himself so we gathered him up and kept an eye on him. He was quite dazed and very placidly sat in Jeff's hands and even sat near us in some old rags and made no attempt to fly away as we went on with business.  After quite some time with no apparent improvement Jeff took him off to Australia Zoo's animal hospital where he spent the night getting some professional TLC.  We were thrilled when the zoo called us to say that we could pick him up and release him back into our yard.  It took him awhile to fly off and for a few days he stayed near to the house but I've not seen him now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully he's out there well and happy somewhere.  I so love living where we do.

Finished

I spent some time putting the final touches on my graphite drawing of a kettle.  Each time I look at it I feel like doing a bit here and there but I need to STOP.  There is always the temptation to keep going and often it ends in tears.  I'm pretty happy with it and am about to start on a shading exercise with a lamp as the subject.

Here we have the reference photo with my graphite version above.  Really loving working with graphite. Hope you are enjoying looking at my work.

This weeks art

In art we've moved on from construction and grid drawing to shading. I really enjoying it and find the shading to be quite relaxing.  This week's project is to use our shading skills to produce a copy of a kettle image we've been given (below).
 

 

 You begin by lightly shading all of the areas that will eventually be built up to have darker tones on them than the paper.

Once you've done this you gradually build up layers of graphite to create the tones needed to represent the image that you are representing.  Here is my almost finished piece below.  As you can probably see it requires a few little tweeks before being declared 'fin'.  

Next week we move onto folds - the kind you find in clothing, fabrics, skin and probably how you depict that wonderfully rippled sand you can find at the beach on occassion.  

Best fun EVER

I have had so much fun this morning.  My Mum came over with my niece and nephew so that we could try our hand at pasta making. It's something we've talked about doing for such a long time and finally decided that it would make a great holiday activity this week.  After a very small amount of getting started chaos everything went extremely well and it was SO EASY.  It is so EASY to make your own pasta people - give it a go!

For each 100grams of plain flour add one egg to make the pasta mix. We did about 400grams plus 4 eggs. Throw it all in the food processor, give it a whirl until the pasta comes together in little lumps, then turn out onto the bench and give it a knead.  Remind niece - again - to take fingers out of flour/dough/mouth and divide into small portions to go through the pasta machine.  Keep running the dough through the pasta machine, adjusting the rollers each time to make thinner and thinner pasta. This will give you a big thin sheet - which we made into ravioli.  Once we'd made ravioli we used more dough and once thin ran it through the spaghetti attachment - which was a blast.  I was so excited I was much noisier than the kids I'm sure.  Some of the hand cut pasta was hung around the kitchen to dry as you'll see in the photos below. We cooked some up to try - about 2 mins in the pot for the fresh spaghetti and about 4 for the ravioli.  I couldn't believe it - it tasted just like real pasta (HELLO! That's what we made - don't know why I was surpised). It was springy and sticky and soft and just so delicious.  I'll definitely be making it again.

J starting out some dough to make into his long, thin pasta sheet.

Miss R took to it like a pro (when we could get her to stop eating the dough).

Miss R had a brilliant time making and remaking pasta of various shapes.  We left her to it and she had a blast.

We ran out of hanging space so ended up utilizing the bottom oven. I get so giddily excited when I see this. Fun, fun, fun.

Handcut spaghetti everywhere on makeshift hangers.  Beware husband dear I have a plan for a much better setup!

Ready to go into the pot.

Bubble, bubble. 

Little man scoffed himself. No other way to describe it!

The ravioli looks a bit dodgy but look at the spaghetti!!! We made that! Squeeeeaaaal!

Art

A couple of months ago I started an art course. I wanted a reason to get out of the house, to interract with other people and I thought that 3 hours a week plus a drive would be a good test of where my stamina levels were at.  I also wanted to improve my skills.  I've always been able to look at most things and simply draw or paint them with quite a good degree of accuracy and have many people in my life who are rather in awe of this ability.  I found this 'awe' a bit frustrating and uncomfortable as I knew quite clearly where my limitations lay, and knew that I had to learn new skills in order to create artwork at a level that I aspired to and that would give me a sense of personal satisfaction and achievement. 

In the first 7 weeks we learned about the drawing techniques of grid drawing and of construction drawing.  The above image shows my assessment piece as a work in progress. We had to grid a very detailed image of frangipanis.  A very high level of accuracy is expected of us and this took many, many hours a day.  It was an interesting experience emotionally as initially I felt quite overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and resistant to it.  As I progressed through the exercise I quickly became more comfortable and at ease with the task and relaxed into it. By the time I was just over half way through I began to really rather enjoy it and found it to be relaxing - which came as quite a surprise. Why grid? Well it helps to train your eye to a really fine degree of accuracy and also provides you with a strategy to develop art works with great accuracy when needed. Portraiture would be an example of a place where gridding could be used, and is used by many professionals.  I have been really surprised to discover that it is a strategy used by professional artists. I think I was under the impression (as are many) that all artists are abe to draw quickly, with amazing accuracy and with little thought.  That's all changing now....

Another surprise for me with regards to the course, is the focus on turning us into professional artists.  After enrolling for something to do and to learn some new skills, this possibility is something I am yet to get my head around completely.  Being a professional artist is something that could quite possibly work well for me as it is a type of career that I can work around my needs, my energy levels and my wellbeing.  I can draw and paint when I'm well and my energy is good and rest when I need to. I had thought about developing my skills so that I could teach art to kids - a vague, distant, pipedreamy type of thought.  Perhaps that will be something that becomes a greater possibility too.  Our tutor seems extremely confident that we will have the skills and ability to go on and become professional artists if that's what we desire.  Lots to think about.

Blue Dog

Some time ago the little people had a glorious time doing chalk drawings on the back verandah. With absolutely no respect for the masterpieces beneath her, Jessica proceeded to have a lovely roll. What can I say, pictures were destroyed, hearts were broken and a blue dog resulted (which soon diverted the attention of those traumatised by smudged pictures).  This was crayola pavement chalk and let me tell you it took weeks to fade.

I love Jess' face here. It's her "I think I've done something wrong but I'm not sure what" face.

Lots of rain forecast over the weekend so I'll take time to do another post or two. Have heaps of photos uploaded to share.  Lots of crafting and indoor activities planned.  See you then.

Back again

I've been away from blogging for so long that I thought the easiest way to catch up was to do some little photo collages. Very clever of me if it indeed works! Those of you who know of my technological capacities may clap and cheer....now! The above montage gives a snapshot of what has been going on in my neck of the woods over these past rainy months. You'll see some crafty things on the go, some crochet - 2 almost completed blankets; and some embroidery, crochet pretties that are completed! These are in the picture at bottom right. I've had inches and inches snipped off my hair as the central image shows. Much easier to look after although still has a mind of it's own.

A quilt show was attended at Maleny with my Mum which was a lovely day out full of oohs and aahs and 'I could never be that patient!'. The annual Orchid Show hit town and gave me a thumping big case of orchid envy. I do have a number of orchids which I must admit thrive on my neglect. Seeing the orchid show however made me want MORE in every conceivable spot around the home. I kept my head however and left with only photographs. The dull, dark photograph scrunched at the bottom of the montage depicts the dull, dark, rainy days of which we've had plenty. If it continues I fear we'll have an outbreak of vampires. Finally a snapshot of Wonderful Man and myself on a rare day out together. We headed up to Noosa to a gallery for a squiz.....more about that in a later post. 

Here we have some of the fabulous art that the little ones churn out when they are here in my 'art studio'.  Children's artwork is one of my very favourite things - so bright and happy and naturally expressive.

I have some exciting news that I will share in a later post but for now, here's a visual hint.....

If you'd like a closer look at the pictures simply click on them and they'll pop up lovely and big for you to see.