Thirty Days hath September - Day Eight - Kenilworth Castle

Today's project has a long story attached so please make yourself a cup of something and sit down with me while I tell the tale of today's project. I'll get to the art, I promise.

As a well prepared artist, I pride myself on always being prepped for a project, this was primarily the reason that Thirty Days was always going to challenge me, I don't exactly do 'go with the flow'. However, a tiny part of me was looking forward to being given permission to change my plans and see what happened, and this is the story of today's project.

While staying at my parent's house, my Dad had left me a small selection of objects to experiment with and this was one of them:

A postcard and envelope from 1890 that celebrated the jubilee of the penny postage - yep I don't know what that is, I forgot to ask my Dad but some of you out there may know.
As an aesthetic object, it is simply beautiful and felt a bit sacrilege to cut up to use as collage so what could I use it for? Continuing to peruse the family letters in Mum and Dad's archive, I unearthed this little gem:

I knew from speaking to Mum that this had been written by one of my ancestors while they lived in the gatehouse to Kenilworth Castle and I had no idea what this building actually was so took to Google to see where they had lived. Er, hang on a minute, was this true? The house built by the Earl of Leicester to woo Queen Elizabeth I? Looking at this building and it's history made me feel a bit humble and where on earth was I going with this? As you can see from the letter it had been written in 1895, five years after the date of the postcard that Dad had left for me, this seemed too good an opportunity not to marry the two things together so I wondered about challenging myself to paint directly on to the postcard (gulp). It is so beautiful and so SMALL, could I do this?

While pondering the enormity of the challenge, I found myself flicking through images of the gatehouse and realising that I didn't have access to anything that was copyright free so I was a bit stuck. In looking at the origin of the images, I came across the blog of authors RC Bridgestock (their website can be found here) where in 2012 they had written a post about travelling around the country as research for a novel and there was a beautiful photograph of the gatehouse.
Being my cheeky self, I resorted to Facebook to get in touch with them and ask if they would let me have permission to use it and they came back to me almost immediately to say yes! Which just goes to prove that if you ask for permission to use an image, you usually get a very positive response and to date, I have a 100% record in asking and being given permission every time.

So, here is the photo that they kindly allowed me to use:

and here is the painting that I ultimately produced combining all of these elements together:

Apologies for the quality of the image, I was so eager to share this with you and write about it that I just rushed outside to photograph it. I will get a better image later on in the event, I may even turn this one in to a greetings card if I still like it in a few days time.

It is small though! I nearly sent myself doolally drawing it...but that's kind of the point of the challenge isn't it?

Thirty Days hath September - Day Seven - Susannah Middleton

I'm up bright and early this morning - okay, less of the bright, more of the early - due to three Golden Retrievers sitting around the bed willing me to get up.

As dozy as I was, I was eager to see how yesterday's experiments had fared and I was surprised to see that one of the old letters I had used had been rendered completely transparent by the resin.

So my first job today was to add some more collage back on the top of the first coat of resin and then apply another to finish it off. You will be able to see the finished pieces in the auction...if they have worked!

Staying in my family home has brought back a project I worked on while I was studying for my Fine Art degree, all based around the life of one of my ancestors - Susannah Middleton. You can read more about this amazing lady here on the National Maritime Museum's website:

Susannah Middleton

Susannah's words have inspired me for years now and a piece that I created after my degree with the silk weaver Debby Kirby is hanging in the hall of my parent's house.

With the autograph book, philately and now Susannah coming back in to my path, perhaps this was going to be a time to look again at this inspiration and re-ignite new works of art? After all, that is what Thirty Days is all about and I know that several of you have been in touch to say that you are discovering new things about your work during this challenge.

In my box of collage was a piece I put together for an exhibition years ago, using Susannah as a starting point but the glass had broken and it was sitting there waiting for me to intervene.

So this morning I have dismantled it!

I will now be spending the day using the skills I learnt yesterday and making a few more jewellery pieces from it and hopefully they will be able to be seen on social media and my website later today when they have dried. Putting them in the auction will be an interesting exercise as they will very much be a piece of me - will people be interested in bidding? Will I be able to let them go?

Thirty Days hath September - Day Six - A special birthday

A different location for me today, I'm house sitting for my parents while my Dad whisks my Mum off for a surprise trip for her 'special' birthday. We don't talk about the number....it's just 'special'.

Being back in the house I grew up in is lovely, lots of memories and surrounded by all the things that make me feel at home - photographs, furniture and a few four legged creatures to care for. One of the things that will always remind me of home is Dad's stamp collection, it's more than a hobby to him and has been a source of fascination to me for all my life as each stamp is a miniature work of art.

This was going to be my staring point for a project today but I hadn't accounted for what Dad was going to present me with. I'd asked him for some old stamps, thinking that I would use them for collage but he also presented me with a few old envelopes, beautifully hand written and aesthetically very pleasing indeed.

I had brought a travelling kit with me, just to see what materialised today but I had also brought a few jewellery making things as jewellery has been my hobby for years, making up bits and pieces for friends and messing about with beads. Recently I had become interested in resin casting and treated myself to some bezels and decent resin so this seemed a great opportunity to put it all together.
Using my collage techniques I began to assemble layers of paper to see what I could put together:

Then after a bit of time spent on Pinterest and reading up on the Pebeo website how to use their products I began to put together a few things to see what happened.

I'm writing this blog having half filled them with resin as I'm reliably informed that it needs to be done in two layers and I'll get back to you tomorrow with how it turns out. Could this be the start of a whole new product line for me?