35. Get an IQ2

Those that know me know that I love a gadget. I have wanted an IQ2 (IQHD) ever since I got cable tv. After getting ticked off one to many times that I couldn't record two things at once and watch another thing I bit the bullet. And now woo hoo we have IQ2.  

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So happy with it. It wasn't till the other night when I didn't like the look of anything that was on so I had a look at the movie catalogue and picked something out that I realized how good it really is.

Visual Arts - Blind Contour Drawing

Last week I had my first day on my new course. This year I'm studying Cert 3 in Visual Arts and Contemporary Craft. But it's hard to call it studying, today I did nothing but paint from the moment I walked into class till the very end of the day.

I thought that I would share with you all one of the very first things that we learnt in class and something we start with any day that we are drawing.

Blind Contour Drawing 

Blind contour drawing is drawing the outlines of an object without looking at the page and without taking your pencil off the page. It really helps to train your hand/eye coordination, by doing this you can train you eye so you can draw what's in front of you.

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It really doesn't matter what you are drawing or that what it ends up looking like what you have been drawing. My teacher gets us to draw the same thing over and over again on the same piece of paper. These drawings can then be used to create other pieces of artwork.

Next week I can hopefully remember to take some pics of the artwork that I have been working on from my blind contour drawings.

23. Buy a Great Camera

Not long before Christmas my camera was starting to get worse (draining batteries really fast) so after doing my research I finally decided on the Pentax RZ10. So off to the city we traveled to pick it up, by shear luck I stopping off at another camera shop before going to the one I had planned and they had it for $50 less. Woo hoo score.

So here is my new baby!!

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My last camera was a Pentax, I just loved the way that it worked so I knew that this one was going to be good but it has exceeded my expectations.

Now its not the camera, I will have to take some photography lessons to get my pics better.

Tutorial Time........

The other night I was check out a bunch of blogs when I came across Dude Craft and Paul's amazing Papercut Portrait tutorial. OMG what an amazing idea. There are times when you see something and you just have to try it.

So two days later I finally tracked down card that I was happy with and I turned this favourite pic of my son and I,

Into this..... 

I cant believe how well it turned out. 

Check out the tutorial here to make your own. 

DudeCraft - Paper Cut Portrait Tutorial from Paul Overton on Vimeo.

I did a couple of things different from the tutorial. I used picnik to change my pic to posterize. I wanted my finished artwork to big really big, so I printed my pic over 9pages (3wide by 3 high, on landscape but it might be different depending on the pic as I had already cropped the pic) and taped the pages together. When I posterized my pic on picnik I chose to used 4 colours/shades. 

I really thought that this was going to be really hard but it was much easier than I thought. I cant wait to have it framed and on my wall. 

I'm Back - What I'm up to

I know it's been a while and there has been so much that has happened since I last blogged. Christmas, Brisbane flooded, my son started high school, there was a death in the family, I returned to TAFE, ticked of  couple of my day zero goals and we also have some very exciting news that I'm going to share with you all very soon.

So today I'm going to share with you all what I have been working on 

As some of you might remember we are currently making over my sons bedroom, if you didn't catch that post you can read about it here. Over the holidays I spotted a crochet rug on a website (I cant remember where, oops) my son loved it and wanted one like it for his new room. So here is my work in progress.  

It was only about 50cm across here and has grown since I took this pic. I'm making it using 180cm wide stretch jersey knit that I got from J.J's at Redcliffe for only $4 a mitre cut into strips and sewn together to make a very long cord. I don't have a pattern so I'm just winging it, I have had to undo a couple of rows a couple of times but I think I'm onto a formula now that is working.

Stay tuned for follow up pics, I will also be blogging some of the things that have happened since I last blogged.