Paving

More progress on my degree show house.

The back of the house now has paving!

I scored individual paving slabs into a piece of thick grey card and roughly painted them.

Then I smudged charcoal over the paving so it would go into the cracks to look like dirt.

I also added grass scatter, the kind used on model railways, along with dried tea and mixed herbs.

I'm really pleased with the way this turned out as it looks pretty realistic. It was also nice to get some instant results as it seems most of the parts I'm working on for this building are taking a long time, but it doesn't look like I'm getting anyway.

Geometric Art

 I'm currently drowning in 1x1cm roof tiles so instead of sharing that dull progress I'll show you an artist that came to speak at uni today.

Yes, it's not all studio time at NUCA. Sometimes artists come and talk to us. Quite often they're kinda boring or I don't like the work. 

But the work of Mark Harris caught my eye.

Continuous Offense - Blade
Acrylic on Lambda Print
48 x 30cm. 2007

His slightly earlier work involved painting over photographic prints with really detailed, colourful threads covering the objects.

Continuous Defense - Northern Gate
Acrylic on Reproduction
26 x 19cm. 2008

Another series of work came about after rescuing a bunch of old photographs that his father-in-law was throwing out. He painted futuristic looking 'defences' onto them and I love the mix of styles.

Western District Archway
Collage and Acrylic on Paper
47 x 30cm. 2009

He received the photographs in brown folders which he made collages on using images of buildings and geometric drawings.

Check out the rest of his work here.

The triangular, geometric imagery that features heavily in Harris' work reminds me of Yes and Yes's blog header...

...Elsie's geometric photo art...

...and the Gotye video. Which I'm sure you've all seen by now.

The most magical place on earth

Hey everyone. How was your weekend? Get up to much?

What did I do?

I went to Disneyland!!!

Sneaky little 4 day trip with my best friends in France when I should have been working on my degree show piece.

Shhh, don't tell my tutors.

For me, Disneyland is mostly about trying on all the hats...

Doing a lot of posing...

And tracking down the characters.

(Baloo pretty much attacked us with a group bear hug right after this photo. Scary stuff)

My friend Lizzi high-fiving Minnie Mouse.

A great moment.

Have any of you been to Disneyland/Disneyworld?

Whats your favourite thing?

Does anyone else spend their first hour in the park just running around pointing at things? Just me?

Camera case

I finally got myself a new camera and thought I should probably keep it in a case as I'd been carrying around my previous camera in a sock.

So I quickly whipped up this simple case this morning.

It's made from the same material I used for this bow which is quick thick and plastic-y. I just folded a strip over and sewed down the sides.

I also lined the case with felt for extra protection.

For the closure I just tied a hair elastic to the case which fits nicely around the camera.

I needed to make this case pretty quickly as I'll be needing it tomorrow when I take a trip to the most magical place in the world (well, in Europe)

Exciting!!!

Inside the house

 Initially I wasn't going to bother too much with the inside of the house I'm making, but after being encouraged by my tutor and my family, and then getting a bit carried away, the inside it starting to take shape.

This is the ground floor with the hall, kitchen and living room.

View through the porch window of the stairs.

The front door.

Uh-oh, the glass has been smashed!

The view into the living room.

I still need to add furniture.

The kitchen.
I thought it would be cool to print the wallpaper using another hand made rubber stamp.

Cos it's not like I have tonnes of other things on this house to work on...

A house doesn't need a roof if it has hand-printed wallpaper, right?

Todays progress, and a sneaky noment

Sorry for being a bad blogger, friends. I feel bad just showing you progress on my degree show piece.

But that will change soon as I have a fun break coming up!

Today I finished making these beasts.

The plinths on which my degree show pieces will sit!

Me and power tools will never be bffs, but I started to get the hang of the nail gun and sander by the end of it.

Now I just need to paint them. Anyone offering?

(I am 5'2", these plinths are 110cm tall. I felt I needed to tell you that as they make me look insanely tiny.)

After all that hard work I refuelled with this cake that my friend Natalie made.

Regular cupcake right?

Wrong!

Oreo, peanut butter, another Oreo, covered in chocolate brownie.

Holy yum!

I'd seen the recipe on Instructables and facebooked it straight to Natalie knowing her love for both Oreos and peanut butter.

She loves peanut butter so much she paid out £7.99 for a box of Reece's Puffs cereal.

The cakes were delicious and we've started thinking of other cookie/spread/cake combinations.

Bourbon biscuit, Nutella, chocolate cupcake?

House progress

My house is taking shape.

Windows and doors really do make all the difference.

All the brickwork took 3 days to complete!

I made a new brick stamp as my first one wasn't the right scale.
And this one has more individual bricks so it covers more ground. 

Here's the house at the moment.

It's my biggest miniature yet!