BLUEBELLS FOR COLOUR INSPIRATION

I often find wonderful colour combinations in nature, and enjoy taking photographs which I can use for inspiration.  Yesterday, an early morning walk took me into a beautiful bluebell wood.  When these flowers are seen en masse, at a distance, there is a wonderful blue/purple haze, which makes a lovely contrast with the shades of green and brown of the woods. In particular, I love the purply blue and lime green combination...

SNOWDROPS AS INSPIRATION!

I have just seen some beautiful snowdrops on one of my early morning walks.  This is a subject that I have just used to decorate some gift bags for the gallery.

As I am decorating ready made bags, there is not a firm surface to do free painting.  To help get round this problem, I put in a foam block.  For the above bags, I drew the stems, leaves and outlines with felt tips onto white tissue and stuck them on with matt medium.  I then stamped white paint on with a small shaped piece of foam to form textured petals, and then finished off with some more outlines and extra leaves.  The luggage label gift tags were treated in exactly the same way to match.

AUTUMNAL WINDOW

Last year I made paper leaves to decorate the gallery window.  As these were successful I am using them again!  However, to add some hanging leaves to the window, I have laminated some real ones, collected on my early morning walks.  This was done not without mishap!  I learnt that you have to keep the leaves as flat as possible or the laminator  becomes jammed! Not sure how long they will last but as it is just for a few weeks it doesn't matter.  I saw some hanging in a local charity shop window, looking like wet leaves floating down, and the volunteer told me how they were done.

I have also decorated some gift bags using the Autumn theme.  This time for the gift tags I have used dark green mount card which is white on the reverse.  This makes a really sturdy gift tag that hangs beautifully! I cut it using a metal ruler and scalpel and the hole was punched with a leather punch. They were decorated with splattered gold acrylic same as the bags and finished off with white hole reinforcers and sparkly black and gold thread.  I am thinking of making some sets of Christmas tags with mount board to sell in the gallery.

WALK AND MAKE

I had a delightful morning yesterday at Dove Studios, Butleigh, on a half day course with local artist, Fiona Hingston.  Amongst other things, she works with natural materials gathered from the countryside - pressing, drying, stitching, waxing and assembling them into beautiful works of art. For ' Amazing Space ', which is an exhibition of specially commissioned work celebrating 45 years of the Dove Centre, she has collected plant material from the grounds and produced some amazing hanging boxes, full of manipulated bits of nature.

Our first job was to go collecting in the nearby fields, woods and orchard in the glorious sunshine and then bring our bounty back to tables set out in the open.  It is a beautiful spot and a magical, restful place. We then looked at what we had acquired and looked to see what could be done with them.

With Fiona's guidance, leaves and stalks and, in my case, thistle seed heads and feathers, were stitched together.  Apples and pears were sliced and left to dry in the sun and little collections appeared everywhere!  Fiona is shown (top left), cutting up some apples.  I won't be able to go on a walk now without taking a plastic bag, looking closely and coming back with bits of the countryside!

Fiona had laid out a table of inspirational work which she had done.  The seed heads set out in their cabinet looked like precious jewels.  It represents her close observations and responses to nature and a great deal of experimentation and patience.

BLOG UPDATE

Walk the Talk - the new blog that I have been writing with my friend and walking companion, Jenny, has been going for nearly 3 weeks now.  We have had lots of positive feedback and over 700 visits!  I thought I would share a few of my favourite photos.

These pictures were taken when we had a guest walker - Trevor, the miniature schnauzer.  He was a quite a handful and started off the walk looking very dapper (see him with Jenny, top left), but ended up looking rather wet and bedraggled, after going through the wet undergrowth!

Jenny used my camera to take this rather arty photograph of a mother duck with some of her ducklings at our local park.

This beautiful shetland pony took us by surprise.  We just saw him through a gap in the hedgerow on a footpath to the west of Shepton.

I have never seen a cow with two black eyes before, but there he was staring at me from over the main road, just a few minutes walk from my house!

WALK THE TALK

This is the header of my new blog - 'Walk the talk' - which I am doing as a joint venture with my walking companion, Jenny.  We have just gone live! We don't want this to be like some of the walking blogs we have read, that are all words and maps. This is much more informal and fun with photos, thoughts, information on what's in and around Shepton, inspiration for my art, keeping fit and more! We are taking it in turns to write the posts and it should develop as we go along. We want to encourage more people to go outside their front door and walk!

My artwork that is the basis for the header and colour scheme of the new blog.

MORNING WALKS

I love my 7am walks in and around Shepton Mallet.  I just walk from my front door, call in for my friend Jenny, and away we go.  We don't have a map, we just go wherever the fancy takes us.  We go three times a week, whatever the weather, and talk and talk!  We have seen many interesting sights, local wildlife and the beauty of the landscape in all sorts of weather. At the moment, cow parsley is centre stage amongst the wild flowers.  It is everywhere in the countryside - clouds of billowing lacy white flowers among shades of fresh green.

Some photographs taken on our last walk.  Top left is Jenny walking among the cow parsley.