Photography « Artful blogging from Glenda Waterworth

Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Purple Poppies – a Colour Challenge

August 20th, 2011

We have a fine collection of weeds growing up through the gravel where we park the cars, and about a month ago, the place suddenly erupted with purple poppies.

I’ve had big pink oriental poppies before, but I’ve never seen such a rich mauve/purple shade in a normal poppy.

The colour is just beautiful, and gorgeous when the light shines through the petals.

Apparently the bees agree and once they’ve done their bit, I’ll be collecting the seed heads from these beauties and already have some put aside for my mum who was also impressed by the colour of these.

Is it unusual? I certainly haven’t see this colour before, but maybe I’ve just led a poppy-sheltered life. I have seen the magnificent Himalayan blue poppies at Inverewe Gardens in Scotland, they are pretty amazing too.

Anyway, I have been so inspired by the colour that I picked out some of the tones from one of my photographs and I’m setting myself the challenge of coming up with a piece of artwork this weekend that features these colours.

If you’d like to play along, please do, you can leave a comment with a link back to your artwork for everyone to see. Here’s the palette:

Have fun!

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challenge, Challenges, Photography

Glass Bead Canvas

March 5th, 2011

Here’s a little canvas that came together last weekend. It’s a photo transfer done with glass bead gel which is a Golden product that actually contains teeny tiny glass beads. The gel dries transparent so you get this amazing texture. The gel was put onto an inkjet photo with a palette knife (a brush could smear the ink) and left to dry for approximately two years. Yes, I found it in a box from the mixed media class I ran in 2009 and figured it should be dry by now! Joking aside, it does take a few days to dry out thoroughly and once dry, you soak the paper on the back and gently rub it off with your fingers.

The canvas is painted with Golden Fluid Acrylics and the corners stamped with irridescent gold paint. The transfer was then stuck down with Soft Gel Matte and I added some more glass bead gel and some gold mica flakes around the edge using another Golden product – Gold Mica Flake (Small) which is a gel with, you guessed it, gold mica flakes in it.

So all in all, a bit of a homage to my favourite art materials company, Golden. It’s difficult to capture the texture and glow with the camera, but if you click on the image, I’ve left the original quite large so you can have a good close look.

Comments ( 20 )

Art, canvas, Golden, Photography

Misty Morning Photos

October 4th, 2010

I opened the curtains this morning and saw something in the distance turn to stare intently at me. I managed to grab the camera in time to get this one shot of a little deer through the mist.

The garden was enveloped in a thick blanket of fog early this morning, but you could feel the sun trying to burn it away. The dew was sparkling on the cobwebs on the cotoneaster outside the door, so I couldn’t resist going out with the camera once there was more light.

There is a rather overgrown hedge of cotoneaster outside the main door and this morning it was festooned with cobwebs along it’s entire length. Most were your typical standard looking web, but one at the end was more like a silk hammock.

I guess different spiders have different web design styles. I’m afraid the spiders will have to find themelves new homes as the cotoneaster hedge is overdue for a meeting with the chainsaw. We are literally having to brush past it to get to the cars and I really don’t think those cobwebs would look good in my hair.

Any of the keen gardeners recognise this plant?

It is growing as a hedge, with bright red stems that corkscrew around anything they can find to cling to and tufts of white flowers. Here’s another picture which shows it’s growing habit a bit better.