Cats In Bed - Finished

It took me a while to finish my "Cat" piece even though it probably looks like it was made in an hour. But there were lots of mistakes made and weirdly, almost all of them came out to be what I needed exactly. Even if they revealed their true mission in the very last steps.

It was quite painful to finish this as this theme was the reason why I put away this book for so long. I'm really glad I made it though because I think I got my answer out of it. 

Cats In Bed

With April 1st our »Draw Along« started and exercise 01 is all about cats. I still have time to finish this task but I wanted to show some progress shots. It was really interesting to observe how awkward I am with a pen. I can't draw with it directly as I can't erase my mistakes and that makes me nervous. I'm not sharing those mess ups with anybody but I am posting my pencil cats. I do know though, that with a lot of practice I could be using the pen directly too, but that's still far away :)

These were done after cat’s photos from the web and I can see the improvement from each cat to another already. Carla’s work in the book we are following (Drawing Lab For Mixed Media Artists) is all about having fun and experimenting with different materials. Bonus task from the assignment is choosing one of the drawn cats and rendering it in full - mixed media style.

I’ve never done any mixed media pieces before so this is very interesting for me. I’ve been observing them with great interest but now I’ll give them a try myself. I know I’ll never have enough resources on hand but I’ll do with what I have and I’ll just have to improvise. I hope having fun will creep in as I move along too ;)

At first I wanted to use the cat from the bag for my final piece but I think I’ll do something else. I still like the way it looks though. I colored it with water soluble pencil and colored pencils.

Eyelet Polka

I was working on my first embroidery thingie over this weekend. I followed Laura's tutorial and I must say I learned a lot. Here is my poor attempt at making the eyelets :)



I noticed I have problems with getting the needle where it's supposed to go, following the drawn line, pulling thread too much or too little and making things way too small (no idea why). But I'm quite satisfied with my results nevertheless. 

I have to go and buy some extremely sharp scissors - the tiny ones for cutting off excess fabric and such - and a smaller hoop. And then do another set of eyelets to see my improvement. Oh, and try them with other type of threads too :)