You can't have rainbows... without the rain.

Happy New Year! I hope you can look back on 2012 without regret and forward to 2013 with hope.

The past 2 years have left me feeling a little bruised and battered but I have learnt that I am stronger than I ever knew. I can dig deeper than I ever thought and even on dark days there is beauty and miracles waiting to be found. There's a quote I read once that said 'You can't have rainbows...without the rain.' I don't know who said this, but how true it is!

I only have one resolution this year and that is to live a moment of each day.  By that I mean to really live it. To smell the bark on the eucalyptus tree, to notice the starry night, to hear the noises of nature and to see the beauty in small but amazing things. I am not going to aim for a photo a day or to set my self a goal of trying new art techniques. I won't resolve to doodle or draw or paint. I simply want to take a moment to breath and live a moment of each day.

First treescape of 2013.

 I am sure I will never tire of looking up at trees, in particular this eucalyptus tree. My moment today was the moment I noticed the sap. Jewel red, glistening in the sun and so small on this huge tree. Just for moment I could see and hear nothing else. How sweet that was.

Best wishes to you all my blogger friends, thank you for your comments and support. I look forward to spending 2013 with you.

Graffiti pages...finally!

I am really pleased with the way this series turned out! It didn't quite go to plan, I missed a deadline for the first time ever and I only created 8 instead of the intended 11. Once the deadline had passed there didn't seem to be a lot of point in creating the projects required 11 but I really wanted to see the project through. I see this series as a bit of a turning point in my artistic journey and even though the series is complete the journey  isn't. It's exciting to have a new path to explore and I will be taking inspiration from these pages and the Rena disaster for my next ICE series.

There are a lot of photos to follow so I am going to do it in two parts.

Part 1

Page 1.

Personally, I'm not actually a huge fan of this page! It showed enough potential though for me to keep working on it and as you will see from the other photos posted they contain similar elements but the style is cleaner.

Page 2.

Jackpot!  Home-made walnut and eucyalyptus dyes, pencil, map pieces and stitching. I love the bigger blocks of paper and most of the pages that followed adopted that look.

Page 3

The first page with an anatomically incorrect heart-nest! (Linocut)

Page 4

Page 5

The stitched text piece is my favorite part on this page, along with the note paper my kids used and left laying about.

It took me so long to 'get around' to finishing the series. Emotionally and physically I was really zapped by the effect of my daughters surgery and my mojo left me. It wasn't really a time thing, I had plenty of time sitting around in the ward and it seems logical to take my supplies and to pass time that way. Unfortuantely my logic and my motivation wern't in tune with each other! When I decided to detox one of the first things I did was to sit down and stitch and it only took a short while to finish these.

School goes back tomorrow for us, I have 2 at home full time doing correspondence and I hope that this term I will do better at balancing school and art. I really struggle with it and even now as I type I am aware that I should be planning the first weeks work instead.

On that note...see you soon:)

Nature Dyes

I'm loving this! It reminds me of leaf spots in Autumn.

It's the result of indian ink being dripped onto wet paper to cause a reaction, the paper was dried and then over-dyed with a wash of walnut dye. The pic below shows my son making one of his indian ink/water papers which we did  a few weeks ago. I saw the potential for good collage fodder so made myself a few too!  He graciously donated me his papers as well:)

My walnut dye. It's pretty dark so I was surprised it gave such an rust/orange shade to my paper. I made it by mixing and matching recipes I found on the net but the basic brew went like this...

Soak green walnuts in water in a stainless steel bowl 

(Until they ferment/smell bad and your family threaten to throw it out if you don't do something with it!! lol)

Boil the brew 20mins and then add 1 part white vinegar to help prevent mold.

So far this method worked but I think I should have boiled them longer to get the darker shade of brown I thought I was making! The dye is now in a jar out of direct sunlight, I will be interested to see if ageing it makes any difference to the dye colour. No doubt I could water it down to get a lighter shade of rust if I wanted too.

These too pics are the resulting papers from my Eucalyptus dye experiments. I like the shade of brown I got with  these.I added my own designs to the paper as you can see! Most of the "line" paper has already been used in my collage work so I will have to get another brew boiling! Good thing I collected a lot of bark!

ICE #12 is nearly finished. It was inspired by a game of snakes and ladders and uses a large piece of my lined eucalyptus paper so watch this space!

Green/Greener, 2 new birds and a sand sculpture.

It's time for a green/greener post! This time my focus is on natural dying which I'm currently exploring (again!) So far my own personal experience is limited to Marigold, Tea, Coffee, red cabbage, onions skins and Fennel. I've also had 2 attempts at making Kowhai flower dye and a nest dye with poor results....this is definitely a learning process! I'm keen to learn though and as I said it my last post I think I stumbled upon a good way of setting the dye on paper- with an iron!

Moss and Lichen. Mclarens Falls.

The first artist I am going to put the spot light on is India Flint. Am I the last person on the eco-dying planet to discover India Flint's blog? lol. For anyone who hasn't visited her blog yet here it is. If your anything like me you will wish you had gotten there sooner! The first link will take you directly to a Eucalyptus dye recipe and this link will take you to her book and others of interest. My wishlist gets bigger!

Eucalyptus bark and feather. Some of the things that made it home with me after our camping trip!

I found a link to this fabulous article on India Flint's bundling/ printing /dying method on a site called Turkey Red Journal which is a publication dedicated to natural dying. Be prepared to want to run out and gather leaves after reading the article!

For John: Close up of a frond from a NZ Native Tree Fern, the Ponga.

Eco dye captures my attention because its in tune with my way of thinking. It's not perfect but it is 'greener.' The foot print of a fennel plant growing over my fence is a whole lot smaller than that of the coffee that has been shipped (and goodness knows what else!) from a million miles away. Right now I am trying to find a more natural alternative too coffee that will give me the same colour. I found this plant/colour guide on a site called Pioneer Thinking. Handy to have! As you can see there are plenty of alternatives to using coffee...and if you live in my part of the globe it's not long until Autumn...and that means walnuts! I know just the tree to harvest from too. If your interested in making your own walnut dye here's a page you might like.

I haven't tried it myself yet and I would be interested in reading about walnut dye experiences if anyone has a link to share! This link will take you to a site with the most gorgeous photography of this ladies natural dye projects. Some eye candy for the eco dyer's out there!

Last but not least, check out this collaborative project that Jasmine of Nature's Whispers is taking part in. How can you not want to go and see a project called Wrapt Trees?

Meet Dollar and Dime! (Dime is the bigger bird with his beak open.) We adopted these teeeeny, tiny sparrows today. I only took this one photo so I didn't disturb them or let them get cold. They're so very tiny and have hardly any feathers and their eyes arn't open yet. They are using a heat pack and polyprop to keep warm. Being small dosn't change the amount of noise they make when it's feed time, which at this stage is every 30mins...please wish us luck that we have a great result for this little foster babies too!

Speaking of birds, it IS feed time so I quickly post a rare pic of me and my kids at out local beach. It was published in a local newspaper last weekend.

We came third place equal in a local family sand scultpure competition! Ours was a giant "We HEART NZ"

Winning was a nice way to end a great day!