Sunday afternoon doodlings

Sunday afternoon and all the chores were done (well as many as I felt like tackling!).  Dog had a great walk ("thanks for that"), I gave the garden a last haircut before the winter, I took some lavender cuttings (I have high hopes for these as the last ones I took, some pelagoniums, seem to have taken - all of them) I did a bit of token housework and washed the bedding for the anticipated next load of house guests and then, lo, I had time for me.

I should be stitching "In a Spanish Garden 2", but it's proving tricky to feed smoothly through the machine (and I find myself with gadget envy - I really want one of these! ) So instead I thought I would do a bit more with the Seville sketch book.

I was inspired by a recent post by Carolyn Saxby where she explains a recent workshop using magazines and painted backgrounds  (have a look at her post here).

I did not have my water colour paints with me, so i thought I would try the same idea but with oil sticks and water colour pencils and Inktense pencils, working on some cheap A3 cartridge paper.

This is the first stage.  I used circles and arches as basic inspiration from a very elegant bridge in Seville which spans the river.   These are drawn with oil sticks.  Then the pencil was applied dry.

Once I had watered down the pencil it behaves more like water colour, but is not quite so satisfactory as the real thing.  Anyhow, I pressed on and used shapes from a colour magazine, pasted onto the coloured paper.  I applied a coat of Mod Podge over the top to hold everything down (It was getting a bit messy and was easier to apply the shapes with a brush).

Then when it was dry I cut the paper up into tiles and stuck them into the sketch book - the page has already been gessoed (to hide the recipe underneath) and coloured with dilute procion dye used as ink.

I did two pages - the one below also uses tiles of shiny paper saved from a chocolate bar.

And finally here is the first page with another coloured, stitched and snipped page on top.  I am not yet sure if this will be the permanent arrangement.  By the way the stitching is a cheap knitting 'wool' (well it's not wool; it's all hairy and synthetic, but it is fun) couched onto cartridge paper.

And here is another one I did, the shape this time was arches.  It is still to be cut up, but even like this, I rather like it!