Alice in Wonderland

Hello my friends!

This week I want to share an art post with you, Alice in wonderland is and has always been one of my favourite things in the world, the story is fun, the original art was truly incredible and the 1951 Disney movie was my second favourite film as a child (the top spot belonged to Sleeping Beauty!)

So this week I thought I post not 1 or 2, but 10 pieces of Alice in Wonderland related art.

Firstly, if you’ve read my other art posts then you’ll know just how much I love my set of Arteza brush pens. They work like normal colouring pens but instead of a felt tip they have a brush one (as the name implies!) but can be used with water to create watercolour paint – its so nice to have an amazing array of colours with the need to carry around all the little watercolour paint blocks, plus the colours are super vibrant too!

‘The little Blue Caterpillar’ sat on a Fly agaric mushroom complete with a few tufts of grass, is first drawn with ink and then block coloured.

If it hasn’t been mentioned before I love calligraphy art and hand lettering ‘The Secret Alice’ quote is from the Disney movie, but it’s not actually in the book and wasn’t written by Lewis Carroll. But, as quotes go it’s a lovely one and it meant I could write ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in gold ink within the design!

‘I want a clean cup’ is drawn to look like a teacup, using 4 shades of blue watered to a very thin consistency and then written with a calligraphy pen.

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Fungi Patterns

Hello friends!

This week I want to share a little bit of photo editing with you! a while ago I decided to see if I could find anything magical to photograph and went out in the wilderness where I found a little patch of grassland fungi! These beautiful mushrooms were so tiny and their colours seemed so vivid against the green of the grass (especially in December!). And then I thought instead to just editing them, why not manipulate them in Affinity to try and create some interesting patterns.

So, enjoy some wild foraging symmetry…

Symmetry is apparent when both sides of a photo mirrors the each other, createing a feeling of harmony and making the image more pleasing to look at. Now there are some with a great enough talent to do this naturally when using a camera – I find it easier and more fun to put an image into my photo editing and manipulation software (I use Affinity Photo its like Adobe Photoshop.) and then repeat the image the desired amount of times, flipping and rotating were necessary.

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The Grim Squeaker

Hello friends, I hope the past week has treated you well. 

This week I thought I’d post a new illustration and I thought I’d share this one with you. Reaper Man is the 11th Discworld book by the comic and literary genius that was Sir Terry Pratchett, and is one of the best books out there (actually all the Discworld book are fantastic) Its main character is Death and later in the Death related books the Death of Rats arrives, the first of which is Reaper Man.

The Grim Squeaker is essentially a ‘living’ skeleton of a rat, that wears a black hood and carries a tiny scythe. If you haven’t read the books I totally recommend them! I don’t want to give away any spoilers (even though the book was released in 1991!) because they’re such wonderful books and once you’ve read one or two before you know it you’ve read them all!!!!!

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New Look {artymissk.com}

Hello my friends, I hope you’re having a prosperous start to 2022!

I know the Friday’s are normally post days but this is an extra little one as I finally made the decision to change my domain and blog name.

My former name of kareynolds .net has been a dear friend since way back in March 2013 (I can’t believe that’s basically a decade!) but I decided that artymissk.com was a good step forward in my blogging life as it relates to my Twitter/DeviantArt/Tumblr/YouTube accounts. It was so easy to do and yet I’ve been putting it off for ages.

What do you think of the new name and artwork?

I hope you continue to follow my blog and join me on my artistic and photographic journey.

K

x

Wild Mushrooms

In a bid to hold onto the last of this years sunshine (before winter completely sets in) I decided to see if I could find anything magical to photograph and while out in the wilderness I found a very lovely little patch of grassland fungi! These beautiful mushrooms were tiny and their colours seemed so vivid against the green of the grass. I love fungi there are so many species and colours and they grow in the most unlikely places.

So, enjoy some wild foraging photography…and a few doodles…

This is one of my favorites from the shoot. I love how simple and stock-photography-like it looks. The way the light hits the mushroom and the sunlight through the grass just feels so natural…

Now I know never to eat mushrooms I find, I don’t even like to touch them – unless I’m with someone who genuinely knows what they’re doing! Let’s be honest I just like to photograph and draw them so I thought I’d try and put together a little collection of photographs to show off the beauty of these amazing little fungi.

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Little picnic in the woods {Art/Photography Project}

Its happened, its autumn – although I feel like we skipped my favourite season and have gone straight to winter, its so cold!

But I’ve been out in the wild to photograph the change in nature and I took this with me.

The unexpectedly small tea party. Created using paper, unsurprisingly this took longer than expected.  Its made to be about the same size as dollhouse furniture (I think its 1/12 scale) and then I covered some dollhouse dishes.  I made it years ago and found it recently, can’t believe its still holding together!

I made this when I was a Uni as a part of my finals as part of an Alice in Wonderland project. It’s not using actual book pages (I could never destroy a book like that!) but is from photocopies from a book. The paper was then rolled or lined with card to help it keep its shape.

Alice in Wonderland is a big part of my life and I have an awful lot of art to go with it!

Autumn leaves

This weeks theme is leaves and nature and greenery, I’ve sat and embroidered a little sampler of leaf designs, not sure when they’ll come in handy but you never know and it looks quite pretty.

The sampler itself only took an hour or so to finish. The hoop its in is six inches across and sewn in variously sized stitches, Its all sewn free hand using coloured cotton floss at a time onto a natural (and excitingly) eco friendly, recycled calico!

I’ve also been experimenting with watercolours and my set of Arteza brush pens to try and bring more green and nature inside for the winter, they don’t take long to do, but look really effective against a white wall – my funny little brain likes to pretend its alchemy!

I’ve always thought that yellow was my favourite colour, but at the moment a lot of my art is green.

Watercolour Flowers

I know that these flowers are super simple and fairly child-like, but I’m actually really pleased with them! I was kind of going for simplified Wildflowers from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Again they’re made using Arteza brush pens…I think I might start doing some tutorials in 2022…maybe…

Embroidered bumblebee

Hello friends, I hope the week treated you well!

To relax, get my brain into the right space and bee a little bit more zen I’ve sat quietly and embroidered myself a little bumble bee. Its all sewn free hand using a single strand of coloured floss at a time onto a natural (and excitingly eco friendly, recycled calico!) It’s been so lovely to study the photos of bees from the garden…as we have at least five types of bee I might sew one for each.

The hoop its in is six inches across and sewn in tiny stitches, I love the fact that the wings look realistic by sewing the threads in different directions.

I absolutely love embroidery, its so soothing and you really feel that you’ve achieved something when a project is finally finished.

Thank you for visiting have a great week.