I know pride's a sin, but, sorry, I'm proud of this!

I actually painted something, from scratch, that looks roughly like its subject matter! yay me! :)

So....this is a circle journal entry for the Blue CJ in the colours circle - my last contribution to this particular circle, now I just have to sit tight and wait for my own book to come home.

As I'm the last to work in this book, most of the obvious takes on the colour blue had already been nabbed, so I was wondering what to do.....and at the same time I was looking to up my participation in Marit's Summer Camp - an online community I have signed up to for the next few months.

One of Marit's prompts revolves around producing a piece of work in three parts - a triptych.  This reminded me of this Octopus painting, by "Plantation Design", that I had seen on Pinterest.

Fab isn't it?

I do hope they don't mind me taking inspiration from their design, it's not for profit after all, and I am not for a second taking credit for the idea.  Please don't send your copyright lawyers after me, plantationdesign.com!

So, anyway, I drew up a sketch that fitted the dimensions of the circle journal:

(sorry for the bad photo)

And then transferred the basic design in plain white paint to a dark blue painted background:

An unintended but cool effect, the white paint crackled over the waxy ink mixture I had used to stamp the circles on the background, serendipity :)

Next I played with different ways of painting in the little suckers on the pus's tentacles, in the end I settled for stamping little circles with the end of a mechanical pencil:

And then it was just a case of adding some shading:

and finishing off the tentacles, and then it was all done:

Sorry this is a bit image heavy....but hopefully it's interesting to see how it all evolved.

All that was left to do was slice the picture up into three parts, and machine sew around each section.

They were added to a bubbly background (another technique from Summer Camp), and a stamped title finished off my CJ entry:

I love it! I really do!  It's such a nice feeling to be genuinely pleased with something I've made :)

Here's a close up of that bubble background:

And here are the pages in situ in the completed book:

That's it, I'll stop boring you with octopus photos now! :)