Rocking February - plus Year of Firsts update

So here we are again with a roundup of what rocked my world last month, and also how I'm getting along with my Year of Firsts:

Blimey it was a rubbish month weather-wise, wasn't it?  Either freezing cold, or raining, or both.  Ugh.  But we tried not to let that get in the way of having fun.

For a start we've been doing a lot of hockeying - when you are stuck inside an ice rink anyway you don't really care what the weather is like outside :)

We have done our usual thing of realising that the season is nearly over and that we are going to miss it loads, so we have gone to a couple of away games this month as well as our regular home games, in a last minute frenzy :)

And as one of those away games was in Manchester, I have now completed my goal of seeing a game at every rink in our league, which is kind of cool - I think I deserve a badge for that.

And in other sporting news - the lovely ladies of Wiltshire Roller Derby had their first ever public home bout this month, and I was lucky enough to be invited along to take photos for the team.

They played really well, vs the Kernow Rollers, and were leading for most of the game, but right near the end our Cornish foes got a late boost of energy and managed to JUST pip us at the post.  The final score was 178 to 173.

The following weekend we had a very short holiday - otherwise known as one night in a cheap Travelodge in Manchester :) We had a brilliant time - who needs a fortnight in the Caribbean??

On the Saturday we were up bright and early and on the road by 8, arriving in central Manchester at 11-ish.  First stop was the Manchester Art Gallery.

Saw lots of incredibly inspiring art there, including a major exhibition by Raqib Shaw, plus the kids had fun recreating some old masters:

After lunch in the gallery (lush!) and a mooch around Chinatown, we drove out to Old Trafford for the Manchester United stadium tour.  I'm not even particularly interested in football but I found the tour really interesting, and the boys (old and young) loved it

We topped off the Saturday night with a walk into town and dinner at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen by the canal.  Manchester city centre on a Saturday night was a real eye opener for the boys - I don't think they had ever seen so many loud drunks and scantily dressed girls before :)

Next morning we had a yummy buffet breakfast at the hotel, and then headed to the Trafford Centre to go to the indoor Legoland there.  My my, that's one posh shopping centre!  It's like a slightly obscene and very over the top temple to opulence and excessive consumption:

Legoland was fun but probably more suited to younger children, as our big strapping lads were too big and old for some of the rides.  We did enjoy making our own cars to race though, and the 4D movie, and the miniland with scale models of lots of Northern landmarks we have visited, like Blackpool Tower and Alton Towers, and of course Old Trafford.

After Legoland we wandered over to the food court (if you have never seen the food court at the Trafford Centre, you HAVE to go, I've never seen anything like it, it's what I imagine Las Vegas is like, but with more Mancunians :) )

And there at Nandos we met up with my best friend from school, Sarah (yes another Sarah, there were 5 Sarahs in our class at one point!  common as muck name!) and her two lovely kiddies.  It was SO good to see her for the first time in over 20 years.  I was so excited that I forgot to take a photo of us together.  Doh!

Next we were going to go to MOSI (the Museum of Science and Industry) but we had left it too late to really do it justice, so instead we went to have a nose at Manchester City's stadium (just for the sake of balance) (and because Connor supports them  )

And then it was on to Altrincham for the ice hockey.  Which we lost.  Oops. But never mind, I was just happy to have finally ticked off the full set of EPL rinks.

We got home late Sunday night tired but happy after a brilliant weekend.

And our final adventure for February happened the following day.  The kids were back at school but Jay and I had a day off work, so we went out to Corsham near Chippenham to the derelict Naval site that is there, abandoned and now covered in graffiti.

It was amazing, and huge!  we were there over three hours and still didn't see it all.

Thankfully we didn't get apprehended and evicted by any MOD patrols....

There are over 100 more photos here if you fancy a proper look

Other Fab Feb happenings:

• I got to see my friends' little boy play in goal (hockey again) for the first time, as his under-10s team did a short demo game at our local rink - he's going to be a star in years to come, watch this space

• The week before their first home bout mentioned above, my Wiltshire Roller Derby girls got their first ever win in Milton Keynes - and with a short team of only 8 skaters too - well done ladies!!
• Baltimore won the Superbowl - go Ravens!

(February seems to have been sporty month!)

• I'm getting back into reading in a big way thanks to the Artful Readers Club.  I'm even finding myself wanting to make artwork to accompany the other books I'm reading outside of the challenge!  (watch this space)
• Connor had a brilliant day out at the Harry Potter Studio Tour in London with his school.  I don't remember school trips being that fab when I was a kid...
• Visiting friends - I had a CJ to pick up from my pal Pam and as she only lives about 40 minutes away I went over to collect it one Saturday morning, it was fab to sit in her craft room and look at all the lovely art on her walls and have a good old natter.  The internet is great and everything but you can't beat a good old fashioned real life catch up.
• An impromptu trip to the Stamp Attic in Wantage and resulting major spend up suggested by Jay one day when I was feeling a bit fed up.  Retail therapy makes everything better :)  Especially when it includes a Gelli Plate!  Yes, I've finally climbed on that particular bandwagon and am pleased I did - gelli-printing is so much fun!  

• Eventually got my Pure Evil print in a frame after finding a perfectly sized (and perfectly priced!) frame at the Range.  It still hasn't actually made it onto the wall yet, but I'm getting there....

• Connor and I took a punt on the Qwertee random t-shirt sale.  It's really good fun waiting for your shirts to turn up with no idea what you're going to get.  I got a nice art nouveau type design and Connor got this brilliant Monty Python one:   I think we'll play again next time.
• Good telly - this month I particularly enjoyed Utopia,  Black Mirror and Ripper Street.  And I also finally got to the end of Season 3 of Fringe (which is the point at which a lot of people apparently went right off it but I still think it's fab).  Only two more seasons to go.
• Talking of Fringe - I got mine back!  After attempting to grow my hair out to one length for a year, I finally had had enough of it blowing in my face on windy days and generally being all rat-tailed and horrid, so I had my hair cut and had my fringe cut back in.  I can seeeeeeee!!!!  Hooray :D

• Connor got a shout out online from his favourite artist - El Pez - it made his day:

This month's firsts - big and small, they all count:

10) After last month's 'trying a different type of bread roll' triumph, I tried ANOTHER new type of roll.  This time, it wasn't very nice :( ah well, you win some you lose some.

11) Used my airbrush machine for the first time, it's awesome, I need to practice with it more though to really get the hang of it

12) Photographed my first open-to-the-public roller derby bout.  It's harder with people in the way!

13) I ALWAYS get exactly the same dinner whenever we have a Chinese takeaway.  This time I chose something different.  It was almost but crucially not quite as nice as what I usually have.  This experiment isn't working as well as I hoped :)

14) First time partaking in the Qwertee random t-shirt lottery

15) First time using the gelli-plate for monoprinting - SO MUCH FUN

16) First visit to Manchester Legoland 

17) First time doing a behind-the-scenes football stadium tour

18) First time visiting the home rink of the Manchester Phoenix in Altrincham

19) First visit to the Manchester Art Gallery

20) First time eating in Nandos.  Yum!!!

21) First time trespassing on MOD property!

So that's 21 of my 100 firsts already achieved and we are only 2 months into the year - slightly ahead of the pace - good stuff!

Ooops - forgot to post this here

I just realised that I have posted pics of my latest circle journal entry over at Collabor-ART, but not on here

This is for Virginia's desert island discs CJ.

Being a collaborative project, before I got to work on my own entry, I had fun defacing enhancing everything that had gone before :)




The box containing the CJ - I added some highlights to the wording in a butterscotch-y colour paint to complement the purples, and then stencilled a dotty pattern around the edges of the box in the same colour:

Next I added some black and white geometric washi tape to both the front and back of Virginia's page for Roxette's The Look (as the journalling was about a black and white dress):

I *carefully* added some colour to Donna's gorgeous drawing of the pregnant lady:

I wasn't sure what I could add to Sherry's fab page featuring Motley Crue's pretty boy frontman Vince Neil, as the page was already pretty full.  But then I remembered he was not one to leave the house without lipgloss, so out came the Diamond Glaze :)

Don't worry it doesn't look this heavily applied in real life, I just took the photo at a glary angle as from full on you couldn't really see the lippy



Next up, Pam's Pink page - I added a border in oil pastels to ground the two hands a little, and then a line round the perimeter with a purple paint pen:

And finally, my own page and sign in tag:

Not the best photo but this was the one that best captured all the sparkle and shimmer from the metallic and interference paints.

The song is One Last Breath by Creed, one of my favourites.

just collage, no cheating....

Over on Collabor-ART we've been having fun with collage recently.  Well, when I say "fun", I mean that we were all painfully dragged kicking and screaming from our comfort zones :)  But I think most of us enjoyed it in the end, at least a bit.

The challenge was a two stage collaborative project to make purely collaged postcards - absolutely no paint, ink, pens and pencils even, allowed.  All we could use were cardboard for the base, printed papers, scissors and glue.  It was hard work!

Everyone did two postcards each, so here are the backgrounds I made for Vicki to work on:

And this is a get well soon card I made for my friend Pam at the same time:

(that one isn't "purely collaged" as the get well plaster was stamped, but I won't tell if you don't ;)  )

This is what Vicki did with my backgrounds, love them, especially the dude on the straw:

And for my part I was sent these backgrounds by Jean:

and

And my final collaged postcards:

and

To see more of the amazing collages that resulted from this little experiment, click here

And if you fancy joining in some fun, collaborative projects like this (and you are European based) - then why not join us over at Collabor-ART?  We are always on the lookout for new members....

Artful Readers Club February - America Unchained by Dave Gorman

Another month, another book :)

This month I've been reading America Unchained by comedian Dave Gorman:

The plan was simple. Go to America. Buy a second-hand car. Drive coast-to-coast without giving any money to "The Man". What could possibly go wrong?


This was a nice easy book to read - I had picked it up in a charity shop a year or so ago, a safe bet as I had enjoyed his previous books, the one where he travels the world looking for other Dave Gormans, and his Googlewhack adventure.

I didn’t even have the foggiest clue what the book was about, other than it mentioned America and a road trip, and I do love a good road trip tale – I’ve always wanted to do the coast to coast thing in a nice big RV, and visit all the wacky roadside attractions like the world’s biggest ball of string, and of course, being a huge Neil Gaiman fan, the House on the Rock – so that was enough to persuade me to hand over my £1 to the nice little old lady in Oxfam

It wasn’t until I actually picked up the book and started reading it for the Artful Readers Club, that I discovered the underlying basis of the road trip – Dave’s challenge was to drive from coast to coast without giving a penny to the endless procession of faceless multinational corporations and superbrands.  So he could only buy petrol from independent unbranded petrol stations, only sleep in independent unbranded hotels and motels, and only buy food from, you’ve got it, independent and unbranded shops and restaurants.  Mom and Pop businesses only.

I think this would be nigh on impossible in the UK – when was the last time you saw a petrol station that wasn’t an Esso or a Shell or tacked onto a major supermarket?  Or a reasonably priced hotel that wasn’t a Holiday Inn, a Premier Inn or a Travelodge? OK I guess you’d be alright in seaside towns where there are plenty of independent B&Bs ….. but it definitely wouldn’t be easy

And to be fair it was nigh on impossible in America too – although he made a jolly good go of it.   Overall the story of the highs and lows of the journey makes great reading, you truly empathise with the author when everything goes horribly wrong, and celebrate with him when his luck improves.

The only downside to the book was that there were very few photos, just a couple in the middle, and I would have liked to see more of the interesting people and locations the author described as he encountered them along the way - but maybe that was a deliberate marketing ploy as it has spurred me to purchase the DVD of the accompanying TV show :)  I'm glad I read the book first though, as it goes into much more detail than the one hour documentary.

On to my arty interpretation for this month, I decided to illustrate a favourite quote from the book:

"You don't need a convertible to feel the wind in your hair.  You don't even need wind.  Or hair.  It's not a physical sensation.  It's a state of mind"

Acrylics and watercolour over a background of torn maps to represent the road trip undertaken in the book.  The inspiration for the windswept lady was a painting I saw on Etsy by fashion illustrator Cate Parr.

I have already started reading next month's book - Heart Shaped Box by Stephen King's son Joe Hill.  He has definitely inherited the scare-them-stupid gene from his dad, it's so creepy I can't even read it in bed for fear of nightmares!  I'll see you next month with my full review and some spooky artwork.....

Infinite Scroll : Monsters

I've been trying hard to resist signing up for the seemingly endless stream of fun free projects over at the Art House Co-op ..... but....but....monsters!!!  How could I say no to this one?

This was how they described the project:

This is going to get ugly...

We're calling out to 500 people worldwide to make one segment of what will become a really long, continuous drawing.

The Infinite Scroll series is inspired by the surrealist drawing exercise known as exquisite corpse, in which a group of people work collaboratively on a drawing without seeing the other parts that come before and after. We'll start the drawing off with a monstrous head and end it with some grotesque feet - everything in between is up to you!

Sign up and we'll email you the template and instructions for creating your design, drawing, or illustration of creepy, scary, and cute-in-a-hideous-way monsters.

We'll string all of the submissions together into one really long monster the likes of which has never been seen or imagined!

And this was my monster segment:

I kept him fairly simple, coloured with watercolours, and his spots came from a pencil eraser dipped in black ink

You can see the final whole monster on the project's blog here - but here's a snapshot of the section I'm in:

I think maybe they should have told everyone to keep the background white, as the sections join together better then, but it's still really cool to scroll through

So, there you go, I painted my little bit of monster, scanned it and emailed it in to the project, but then I still had my little bit of monster, and I didn't really know what to do with it .....

So I thought, why not make a not so infinite exquisite corpse monster of my own?

I didn't want to design the head and feet portions myself, as then they wouldn't have looked as disjointed as they needed to, so I asked my other half Jay to draw a head and my 10 year old son to design the legs and feet.

Then I copied their designs in different media, and ta da:

Meet Marvin, isn't he a cutie!

The end result is about A4 size, which luckily I had an IKEA frame lying around to fit.  I think I will hang him in my hallway so that he can greet visitors to my house with that lovely cheery smile :)