Introducing . . . . .

Me!

I survived a long steep walk on a hot day 

I am on day 15 of the 30 day blog challenge and I would like to welcome new subscribers and readers who use other types of blog reader.  I am so excited that you are here.

I thought it would be good to tell you a little about myself.

I was born in ......

Never mind, I won't make you read through the whole of my life!

I was under the impression that I don't share a lot about myself on this blog but maybe I have let slip more than I thought.

In brief, Roger and I have been married since 1983 and we have one son, Andy who lives in Sydney, Australia which his beautiful wife Naomi and their new baby.   Roger & I are both retired and enjoying ourselves.  We like to travel and go walking.  I love to visit Stately Homes especially those belonging to the National Trust as I have a Lifetime Membership which means we don't have to pay for us to get in!   Many of my blog posts have included photos from our walks, visits or travels.

As you have probably gathered I like to take photographs and lots of them.  I discussed my love of photography in a post about Why Photography? in two parts: part 1 and part 2.

I tend to sign up for online classes which I never finish.  I did try to cut back this year on the online classes but have attended real life workshops.  I was really thrilled to finish the fabric book I started in a Steph Redfern class.  But that was back in February 2014 and I'm not sure I've finished anything since.

I suppose that's not strictly true!  If it's a daily art challenge I've set up then I will always have finished the project as I blog about my pages every day for that month.  All of my art challenges can be found at the top of this page and can be done in your own time.

I shared about my struggle with depression when I described my choice of one word for 2014.

And random bits:
I'm totally addicted to Strictly Come Dancing and It Takes Two.   I like watching NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles and NCIS New Orleans.

I have never seen an episode of Downton Abbey or watched the film Titanic.

That's probably enough for now!   If you want to keep up with my art and my travels please subscribe to my blog via the Subscribe by Email box at the top of the page.  Or you can follow me on Twitter,  Instagram or Pinterest.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Colour Theory

I saw an online class advertised by Craft Daily for a workshop with Pam Carriker on how to effectively use the colour wheel.  That reminded me that I had done some work on colour many moons ago and had always planned to follow it up.  When I says many moons I'm talking 2008.

I have taken photographs of my journal pages from back then and the photos of photos aren't really of a very good quality. (Sorry.)

I used embroidery threads to show the colours in the colour wheel rather than use paint.

Primary colours - red, yellow, blue

Secondary colours added - orange, green and purple.  Secondary colours are achieved by mixing two primary colours together.  Red + Yellow = Orange.   Yellow + Blue = Green.   Blue + Red = Violet.

Then I added the tertiary colours.  The tertiary colours are made by mixing one primary colour with the secondary colour adjacent to it.

Tertiary Colour mixing
Red + Orange = Red-Orange       Yellow + Green = Yellow-Green    Blue + Violet = Blue-Violet
Red + Violet = Red-Violet     Yellow + Orange = Yellow-Orange    Blue + Green = Blue-Green

I made a larger colour wheel using lots of different types of threads.

I wound the colours around cards using different shades.  This helped to see what colours look like by the side of another colour.

I found magazine pictures to demonstrate warm and cold colours.  Warm colours are considered to be yellow through to red-violet on the colour wheel and the cool colours are yellow-green through to violet.

I found this exercise in a magazine.  Cross stitch leaves to show analogous colours.   Analogous colours are those colours next to each other on the colour wheel.   You can use two to five colours.

And finally stitches with black, grey and white to show shades, tones and tints.

A Shade is the colour plus black.  A Tone is a colour plus grey.  A Tint is a colour plus white.

Harmonious colour schemes
Complementary colours (not shown here) arre two colours directly opposite each other on the wheel eg blue and orange.    A Triad scheme uses three colours equally spaced from each other on the colour wheel eg orange, violet, green.  A Tetrad is a combination of 4 colours that are two sets of complements eg blue and orange with red and green.

This information is always in the back of my mind and I own a couple of shop bought colour wheels. But it's always worth trying out paints to see how the colours work, which I haven't done for a long while.

So I signed up for Pam Carriker class and I have started - hopefully I will finish.  Here's a sneak preview of one page of the journal we had to make for the class.

Next Sunday I'll show you some of the journal pages from the class.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

TMD: ReWind November week 2

We are continuing with the ReWind theme in Take Me Deeper at His Kingdom Come.  This week's them looks back to Honour, the theme for July.

I used some of stick on letters to put the word honour in several places.

At this point I had no idea what I was going to do and then as I had the black gesso out I put black gesso over the whole page.

I wasn't quite sure how gelatos would work with this but I decided to give it a go.  As you can see in the photo below I scribbled on the page and then blended the colours.  I tried a small section with a wet wipe which wiped off some of the colour so I used a piece of paper towel instead.

I went over the letters with a silver gelato.

I added words and a border with a white Sharpie

It's not one of my favourite pages but at least I learned that you can put gelato colours on black gesso.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice