Roger suggested that we walk from Lapworth to Lowsonford alongside the Startford Canal and back. There's a great place to eat in Lowsonford called the Fleur de Lys. Always keen to eat out rather than have to cook I readily agreed.
We have walked this route a couple of times before but this time it was different. The Canal and River Trust use the winter months to repair the canal system. It is the Stratford Canal's turn and that meant that parts of it had been drained.
The other side of the lock in the above photo.
The next lock which apparently is having a new lock gate. They are replaced every 25 years.
Thank you so much to everyone who reads my blog. I really appreciate that you give some time to reading my witterings. Thank you also to those of you who leave a comment. I've yet to work out how you would know if I left you a reply. If any of you use Blogger and know the answer to this please let me know. Thanks.
I thought I would introduce you to some of the blogs I follow. So, in no particular order:
Me, with my head in the clouds
Mary's blog is a delight. She shows her amazing photographs and her art work. I particularly love her art style.
Itchifingers
I love Sandie's mix of photographs, phototutorials and information about classes and retreats. I found the 30 day blogging challenge on Sandie's blog. Sandie and I went owl spotting in Birmingham in the summer.
I love to visit Valerie Sjodin's blog Visual Blessings. She shares her amazing artwork. Valerie did a piece of artwork especially for a Gratitude blog challenge I set up last year. This is her guest post on Walk.
The things that attract me to follow blogs - and I have 53 listed on Feedly - are photographs and artwork and photographs and creativity and photographs and photo tutorials and photographs.
And that sums up my blog too!
What attracts you to read a blog on a regular basis?
Last week I talked about colour theory and showed you a sneak peek of the journal I made from the Pam Carriker online class.
When I was preparing my journal I only had six of the colours I needed to make a colour wheel. These are Dylusions acrylic paints. For the journal I chose three colours - the instructions were for four colours. I rarely do exactly what the tutor says. Mind you in this case it was that I didn't have the 4th colour. I mixed the acrylic paint with some water in some spray bottles.
Remember the colours on the colour wheel last week? The colours above are Squeezed Orange, Fresh Lime and London Blue. According to my colour wheel they match Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green and Blue respectively. The other 3 colours I didn't use are Lemon Zest, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape which match Yellow, Blue-Green and Red-Violet.
Journal Preparation
I thought I had followed the instructions for putting the paint on the pages
but when I went back to the video I found I hadn't So I did the backs of the papers the correct way.
When you fold the pages and sew the journal together you get spreads like this.
When I went to Art from the Heart I bought some of the missing colours and set about making my own colour wheel. Ideally you would do this with only one make of paints and do separate colour wheels for all your different makes of paint.
I set the paints around my colour wheel and the red and Blue-Violet were wrong so I rummaged around and found some Golden paints that were okay. In fact I might go through all the Golden paints I've got to see if I could do this exercise just with Golden.
Then I drew round a template to get the large circle and I found this piece of plastic canvas and worked out where the middle of the large circle was and measured where I needed to make my lines.
I used a pencil and ruler to draw the lines.
I made pencil notes of the paints as I painted in the segments
When the paints were dry I wrote the colours on the wheel and cut it out.
After I had made my colour wheel I decided I would use the other colour to make a page for the journal. I'll show you that in my next post.
