Creative Outlets pt.1

As a disclaimer: been meaning to post this stuff for a while, but haven't taken the time for it. Figured I had nothing to say tonight & so figured it'd be a good night to fit this in, but I did have stuff to say. Check the post below this one for the sordid details.... confession is good for the soul from what I hear....

Anyhow, have had over the course of the past year, chances for artistic expression, creative outlet other than writing. I went through a long drought from writing (which as you can see is apparently over for a while)... Being a creative, your soul dies if there is no outlet, no expression of creativity & so I found - by choice, accident, self-preservation instinct - a collection of creative outlets over the year.

One of which was pottery painting. Here's the products of that outlet:

First is a vase that I put together trying multiple coats on top to give the solid colours & lighter colours on the bottom with a sponge to give the mixture/texture. A good friend gave me a book on pottery painting (that I haven't used enough) that suggested the idea of putting on thicker paint & then scraping some way to reveal what's underneath. The green leaves are my first attempt at this.

Second attempt is another mug. Didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. Was hoping for a sunset effect on the side, but didn't work. Again, added the leaves with the scraping, but still not quite right....


Thirdly was another mug that I painted while hanging out with my friend Mark & my friend Samantha's Danish cousins....

Tried using masking tap to tape off areas that I didn't want painted over (hence the white bits & tried doing a multi shape pattern by the handle (this idea stolen from one of Samantha's projects). & used different layers of pain to give the multi coloured ripple effects. One layer of paint will give you a light colour, two layers will make it slightly darker. So I painted the one colour on solidly across the whole area & then painted the same colour again over only some of the space (what comes out as the darker areas).

This is the hard part about pottery painting is that you never really know what you're going to get until after they've fired it....Lastly there's the project that I put together for my brother Preston for a christmas gift. I started painting it with my friend Rachel (a true artist :) who is definitely missed ) & it took me a long time to finish.

It was suppossed to have a Kyrgyz theme to it, hence the patterns on the sides were made to look like the Kyrgyz runs that Preston makes.

These took a long, long time to do & were kind of painful in just how much work went into them, so the other two sides got done in a bit of a rush, trying to use the scraping technique to throw in some more subtle designs.....

Finally though, that left the top to do & I wanted to make it look like the sun & yurt in the middle of the flag of Kyrgyzstan, which looks like:
But that didn't quite turn out. Instead I got this:


Pretty close & Preston was happy, but again, not what I had hoped it would look like after going through the fire (though I guess we never know what things look like until after the fire)...