Birthday Projects – Cake

Katie’s 21st Cake

We are in the midst of our annual rush of birthdays, my family has four birthdays in two weeks, and this year we have two special birthdays, my niece’s 21st and my nephew’s 18th.  Busy times.  So I haven’t been doing much drawing this week, but concentrating on another art form.  Cake decorating.

The cake you see is for my  niece’s 21st.  I have done a few cakes, having created them for my friends and families 21st, weddings and a few other special occasions and I really enjoy decorating them.

As you can see this was a double story event and the first chocolate cake I have decorated.  My sister made the very yummy red velvet chocolate cakes, well we had to quality check before icing didn’t we.

work in progress

I was fairly happy with how it turned out, but it was a little rushed as we ran out of time getting it ready and I didn’t have as fine an icing tube as I wanted, but the effect was great and no body else saw the faults I saw, then no one else would have had their nose two inches away from it as they iced it.

For those of you not familiar with cake icing, to transfer the pattern onto the cake you draw it onto a piece of paper and use a pin to prick the design through the paper onto the cake, I then drew around it on the white tier to see it better, before I iced it.

Karen

Playing with Colour

Colour Swatch 1 Orignal Image

I am painting a picture for a close friend for her birthday and it is causing me a great deal of concern as it is not my usual style.  I have this vague idea in my head but it is not coming out on paper and I am having to do something I do not normally do, a lot of preliminary drawings and computer work.  I am usually really good and working things out in my head, I am lucky to be able to picture how things will look and fiddle with them without having to put them down on paper.  But this is not one of them.  (As the painting is a surprise and my friend reads this blog I cannot give too much away).

But I have persevered and after five attempts I have a rough sketch done and am now working on the colours.  These have to be right as she is an interior designer with very highly trained colour sense. No pressure at all!!!!

I want to use some paisley patterns in the picture and the lovely turquoise colours that she loves so much, but my first efforts did not work.  So I decided to break out all the colour design theory that I have learnt over the years and do some swatches.

I used pictures of paisley patterns that I had found on line that I liked the colours of and went into photo shop and made some swatches of the colours.

Colour Swatch 2

Colour Swatch 3

Colour Swatch 4

I also found this great web site that lets you play on the colour wheel with the different colour combinations, didn’t that take up a great deal of time playing.  Here are some of the results.  For those of you not familiar with some of this theory there are groups on the colour wheel that go together and have different names.  See the dots on wheel, they show you the groups and you can slide these around to find the different colour combinations you can make, while the box of colours puts them together and gives you the different values and saturations of the colours you can use.

Colour Wheel triad

Colour Wheel tetrad

Colour Wheel anologic

Colour Wheel accented anologic

Colour Wheel accented anologic 2

It is so interesting to look at the colour wheel colours and the swatches above, you can see that they match up to  certain extent, did they now the theory or was it instinctual?

Wish me luck, it is a stylised portrait and I don’t do figures that much.  I think I know my friend’s face better than my own right now and I don’t think that is quite right.

Karen

PS.  I would love to recognise where the other paisley pattern pictures came from, but I can’t find them again on the web, and I saved the images a few years ago before I was blogging and more careful to save the origins of pictures taken from the web.  Apologies if I have not credited your design.

Blue Wren

Blue Wren Woodcut

This is my first ever woodcut, a little blue wren, sitting on an old fence post singing his heart out in the morning sun.  There was a family of blue wrens that lived on our property and spent the day ruffling through the gardens looking for tasty treats to eat.  They would come and watch you garden and sing and cheep away, such lovely companions.

This is the last print I did for my first relief printing class and it was a two colour wood cut.  This time instead of reduction we did a two plate print.  Again we had no choice in the second colour so not the colour I would have chosen.  But I see this as a draft for the second lot of prints that I am currently working on.  A short series of the birds that used to visit us on the property I used to live on in Castlemaine.

Blue Wren Woodcut

I enjoyed using the wood and really liked how the texture worked on the stump.  Lots to think about in how to use the grain of the wood in future work.  The wood also smells better than the lino.

Karen

New toys for a new medium

I am have been getting together my tools for my next printmaking course.  This one is more about working in the studio at Australian Print Workshop.  When I complete this course I will be able to go in and use the workshop whenever I want.  It is like getting my studio license.  I will need to have all I need to do the printing so I have been having fun getting new art supplies.  It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Carving the Pardalote

I have bought some beautiful lino/wood carving tools.  I decided to spend a little more and get some decent tools that will hold their edge and feel good.  Then of course I had to buy some sharpening stones to keep the edges sharp.  Still trying to get the knack of a really sharp edge (any suggestions or tool sharpening tips greatly appreciated).

New Carving Tools

I decided to redo the bird prints that I did previously on a larger scale with the right colours this time.  So I have wood shavings flying and some sore fingers, but very proud to say no blood as yet.

The bench hook (board that I am carving on) is very special to me, it is my late fathers cedar drawing board which my cousin partner turned into a bench hook as it was no longer smooth enough to use for drawing.  Thanks Chris, it is already in good use.

Having so much fun, there is nothing like a new project.

Karen

PS a special hello to all my friends in Paris at the moment, have fun, relax and partake in all that great cuisine.