Acrylic Painting - Poppy Field

So here is my second acrylic painting:

I quite like it, though I can see I have plenty of room for improvement.

I followed this tutorial by Angela Anderson.

It's good to try a very different style of painting and I like the bold colours.  I'm a huge fan of flowers so it was fun to paint different types of flowers too.

The painting over all was easy but poppies themselves were quite hard to do.  If I try this one again I would look up a photo of some real poppies in a field and try to copy the light and shade on those as they were very difficult to highlight.

Overall though, I am very pleased with the outcome!

My First Acrylic Picture

I loved art at school and was a pretty good drawer, but I never, ever got the hang of painting.  I tried oil, I tried water colour, but I never tried acrylic.

I'm sure the artists out there will say that I probably wasn't taught well, but I did learn the basics, especially for water colour and never got the hang of it.

So, I have been delighted to find that I can paint with acrylics!!!

I have used acrylics to decorate my picture frame, my mini chest of drawers and my sewing box as well as a few other bits and bobs before, but I have been far from adventurous with it and haven't used any "proper techniques".

I have started a project to hopefully sell some mini hand-painted chests of drawers and knew I needed to up my game if I want to sell them so I started looking up ways to paint certain things with acrylic and discovered a whole host of Youtubers who give tutorials on acrylic painting.  And now I am hooked.

I will write another post about my long-term mini hand-painted chests of drawers projects once I've got the ball rolling with that, but for now I want to share with you my acrylic success to motivate you to give it a go too, because it is super easy with a little patience!

So first of all, these are the reasons I have fallen in love with acrylics:

• If you make mistakes you can easily fix them, usually by just wiping it off the canvas or waiting for the paint to dry and then going over the mistakes you made.
• You can paint on practically anything.  
• Blending colours is really easy.

So here is what I've been working on...

I discovered Angela Anderson's channel which inspired me to learn how to paint daisies.  I looked up some other tutorials, in particular Allison Prior's video and played around with different techniques.

I eventually used a mixture of techniques I'd seen to create my own version, and you'll be seeing more of these in my up-coming project!

Then I decided to actually follow one of the tutorials to make an actual picture and decided to do this zen painting by Painting with Jane.

I struggled a little bit at first with shading the rocks, and it took me a few attempts... I left it over night and came back to it and I ended up really happy with the finished product.

I like the painting.  Obviously it's not perfect, but it looks good, I think.  The problems I've spotted with it are that firstly the vines look like they're in front of the rocks, which isn't really a big deal because you could be looking through the vines at the rocks, but in that case the back-ground looks like it's missing something.  Also, if you look at it as though the vines are on a level or behind the rocks I think there's a depth missing to them and maybe I should have put more vines of different lengths in there and darkened the ones I wanted to look farther away.  Also, the background looks a little bit wrong to me in terms of where the water stops and where the ground is... I think the rocks have made the ground look like it's behind them in an odd way.  But over-all these aren't major problems and it's a learning curve.

So what do you think?

Knitted Mini Teddy Bear

This is something I made for someone to send to them as a gift and it worked out perfectly.

I got the pattern from here which was really easy to follow as a beginner knitter and I did the whole project within a few short hours so it felt really rewarding to make it.

I changed the face a bit on mine to make it look more like a bear than a koala.

Basically, you knit all the different parts of the bear, and sew on the face.  (I made sure to keep checking where the eyes and nose would sit once the head was stuffed to make sure they wouldn't be too close together or too far apart).

Then you stuff the parts which need stuffing, sewing up these parts as you go.

And then sew all of the limbs and the ears together, and voilà!  It really was that simple!