Derpy, Ditsy Doo, Dr Whooves assistant

I guess the title doesn't make a lot of sense if you're not a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan. But you don't have to be for this post, I promise. It's just that I got my first introduction to needle felting on a MLP:FIM site and was determined to at least try to make a pony.












And what pony better to try than the wall-eyed, clumsy, but absolutely adorable Derpy.

I loved how she turned out and how much I learned on this little model, first one with "seperate parts" (ie wings), a wire armature inside (ok, a non-pipecleaner wire armature) and non-felted or at least very softly felted "hair"










I wish I had progression photos of how I made here, but if you're interrested at all have a look at the wonderful tutorial on Deviant Art by the-pink-dragon for how to make/use armatures (for a pony) with needle felting.

The hair I sortof made up as I went along, including my first hand blend - as you can see her mane is not entirely evenly coloured. Now I have proper blending brushes (will do a later post on this), but I honestly think I'll need to get into dyes as well at some point.

Baby dragon

I'm a huge fan of dragons, all sorts of dragons (but western fantasy, not easter worm-like), little ones, big ones, flying ones, sitting ones.. ok you get the picture. I'm also quite fond of making dragons and here is a little one I made for my sister

 This one is about 15cm high and made from the most amazing sculpting clay I have used. Its called super sculpey and is a fleshy colour to start with. You can bake it in a normal oven at 130 C (yay no need for a kiln!) and is soooo responsive.

From the front on this photo she looks a little evil, but I just couldn't get a good angle to get her from the front

I've started with some tinfoil as an armature/base because this kind of polymer clay apparently shouldn't be too thickly applied. The scales was created by taking a bit of netting fabric and rubbing it into the clay and then pulling it out to leave a nice patter behind.

 I painted her with purple and pearlesent white and aded some black to the details. I also used some ink to bring out the scales - a technique I learned when painting miniatures which, sadly I haven't done in a while, but I only have so much time. And besides I'm easily distracted by new projects

Needle felted polar bear

So about 8 months ago I started a new hobby: Needle Felting. What is that you might ask, as I did myself. Well the best I can describe it is sculpting with wool. In essence you use barbed needles to tangle wool fibres (or any other natural fibre) together to form 3D shapes.

Here is my first project (well the first one I was willing to admit to). It not a large polar bear, but I learned a lot about sculpting with needles in this one. He's made from white and black merino wool over a pipecleaner armature.

Re-purposing

So clearly I'm not putting up photos every week anymore, not that I don't still occasionally take out my camera, but as usual I have gotten side tracked by other things in life and recently my husband said to me, "Why don't you put your latest craft stuff on your blog?"

And seeing how much I enjoy reading other people's craft blogs I thought why not. Maybe no-one will read it, but it makes for a nice diary anyway and I'm not likely to loose this like a file on my harddive.

So over the next while I will put on some of my crafting stuff until I'm caught up to what I'm currently working on and re-purpose this as a general creative blog. Once its up to date, I'll update it as and when I've got a project I want to share.

week 43 or so : Photo manipulation

Well I'm not longer doing weekly posts, but I'm keeping the blog open because I find writing this gives me new insights into what I want out of my pictures. I have become a lot more active on Flikr (thanks to my husband buying my a pro account for christmas) One of the groups I've been a member of for a while now is the weekly photoshop competition and I have been entering the weekly competitions from time to time, if I have an idea for the starter image and I have enough time to get it done. I'm also learning a lot of editing doing this, mostly through  trial and error, but also by looking at what other people do and seeing new techniques.

One thing I've seen a lot, but never really managed to do satisfactorily before is apply textures to an image. Not that its particularly hard to do, but there are so many textures out there and to get exactly the effect you want.... well lets just say I'm still finding it quite challenging. Which is why I'm so happy with this image.  It was almost accidental, because I was absolutely sure the second texture I've got on here would mess the whole thing up, but it didn't and I like the paintery feel of it.

I also did another one just for fun - those of you who know the new(ish) My Little Pony will recognise Pinky Pie in her element :-)



Until next time. Oh and happy new year or something like that.

week 42: Macro!

Its been quite a while since my last post, and counting this one, I'm now exactly 10 weeks behind (or maybe 9 if I can find something else nice before the weekend) This project started out as being a year long thing, but I'm actually quite enjoying this and will probably continue ... as I may have mentioned before :-) But it will be a when I have a nice photo to post, which will hopefully still be a roughly weekly or fortnightly occurance.

I have been struggling to find something to inspire me for a while now (as if you didn't guess that by now), but my wonderful husband gave me macro extension tubes for Christmas and so I've been playing with those. If you don't know what macro extension tubes are, they are essentially just empty tubes that are placed between the camera and the lens to increase the distances between the lens and the focus point, which in turn reduces the distance to the focus point in front of the lens. In other words, it allows me to focus on closer stuff and therefore take photos of much smaller objects.

This photo is of the stamen of a geranium flower. I didn't even realize they had such intricate stamen until I started looking for something to take a macro photo of! Yes there are some water droplets too - another thing I've been playing with, but to be honest of all the photos I've taken this one had the best focus. I have learned that even at a reasonably small aperture of f22 (the smallest my lens will go), the depth of field is no more than a millimeter or two. My dioptre is set for my right eye, but even so the focus seems just a tiny bit off, so that will take further work too. But it is a nice exciting thing to be playing with and I expect to be taking more macro photos in the next couple of days.

For interest here is the same geranium flower from the top - its not a pretty flower, but it is winter and it was all that was available.

week 41: Jurassic?

We've been having some fantastic mist, well that is to say great if you're a photographer, not so great if you're waiting for your plane to leave as I've heard there was some flights grounded due to heavy fog. But since I didn't have a flight booked anywhere I managed to get out early enough one morning to actually get some photos with mist in. If I gotten up earlier that would probably have been even better, but I like sleeping in, especially when its cold.

This photo was taken in the Epping Forest close by my house. I was really taken in by the brown ferns, somehow I've never noticed them before and many not really have now except for the fact that I wanted to plant some ferns and discovered not all ferns are evergreen. I'm sure to most of you this is all obvious, but it came as quite a shock to me.

Anyway, I quite like how in this photo its actually the dead plants that add colour. The combination of the dead trees in the back, the ivy on the front tree, the large ferns and the slight mist made me think of Jurrasic Park - hence the title.

I had to replace the sky as it was completely blownout, but honestly the sky did look very much like that on the day I took the photo. This photo was taken at ISO 800, and it appears way too grainy to me at any level larger than what is displayed here.I tried some noise-reduction, but to make it as smooth as I would like removed so much detail that a subsequent sharpen could not replace that I ended up having to scale back quite a bit on that.

I'm hoping its not too dark on everyone else's monitor. I've recently printed my first photos and they're all a little darker than what it looks like on my monitor (and less saturated) I'm still trying to work out if that's because I should have converted to a different colourspace myself before printing or if it means my monitor is not calibrated correctly.