Two buildings and two boats

 

I have four more small postcard sized watercolour-pen paintings on the go. As it says in the heading two are of buildings  - one in Sherray and one in Armadale Scotland. The Skerray building is above and the stone cottage ruin in Armadale is below.

The two boats are both abandoned wrecked boats at Skerray Harbour.

Some images of my process-progress follow.

I hope to finish these four next week.

IIn the meantime I'm loading a few matted watercolours into my online shop. Fiona and I will be launching our updated websites and shops in a newsletter in the near future.

Small Silver Books

 

Now that our large public studio-gallery has closed and our home-based making spaces are set up, Fiona and I can now turn our minds to refreshing our websites and online shops.

One of the products I will continue to make are Small Silver Books with words stamped on the internal pages as can be seen in the opening photo - dream. The books are about 4.5cm high, 4cm wide and 2.5cm across the opening. In the main they are made from salvaged good quality silver-plated placemats

Initially I will have four words - dream, love, shine and hope - see photos below.

The books will be found under the new shop categories of Mindful Metal and Artists Books. Mindful Metal because I hope they encourage folk to pause and make the words their own; and Artists Books because they are small metal books with words made to my design.

Some process photos follow.

In the near future we will be sending out a newsletter letting folk know about changes to the websites and shops.

In the house and on the verges - beauty and hope

 

Bringing beauty inside can be such a joy as you can see in the colours and textures of the flowers in the opening photo and those following. I love how the colours of paintings and glass splashback  combine with the natural beauty of the flowers. Flower arrangements by Fiona - bringing beauty in for my birthday.

The verges on this morning's walk offered more fragments of colour and beauty.

Fallen blossoms in the roadside gutter have such gorgeous texture and subtle colour.

I took the following photo of a stamped ceramic tile and a crystal to simply round off todays blog.

May we pause now and then to let the light in to offer us hope.

Words to live life by?

 

I'm making four sets of Daily Leaf Words and 12 small metal books for my online shop. After cutting the leaf pieces and the 'pages' for the small metal books I grabbed a bit of time to stamp the words on: seven words on the Daily Leaf Words and four on the books.

The opening image shows the stash of stamped metal for the word leaves.

Below are the 'pages' for the books with stamped centre page.

A few more process photos follow. I love the images of the metal stamps and the stamped word "wonder".

When time permits the leaf metal will be folded and cut into their leaf shape etc etc - several more steps to go yet. The book pages will be riveted into their book forms after polishing and grinding. I will blog on the Daily Leaf Words and the small Metal Books when they are ready for the shop.

I had a tricky cutting morning - but I got there

 

I've agreed to carry out a repair and restoration job that requires the making of stainless steel sculptural elements that have gone missing over time. Each of the missing pieces is unique in shape!!!!

I followed up with several metal fabricating companies - but in the end all declined to do the work - too fiddly I think. So it was up to me. Today I set myself the task of cutting the pieces with my trusty side grinder. Not an easy task to get a straight edged grinding disk to cut curves. Over time I had collected almost worn out disks so that I had a stash that were of a small diameter and therefore could be persuaded to slowly cut curves. 

The trickiest piece was a hollow circle but as you can see from the opening photo with some patience I got there.

The photo below shows a couple of the pieces marked up on the metal.

And then some progress photos.

Cutting hard 3mm stainless steel is not for the faint hearted. The rough cut pieces will be finessed, ground and then sanded to a brushed finish.

I see red - beautiful and joyous

 

This blog post is not about song lyrics but rather the fact that red was the dominant flower colour I saw on this morning's walk. In almost direction I looked I could see red, or a shade of red, popping out in the sunlight.

This blog post is simply a celebration of the beauty of red. All photos were taken this morning.

Nature develops and delivers some intense colours to light and excite us.