bonnie birds – taking lessons from the master

Alasdair has been guiding me through the process of making one of his Bonnie Birds…it’s not a process I will be repeating in the near future!

First you have to make the armature, which is quick and easy enough.  Then comes the mache, which refuses to stick to the armature.  Alasdair’s most helpful advice was to keep squeezing it together until it looked body like…yeah, ok…the more I squeezed, the more determined the stuff was to stick to me and not the armature!  Then, and I am not the most patient of people, you have to wait overnight for the body to dry…

…next night you can make the tail in the same way…mache stuck everywhere but where it was supposed to be, and once again we had to leave them overnight to dry.  The next night was a repeat performance for the head…I nearly threw it on the fire that night!  My beak was huge, then too thin, then it all fell off…argh!

Alasdair assured me that it would all be ok in the end and to just try and get a sort of shape that sort of resembled a bird.  I trust him, because he’s my husband, so I persevered, tried my best and created something resembling a bird.

This is Alasdair’s bird after sanding.  Mine was too ugly to contemplate at this stage.

The next stage was to sand it all down…I needed to wait for the weekend for this…I won’t bore you with the whys and wherefores.  Alasdair insists that sanding is key and other than advising me ‘not to be shy about it’ his other top tip was to mind my fingers!?  That exercise went a whole lot better than I imagined it would and I ended up with the shape you see in the finished article.  Alasdair was right…all of the mistakes I made earlier were wiped out at this point.

The final stage of painting and varnishing were nerve-racking for me.  I’d spent all week making this bird and was about to ruin it all with one wrong brushstroke.  Fortunately the Bonnie Bird is a forgiving creature and I was able to rescue it from an overzealous paint job by imagining target practice where the wings should be.

This is me fixing the bits that I missed the first time I varnished it…oops!

As I said, it took me two weeks to make mine from start to finish…Alasdair made five in that same time.  See them all in the background laughing at my bird’s short legs and lumpy backside…still I think it’s pretty good for a first (and only) attempt.

more bonnie birds … an obsession in papier mache!

It’s funny how an idea can sprout wings and take-off (dreadful pun entirely intended), such as it has been with these bonnie birds.  It’s rather refreshing to have something I can make out of papier mache that doesn’t take forever and a day and that isn’t a bowl!  Aside from this pair I’m hatching three more and they should be fully fledged in the next few days (and yes, that was a couple more of dreadful puns that were entirely intended).

This pair seem to be diametrically opposed in terms of form, one’s short and fat and the other a bit leggy with a great fan of a tail, the tail’s something I can see me repeating and refining on future versions.

Of course, like all birds that flock, it doesn’t take long for them to catch-up with more of their own kind …

… I imagine this flock will be growing as they, ahem, get to know each other better … well, it is almost Spring!!

All of these birds are available for sale in our shop.

Papier mache wall art

It’s been commented on in the past that there are strange things going on in the dark recesses of my mind, that they seem to bleed out into the light through what I create … I think ‘they’ may have a point.

I seem to have a raft of canvasses lying around and despite repeated attempts to paint something of any worth on them I seem to fail and fail again.  The canvas here has been used so many times now that I can’t recall how many images lie beneath this final effort, perhaps it’s a furious amalgam of all that went before, a seething anger at the ineptitude slapped on the canvas below.

Whatever it is, using a canvas as a base for some wall art/sculpture is an avenue of interest to me and something I feel sure I will pursue further at some future point.  In the meantime I can think of at least two (more conventional) sculptures that deserve to be finished after well over a years worth of idling!

Mushroom bowls in blue – reworked

Regular readers may well recall these bowls in their original form, you can see them here.  As then they were blue, and they are finished with varnish.  What is different is the depth of the ’sub-coat’ I apply to these pieces, the method in which the paint was applied and finally the varnish used is a much tougher and much higher gloss variety.

In all honesty I was never satisfied with the bowls, despite the compliments (thanks!), and when I brought them out at one of our recent craft fayres I was compelled to immediately re-wrap them and return them to the crate from whence they came!

With everything that’s been going on of late I struggled to get them finished, but the final coat of varnish is dry and we even managed a wee drop of winter sunshine to get some piccies taken … sunshine makes me happy!  Anyway, here are the bowls:

click the images for full-view

Mushroom bowls in red ~ the final set

This is the final set of mushroom inspired paper pottery bowls, the other sets can be seen here and here.

All three sets were made using the same set of moulds, although despite this I think they are all quite different in terms of shape, of course the variation in colour also helps to accentuate the differences.  Personally my favourite set is the brown/tan version, although I really like the this final set too for which I used a different varnish that has a subtle lilac hue to it which works really well with the reddy colour.

I’ll be making some more sets of bowls in due course, although I think I’ll aim for something quite different from these sets, maybe something a little larger, although equally as organic in feel … but more of that later. 

Coming in the more immediate future we have a sample or two from Jolene’s newly created ‘make-it-yourself’ bird hanger set which will be available at the forthcoming fairs we’re attending and we also have some more of her Sock Creatures.

Spring inspired bowls

I’ve been meaning to make these for an age and whilst the inspiration is very much borne of the spring time the design is based on an earlier bowl I made way back when, here. 

I don’t know about you, but as we prepare to plunge into the depths of winter (haven’t we already plunged?) it seems like a remarkably good idea to do everything we can to remind ourselves that the long dark nights and the miserable weather only last until spring … actually the weather never really improves beyond getting a mite warmer, it does at least get lighter though!

Mushroom bowls in blue ~ another set of three

This is the second set of bowls I’ve made along the mushroom lines, of course mushrooms don’t traditionally come in shades of blue, but then traditionally bowls don’t come in the form of mushrooms.  I have been keen to experiment with colour and whilst I was initially sceptical about making these blue they are beginning to grow on me … not that I have some sort of fungal infection you understand, it’s just that I’m coming to like the bowls!

These bowls are made on the same moulds as the previous set, and despite this you can readily see that the bowls themselves are rather different from one another not only in colour but also in shape and weight.  The bowls shown here have a much lighter or finer finish to them than their predecessors, although each is as robust as the other, I was mildly concerned that the blue bowls would be rather flimsy so I was pleased to discover that the finish I use gives a rigidity to the edges that you might not otherwise expect.

please click on images to see a larger image

I have one final set of these in the pipeline, in fact, I’ve already removed them from their moulds and the moulds are no more.

Mushroom bowls ~ a set of three

This is the first finished set of paper pottery bowls that I mentioned earlier (below) when I was showing the ‘little red bowl’.  The original inspiration for these bowls is obviously mushrooms, although the notion to create a set or two was borne of an earlier single bowl I made which is available in the shop, here.

I’m rather pleased with the outcome although with the weather being truely evil of late and in the absence of a light box I’ve really struggled to get any pictures.  I only managed to get  these photo’s during a very brief interlude in the weather that only really lasted long enough for me to set up my ’studio’.

More mushroom bowls coming soon, I’m experimenting a bit with alternative colours, so expect something a wee bit different.

Paper pottery – a little red bowl

It’s been quite some time since I did any paper pottery and it was something i was pleased to get back to a two or three weeks ago when I decided I needed a rest from the ‘plant pokes’ I’d been working on.  The piece shown here is the first of nine pieces I’ve been working on, this one is the most individual of the set and I’ll presenting a couple of simple ’spring bowls’ in a few days time as well and two sets of three ‘mushroom bowls’ … those however are for later.

I’m relatively pleased with the way this has turned out, especially since it is the first I’ve done in some time, the simple colour scheme is probably borne of an abstract ‘ladybird bowl’ that sits in our window sill and was one of the first pieces I made a few years ago.  I suspect though that a more immediate influence has been the scenes of autumn that have been surrounding us for the last month or so, lots of reds, oranges, yellows and browns this year.  Very nice.

… and a couple of fun photo’s …

… obviously when i say, ‘fun’, I mean it in the, ‘I need to get out more’ sense!

In terms of uses for such a bowl, well it is largely decorative, although we use bowls like this for keeping nick-nacks and keys in and so on