Size: 10 x 8 inches with ready-to-frame 12 x 10 inch arctic white mattboard, and signed by the artist.
Material: 140lb/300gsm Cold pressed NOT Daler-Rowney watercolour paper with archival, recycleable, whitecore matt
Media: Watercolour, coloured pencil, ink, gouache, glitter & gems
Frame: Ready to frame, frame not included

Buy Now!

Original art and design copyright Klair Scattergood 2011 (http://rhomany.org.uk).

All images and other content Copyright ©2011 by Klair ‘Rhomany’ Scattergood . All rights reserved by artist. Buyer is not purchasing the rights to the image. Any and all publishing and reproduction rights are reserved solely by the artist. This image is not to be re-distributed, copied, imitated, or misappropriated in any way. If you are in any way unsure of the legal rights retained by the artist following the sale of the work, or are purchasing this artwork with the intention of re-selling this work you must be aware of the Visual Artists Rights Act. Thank you.

*Original photo-credit for this piece goes to Jillian Iris. Photo reference used with full permission. Please do not re-use photo without permission of the owner.

Let go of the need to have everything straight, uniform and regular.

Lettering can bring a whole new dimension to whatever you create, from scrapbooks and journals to canvas paintings & fabric art. All you need is a few simple tools, a little know how and a dash of creative mojo.

This is not just a class on doodling with a pen people! We’re going to work with pencil and pen to begin with, yes. But then we’re going to use paint and paper to create proper mixed media effects!

Join me for 5 weeks of mixed media lettering fun!

This class is designated as ‘self study’. This means all materials are available as soon as you enter the classroom.

All classes whether live or self study, have full tutor support.

SIGN UP NOW!

£40 (approx $65)

 

Already a member of the new site? Click here to auto-enrol via Paypal!

Here’s Tam herself to tell you all about it!

Sign up to the group here! (Don’t forget to join Willowing & Friends if you’re not already a member)

Tam’s currently posting a new artist interview every month over on Willowing & Friends. I did an interview for September and in August she interviewed the lovely Bonnie Rose. Not sure who’s up for October (our other mod, Iris maybe?), but there’s only a few days left until we find out.

picture courtesy of Amazon.co.uk

I’ve been eyeing up Wacom tablets for a while, but I didn’t really see how I could justify buying one, because I have never considered myself a graphic artist and until last week I had never really used a good one or seen someone who knew what to do with it give a demo. I did know that being an illustrator I really needed to add it to my repertoire but I didn’t want something that would turn into an expensive paper weight through lack of use.

But while I was away a friend brought her Wacom and Mac with her and showed me how you can use it as a normal sketch artist in a similar way to drawing on paper, then how to use it for manipulation in Photoshop. I tried it out a bit for myself but felt a bit under pressure drawing in public and it felt very weird, but I liked it. So when I go home I ordered the Wacom Bamboo A5 Pen & Touch from the company account and started to play. Most of what I know so far is from my friend and her partner, but I can give a personal beginners-eye view of it.

As a complete beginner on tablets (I’ve totalled about 3 hours playing with them over the years) I have to say it takes some getting used to. The pad on the table represents the screen you’re looking at or the canvas you’re drawing on and it feels weird having to scale your movements. If you’re a bit heavy handed you might do better with a bigger version. If you like to draw at a slant then you can turn your canvas to match how you hold the tablet which is handy, but skews your perspective. You have to be used to drawing at and angle to get it right.

Fine details are easy, you just zoom in and use tiny movements, it’s the larger gestures I find difficult. The pen on the tablet feels a lot different to a pen on paper as there’s no ‘grab. On paper, with a nib pen I can draw an almost perfect circle. On the tablet that’ll  need a bit more practice to say the least. It’s a whole new way of drawing but it does come to you. I struggled with pressing the buttons on the pen because I tend to turn my pen when I’m using it, but after a while I stopped doing that. Working in layers is natural to me as I’ve worked with a mouse for years, but if you’re not familiar with layers you need to be.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with it so far and I think for the price I paid it’s a bargain. It’s a steep learning curve but I’m glad I got it as I can definitely see the benefits of using this over a mouse, even with my limited skills. Even if I only ever use f for cleaning up my scans it’s worth the price. It really isn’t one of those things you’ll just throw in the corner and forget about after a week. It’s too intriguing. Plus it’s a nice change of position for those of us with the beginnings of RSI.

I will keep practicing and I am looking out for any online tutorials for tablets, so if you know of any good ones please let me know. I’ll let you know how I get on at a later date.

I loved her so much I recreated her in my own style as a proper mixed media painting with a new theme.

'And the Night Heralds the Dawn' 10x12" mixed media © 2010 Klair Scattergood

Click here to purchase on Artfire (no sign up required)

'Gemini Magic' 8x12

The faces are done in graphite and Prismacolor pencils, with a little Cosmic Shimmer and black gel pen in the eyes. The hair is acrylic, the background is Portfolio watersoluble oil pastels smooshed (technical term) with white acrylic. Then I covered the oil pastel with clear gesso and did the writing in Uniball POSCA poster paint markers.

I’m really getting into these monochromatic faces and I’ve got a painting in progress that mayfeature these colours too.

Speaking of Gemini twins…

Guess who’s TWELVE years old today?!

Quinn (aka 'The Bear') bottom, and his twin sister Crowe (aka 'Madam'), top

They often sleep like this. They were born wrapped around each other, the biggest (‘Bear’ is now 36″ from nose to tail tip) and the runt (she weighs less than my netbook) of the litter.They still find the greatest comfort in each other. He will happily fall asleep while she prods him, chatters at him, licks him clean, kneads at him with her paws and all other manner of things. They never fight. Quinn is a big scaredy cat and apart from a couple of people he doesn’t like people in the house. He hides upstairs with wide eyes until they go away. Crowe is very protective of him and generally sits on the stairs between him and whatever’s scared him, be it human or just a loud noise. Crowe also protects me from big bad spiders and looks very proud of herself when she catches one. Now if she’d just stop bringing them back to show me…

When I watch them running around the house like loons or chasing their own tails, its hard to believe they’re technically classed as ‘elderly’ by the vet. Even he’s surprised that they’ve never been sick, not once, although Quinn was born with a heart murmur.

They are my studio cats. Always there, always watching, sometimes getting in and licking the brushes for me, other times pawing at the brush water or drinking my tea – Crowe likes to help herself to a bit of my Earl Grey.

There’s nothing like sitting painting and listening to a chorus of cat purrs.

'Some Frogs Are Purple' 12x10" mixed media © 2010 Klair Scattergood

Click here to purchase on Artfire (no sign up required)

You can see a ‘step-by-step’ creation of this painting in this previous post.

'Mr Darcy, I Presume?' 12x10" mixed media on canvas board © 2010 Klair Scattergood

Click to purchase from Artfire (no sign up required)

————————————————————————————————————————————-

You can now purchase my bookbinding and art journal workshops through my ArtFire studio too!

That’s how I work. Doing a ‘page/prompt/challenge a day’ constrains me and makes me feel claustrophobic. What if what I’m really struck by is a prompt form 3 days ago? What if the challenge for today doesn’t fit with the wonderful picture of a ballerina I want to use? These are the fears I feel when I feel like I ‘should’ be doing things. ‘Shoulds’ make it feel like work and if there’s one place I shouldn’t be working it’s in my journal! My journal is where I let rip and don’t care and just do. It’s about producing something, not how good or bad or large or worthy it is. I don’t even care if it doesn’t stick to the theme at all.

With all the stress and strain I already feel as an artist, the last thing I need is for my art journal to become yet another albatross. It’s my safe haven. A place I can go and see if those inks work with my quill, whether the paint I got yesterday shows up over black acrylic and to try out the new pens on different types of paper. It is not somewhere where I ‘must’ or ‘should’ or ‘have to’. My art journal has no deadlines.

I have but one rule: Every day do something.

The something doesn’t matter, as long as I’ve done it. Sometimes all I do is go back and fill in a blank spot on a page with a ‘To Do List’. Some days that’s all I can manage.

The NaNoJouMo prompts are coming to an end for November, but I’m thinking they’ll probably keep me going until the end of the year. Which is great because a) I’m really busy til the end of the year so not having to think about what I’m doing is a nice change, b) if I do one or two single page spreads I can finish this journal which means c) I get to spend New Year’s Eve making my new journal and watching back-to-back Christmas films and ‘Jules Holland’s Hootenanny’ – a tradition I’ve come to love.

I’m currently working on page 9 through 15, which are in various stages of incomplete. Here are 5-8 which I think may be finished. Click to view large as always.

5: Solitude

There is nothing like a nice quiet cup of tea on a winter’s morning. The fire spreading warmth through the room, the tea causing condensation on the windows, the cats screaming for their breakfast before you dare to sit down…

'Solitude' 8"x20" art journal page © Klair Scattergood

6: Felicity

I actually had no idea what felicity meant. So I looked it up.

'Felicity' 8"x20" art journal page © Klair Scattergood

7: Compassion

I loved this picture and just didn’t want to change it. I wanted to put it in my journal to ‘keep’ for myself. The photograph is from National Geographic Vol 182-1 July 1992 and is by the incredibly talented outdoor photographer Peter Essick. I assume © lies with him or NG, it doesn’t lie with me.

'Compassion' 8"x20" art journal page © Klair Scattergood

8: (not) Emphatic

‘Emphatic’ didn’t really do it for me, so I finished off this page instead. It’s been a work in progress for about 6 months because I just didn’t know what to do with it. Somehow I ended up with a vase and an elephant with no idea how or why or what I was going to do to make them work together. So I gave up and just did some lettering. Sometimes it’s about the pictures you chose being nice to look at, not about making them work as a new piece of art.

'(not) Emphatic' 8"x20" art journal page © Klair Scattergood

I have a nice quiet weekend coming up with nothing more stressful than listing a few things in my shop to do, so I’m looking forward to finishing a few more pages for next week. Or maybe starting a few more, who knows? I go where the muse takes me.