Shoshiplatypus

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

This was the staged setup on my desk by the window in the studio on Monday, following the craft show on Saturday.

You can see full details on my previous post, here.

It was a great day, and as usual I came home with a lot of stuff, most of which wasn’t on my shopping list! I had hoped to find some of the new Tim Holtz Distress Embossing Glazes but they don’t seem to have hit our shores yet. I shall have to get them online.

Gesso

I haven’t done any more brush calligraphy practice with my Tombows. I’ve been quite busy this week, apart from the craft show, and having to rest, but following the advice of various people online, I decided to prepare some card with gesso in readiness for more Tombow work. I used some cheap printer card. This is rubbish for ordinary art stuff because it disintegrates at the slightest touch of water-based media, but it does at least hold up to a coating of gesso, and this improves it to useable quality for lots of purposes.

I covered quite a lot of sheets, some with white gesso and some with grey, which I mixed myself from black and white gessos.

I have to say that the Tombow pens blend absolutely beautifully on this surface! The gesso does give the paper quite a bit more tooth, so I sanded it with a fine sanding block once it was dry, to make a nice smooth surface for the pens. If you are not careful, you can ruin the brush nibs of Tombows by using them on a rough surface. So far all I’ve done is a trial swatch of my Tombow colours on the grey sheet. I need to redo this to get the correct order but I don’t want to do that until the final colour arrives, that is still on order.

I am planning on printing off some drawings on this card and then adding the gesso. I saw a YouTube video last week where they did this – using a thin coat of white gesso, the black lines of the drawing were beautifully muted, and you could always go over them to re-emphasise them, either all over, or selectively, according to the design, and the effect you wanted.

I have got some clear gesso but this produces a huge amount of tooth – almost like sandpaper! It’s really gritty. I didn’t want to use this, so at the craft show I asked on the Art Van Go stand if their clear gesso was smooth, and he told me that it was, and he’d never heard of a clear gesso that had given that amount of tooth. I bought some, but I haven’t tried it yet. I also bought some more black gesso because mine is ancient, and it’s getting very globby which makes it difficult to use. The new black gesso is by Golden, and he told me that it is very, very black! They had a customer who dropped a pot of it on the carpet once, and it was impossible to clean up! A little goes a very long way. Golden products are superb quality; I have quite a lot of their gel media and polymers, and I look forward to trying the gesso. I also bought some heavy bodied gesso for textures.

Before I get started with colouring in earnest, I am hoping to do some new drawings this week, and scan them onto the computer so that I can print several out at once. I will also be able to resize them as necessary, for different uses. I want to do some more Celtic-style drawings, and also some from my Florabunda book and from my Crafters’ Design Library “Florals” book that I bought at the village fete last summer. I’ve also downloaded a few more free adult colouring pages which I am going to adapt and personalise a bit, because I like things to be my own work if at all possible. All of these will be useful for cards and other purposes, and I am looking forward to trying different media on the gessoed surfaces as well – my Inktense pencils, watercolours, watercolour pencils, Distress Inks, Perfect Pearls and so on, in addition to the Tombows, and in combination. I also want to see if the new Distress Oxide sprays that I bought at the show will work with this.

Another project in the pipeline is to get hold of some fine mister spray bottles so that I can transfer my collection of Distress Stains over. I hate the dauber tops on them – impossible to get even coverage, and I think that if they are in spray form, I shall use them a great deal more than I am at present. I hear that Ranger is stopping production of the daubers and going over exclusively to sprays, but I certainly don’t want to have to replace the whole set. I have found lots of spray bottles on Ebay but the ones I have had in the past have not produced a fine enough mist, so I’m not sure of the way forward on that one.

I also want to do some reorganising in the studio – on my Craft Show post I mentioned about redoing my stamp and die storage, with the folder I bought at the show. There are certain things in the studio which are no longer working well for me, and part of this process will involve me finally getting down to sorting through a load of stuff and sending it off to where it will get better use!

Food

I have been using the “Forks Over Knives” whole-food plant-based meal planner this week – I got the free trial version. I am not going to subscribe to the full version because there is something similar in my existing Paprika app. However, Forks has a wonderful collection of recipes and we tried some of them this week – a great success! Unfortunately my two favourites are only available on the meal planner and I don’t want to violate the copyright but I can share another new favourite which is on their main recipe list and freely available. (This is not exactly the same as the meal planner one which I made, but it looks pretty similar.)

Recipe of the Week

Veggie Fajitas

I didn’t have any tortillas so I used wholegrain wraps. To accompany this, I made a quick salad with baby spinach and diced avocado, and:

Easy Home-made Salsa

This salsa is very delicious with a variety of things. I exchanged the sugar for a couple of dates.

The Forks Over Knives website is a spin-off from the film of the same name, available on Netflix and DVD, which is really foundational to understanding the benefits of the whole-food plant-based lifestyle – well worth seeing.

Kitties

In the recent storm, two of our fence panels were damaged beyond repair and my hubby has had to replace them. When they blew down, they also damaged the kitty defences, so he has been busy (weather permitting) putting these back as well. As a result, the kitties have been housebound, but they don’t object to that, because they wouldn’t have enjoyed being out in the storm anyway. When the weather is bad, they like nothing better than to cuddle up together and keep warm, and they sleep a LOT.

Here’s Lily playing peek-a-boo through the banisters.

Health Update

Tomorrow morning I’ve got my bladder appointment with the physiotherapist, as a follow-up to the group session I had a few weeks ago. She may refer me on to a urologist if she thinks it’s necessary. There was a questionnaire with the appointment letter which I have to fill in and give her at the appointment. I haven’t heard anything yet from Exeter, of course, about my forthcoming operation, and I don’t expect to for quite a while.