a little before-and-after post of The August Five

More Bears

Bear production is going well! Here is another medium length faux fur bear.

   This one is very keen on headstands as when he rights himself, he growls!!! There's a double-growler method where you use two taped together with one upside-down so that the bear can speak without having to be tipped both ways. It would have to be quite a big bear to contain two growlers.

With his sparkly-eyed brother.

Little 9 inch jumbo-cord brown bear, his pelt was upcycled from a pair of trousers. I made him in the Summer but have only just got around to photographing him properly. The combination of the dreary Winter light and feeling that i need to take better indoor pictures of the bears had me spending a whole week experimenting with light and props. My mini-artist's mannequin seems to suit the bears' portraits.

This little grey fleece bear needs more photographs. He looks very well with the foxgloves back in June.

I think these are sweet pictures and i'll try and take them again with improved lighting.

 This is the 4th of the August Five. He's 19 inches tall and weighs 1lb and 12oz. I like his pelt, it's very cheap fun-fur stuff from the local market but clumpy like a sheep. I do wonder if i should be making customer-specific bears: plastic safety eyes as well as noses for children and save the glass eyes for extra-special bears which adults might like. At the moment i'm using a mixture of bottom and mid-range furs with glass eyes but plastic noses. It only occurred to me recently that the danger of glass eyes for children may not be that they could loosen and get swallowed so much as might get bitten and shatter in the child's mouth.
  Perhaps it would be best to save all the posh and potentially dangerous materials for adult customers. But then they might not get to be cuddled!

This tiny knitted bear will definitely be cuddled. I sent him to one of my oldest friends this week. She has just begun a long course of chemotherapy and Boris (as he has been named) is small enough (4 inches when standing) to sit quietly and supportively in Kelly's pocket.

Lastly, the two other tiny knit-bears seen previously in bits. The cream chap on the left is 5 inches tall and the little brown bear is 3 1/2 inches. Size 12 needles (2.75 or 2 US) - had to put my glasses on!

the show must go on, nevertheless

The five sets of bear parts photographed at the end of August (for heaven's sake) are gradually achieving their potential. There was some mis-ordering of joints and eyes, and a general loss of stamina over the last three weeks since Queenie went missing..the black dog snapped at my heels but i am rallying. If anyone's going to home a BovisBear, Christmas must be a likely time so i am cracking on.

This is a lovely medium to long length faux fur. I used glass eyes made sparkly with a metallic paint which shine beautifully in the dark thick fur. Lot of heart-in-mouth scissor sculpting around the muzzle and eyes and paws.

These curly bears can't keep still - really hard to get a focussed picture of them. I'm still tinkering with my patterns but think i've got the heads right now; i'm pleased with the longer muzzles and this boy even has cheekbones.

However i think i am placing the hind legs too far apart. All of the five appear to have rickets when standing. Luckily bears spend most of their time on all fours or having a sit-down.

 These bears are 20 inches tall. I need to re-work the body pattern as i found i had to set the heads further back into the hump section otherwise they hung woefully. Much breaking of cotter pins and undoing and re-sewing of the head joint - almost reduced to tears! i wonder if i should use a lighter stuffing for the heads instead of the heavy stuffing? Presumably old bears had/have Excelsior fillings, wood-wool.

I have made a return to traditional teddy-bear front paw shape for a little while. I saw a photograph of an old bear and felt nostalgic. Not certain if my realistic front paws are appreciated. I haven't given up my ambitions to make bear-like teddy bears; i shall start again (concurrently with larger teds) but on a much smaller scale.

   I have also been making knitted bears now that knitting season is upon us.

Here are 3 miniature woollen bear bodies and their respective limbs in a pile beside them. I shall give them button joints.

And here is a frankly monstrous bear knitted in a chunky wool blend, quite tight with 4mm needles in moss stitch (seed stitch if you're American). It's actually a nice mustardy golden colour in daylight but becomes this dirty orange in lamplight. I feel as though i've been knitting him forever - had no idea (until it was too late) that he would be this big - 26 inches! I have to order bigger eyes!!

This is one of the last pictures i took of Queenie, before she disappeared, playing on the rooftops with Uncle Boris and NoNo (who misses her.) I'm still leafleting the area and knocking on doors and I've met some very kind people; there are now many pairs of eyes looking for our girl.

everything went to pot eleven days ago

nearly finished, i think

25th September, after using glue and acrylic paint to darken the corona.

October 4th, just now.
I've been pulling and peeling bits of the gluey paint off here and there and i covered the bottom section in tissue paper and glue. When it was dry i smeared various yellows over the top, rubbing it in sometimes. I made the fabulous peacocky, labradorite blue on the right hand side (as you look) last week with Prussian, French Ultramarine (Green Shade, W+N), and Cerulean. (I hope you can see it - i've only just realized i'd mis-calibrated my screen and it wasn't showing at my end until i put it back to Adobe RGB.)
   This afternoon i felt the fizz of possibility that this painting has arrived at the beginning of the end. And for me, it will mark the end of the beginning.
                                         

equinoctial garden

The carnival of Sunflowers is over for the bees and the people (seeds left for the birds), and the long Fox Glove bombus party is a season ago but there are many Survivors in the garden, budding and blooming and playing on.

A Cobea bud! Also known as Cup and Saucer vine and Cathedral Bells, i grew this plant last year but had no flowers. I was fearing the worst again this year but spotted a couple of odd shaped leaves while i was washing up and rushed out to find they were buds!

Each stage of the flower's development is distinct and wonderful

and surprising: the flowers are unfurled for a day before they become purple.

i think this is a tea rose. My (nice side) next door neighbours were having their last remaining patch of earth concreted over several years ago and thoughtfully offered me their only cultivated plant. I rushed round with my spade and a bucket and rescued this lovely rose. I took these pictures at dawn last Thursday. These particular blooms have now been deadheaded but there are a few buds left on the bush.

i love Dahlias. I grow them every year from seed as i have usually slipped into a seasonal decline around the time i should be digging up and storing the bulbs. I am hoping to try and do the right thing this year, although i am a little disappointed to have had none of the big scarlet pompom blooms promised in the picture on the front of the seed packet. Nearly all of this years Dahlia are white and chrome yellow. These two are the exceptions.

When i became a gardener, my Mother told me i must grow Morning Glory and so i have done every year - sometimes a bit late, like this year, but they have obliged happily at the last minute. My friend Sally is a gardener now and i have passed on the lore.

This is a Helichrysum flower, on it's way out but fading with such grace, humility and quiet elegance - an example to us all. Snigger. But doesn't it look like a young Edwardian girl, gazing at the sun setting on the sea? Perhaps the Channel, perhaps she can hear the artillery....oh stop it.

I grew some new Astors this year. The colour hasn't transferred to screen very well, they are much mauver. I have a clump by the fish pond that i transplanted from my Grandmother's front garden when the family house was sold which are much paler and more delicate, proper Michaelmas Daisies.

The Datura are coming into their own now. I grew 10 this year, gave some away and have 5 or 6 in the garden. They deserve an entire post to themselves really. Sally alerted me to their extreme toxicity so i have a wash after hugging them now.

 These 2 little flowers are doing very well. Queenie is 5 and a half months old now! We assume NoNo is about a month older, 'though Queenie is taller all of a sudden. I'm hoping to be able to make a double appointment at the vets for their spayings so that they can get through the difficult day and convalescence together.

 

Nana will look after them. 

path of a painting

march

june 9th

July

august 29th

september 5th

september 12th

september 16th

I've had a very good couple of weeks of consistent and mostly daily  work on one painting. Instead of my usual attitude of doing a bit here and there and seeing what transpires, i have made decisions about the patterns and design on this canvas and, for the most part, stuck to them - even working on it in my sketchbook in the evenings downstairs to keep focused for the next day. The old method (which wasn't a method at all) never worked; paintings would be left for months, sometimes years, in unfinished states. There's a stack over there.
 An awful lot of claptrap is peddled about art. Especially painting and especially abstract painting. Most of the nonsense is spoken by those who can't paint but admire the ability to do so and plenty by art critics who really should know better. A mystique is created and a 'God is painting through me' element can even creep in. I am guilty of having a hierarchical scale of my own endeavors with painting at the top and embroidery, knitting, bear making and photography jostling beneath, buying, idiotically into the idea that art trumps craft.
   A painting is paint on a support. Painting is the act of putting paint on a support. That's all there is to it. And the viewer either likes it or doesn't like it.
    So in thinking and, more importantly, feeling like this, i've done more work in the last fortnight than i have for a very long time. Another reason for the tremendous Getting On With It is the thought which has developed into a certainty, that this and the plastered canvas are to be my last orb/circle paintings for a little while. I may tinker a bit on a smaller scale but i think some kind of unconscious desire has finally been satisfied. I used to rail against the orbs but an art therapist friend advised me not to, just to let them appear. In Steiner wisdom, so another friend mentioned, the circle represents a wish for wholeness.

  In Other News, I've made the first print of the Inner Ear lino cut. It needs some tidying up before i print it again. It's the first cut i've made using the new Pfeil tools and i'm thrilled to see that all the additional gouging i did to deepen the lines was unnecessary as even the light, single marks show very well.

 Ofcourse, one of the best things about any kind of art or craft is that nothing ever turns out perfectly..... so we keep going.