Mad-busy January simultaneously studying for and NVQ2 in business and administration (excitement, I know) doing work experience at the New Vic Theatre, job-shopping and looking for a flat in Wolverhampton at the same time. I managed to carve out some time this weekend in between packing (moving next weekend yo) to attend a textiles workshop with Emily Notman which was the highlight of my month. Oh my days! It was awesome! I've missed being in a workshop so much! At the same time I was totally out of my artistic comfort zone playing around with fabric, sewing machines and wotnot, which is always great.

Unfortunately most of my photographs look like gobshite on toast so I guess you'll have to watch this space until I can take less crappy ones. Wouldn't hold your breath.

...oatcakes

Best graffiti I've seen in stoke for ages

Best thing about being back at my parent's place for Christmas is finding random old stuff like this. I must have been about 14 when I drew this comic. It was meant to be about two kids who live in an underground civilisation of inter-connected tunnels and fight with shovels against vicious tunnel bears that eat people. Because that was the sort of thing I thought about during French class for some reason. I was totally normal like that. Done with fineliner and touched up with MSpaint (we had no photoshop in the dark ages).

Finished colouring in my angels collage so I attempted to mashup the two halves. Eh, not my best stuff because I should have turned the sketchbook round when I took the second photo so that the lighting would match up but I guess its been a little bit fun playing around with it on photoshop, so I count that as the most fun I have ever had on photoshop. I hate working on photoshop :o(

Material-experimentin' time! I am pretty unashamedly chuffed with this first maquette, it's just like how I imagined it would be. Needs time to dry and then get fried to death in my grandad's old kiln. All the parts where I have cut through would be where the comic panels will be. I'm so excited ^_^

These are my test tiles waiting to be fired either tomorrow or the day after. Unfortunately at the moment I can only get my hands on pre-mixed glazes and grandad also left me a load that all unfortunately contain lead (meaning they would be totally redundant on bowls for example) Decided to test a few anyways and then the two on the far right are some spectrum glazes my dad bought me for christmas, and I've recorded them all in a handy little database on my laptop so I can keep all my test information in one place.

A bit concerned about trying to create a firing schedule for a kiln that has no temperature cutoff aside from the plug but I suppose all I can really do is try to mimic one to the best of my ability and just resign myself to the fact that no two firings will be exactly the same.

here's an update of my angels collage

it's hideously early o'clock, here's an update of my angels collage. Have worked on it approximately 4 hours now.

Started an angel collage, using print-outs, fine-liner, pencil and chalk pastels I decided on massively oversized wings that look like they're bursting out of the page like they're ready to fly.

Still needs a bit of work in the middle, blending the print-out with my freehand parts and finishing off with more mid-tones but I think it's a good sign of things to come.