Paint By Numbers!

Almost everyone I know attempted a 'Paint By Numbers' set as a child. But I don't know of anyone who has ever completed one. I bought this paint by numbers of a giraffe and am about halfway through beating the challenge. It IS a bit boring, but only in the same way that a jigsaw puzzle is a bit boring (you already know how the picture will turn out).

 I'm DETERMINED to finish it. Anticipate a photo of the finished result some time within the next week and the next month!

Wedding Portrait

I'm so excited to tell you that we have hired an artist to paint our wedding portrait! Laura Manfre will paint our portrait in watercolour. Her work is really vibrant and has an interesting sort of 'blotchiness'. Here's some examples. I have no idea if she has ever painted a wedding portrait before: I fell in love with her painting of a pug dog!

Her prices are very reasonable, and she only charges £10 extra to have two people in the painting. I'd recommend her (even though I don't yet know what the finished painting will look like) if you need a wedding portrait or are just feeling egotistical. Let's be honest, no one really needs a wedding portrait.

Although this is the only wedding detail I have yet organised, besides booking the venue, it makes me feel hopeful that I will make progress in other areas of wedding planning, too!

You can look out for the finished painting some time near the beginning of August.

Wedding Invitations

My friend Liz hosted a craft night on Thursday, which was fun. I always wish crafting was more social and I got my wish! 

I ordered some stuff with which to make wedding invitations from Hong Kong, but it never arrived, so now I need to start thinking of other ways to make them. I had this idea of doing pairs of something with a watercolour wash background. It took me about 2 hours to do 16 of them: I hope the real invitations don't take that long!

These are some of the designs:

 

 

On Friday I showed them to people and most liked the turtles or the fish or starfish. I liked the ghosts. 'They're not very weddingy', said everyone. (I had thought that the ocean creatures matched the fact that it's a beach wedding). But then I got home. 'I like the ghosts', Jouni said. And then I smiled, because I knew it meant people would be getting ghost invitations whether they liked it or not!

On Saturday morning I messed around with some ideas for the text inside the invitations. I'm not sure yet which I like best:

As a person who is neither very organised nor very weddingy, these invitations probably won't get sent out for another month. We need to buy card and I need to paint all the little pictures. Theres so much stuff to do! It should all pay off though, because I think on the day everyone will have a lot of fun.

Art A Level: Salt painting and Sewing

I've been having fun recently with salf painting, which is where you apply watercolour paint and then throw a ton of salt on. Here I sewed a portrait (well, half a portrait) and then applied the watercolour paint and the salt after wetting the cardboard I had sewed on. It looks pretty cool but the sewing hurt my hand through the cardboard: I guess I need to learn how to use a thimble.