Craft spaces and inspirations

 My craft space, at the back of our sitting room

 Close up of my craft space

Mouse under a cushion

I am always fascinated by other people's craft spaces, so this is mine.  It is newly set up, although we moved into this flat a year ago.  The desk and most of the stash arrived from where it was being stored about six months ago and I finally unpacked the last of the Pickford boxes on 2 January 2012.  Yay!  

I had forgotten how lovely it is to be surround by crafting things.  What you cannot see is that behind the sofa I have three big bags of...well stuff.  At least it is hidden from view when guests visit.  I close the shutters outside at night, but during the day, they open up to a cityscape of the City of London, where I can see 30 St Marys Axe, aka 'the Gerkin' building, the Shard of Glass (Europe's highest skyscraper) and just the golden cross of St Paul's Cathedral (sadly the rest is hidden by a neighbouring building).  It is a beautiful vista in its own way.

My favourite type of art is represented here by the iconic image of Le Chat Noir, an 1896 poster by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.  'Fin de Siècle' refers to the end of the 19th Century (typically 1890s), an era of cynicism and debauchery but also of hope for the new century.  Arthur Rackam, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch are all of this period.  I love the painfully cold, but beautifully detailed pen and ink (black and white) drawings of Beardsley and the downright creepy illustrations of Rackam to which I was introduced as a child through a book of Aesop's Fables given to my younger brother.  I also love the art, architecture, furniture and jewellery design of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods that followed and the future echos of artists and poets like William Blake who preceded Fin de Siècle with his Songs of Innocence and Experience.  To my mind, these artists managed to break away from recieved wisdom about what art should look like and yet still convey such emotion and conviction in their works.  What talent, what courage!  What I take from this is that when all around you looks bleak and empty, create, create and keep on creating, because even if your inspiration is something negative, you can still use it to create something positive.

WIP - iPad drawing of Storm

iPad 2 drawing of Storm (click picture for closer look)

Storm as a kitten

I have many works in progress. This is a drawing of Storm that I started on the iPad (Brushes for iPad) and have yet to finish. The truth is that I loved 'painting' Storm, but became thoroughly bored of painting the background.

'Painting' on the iPad is ultimately just finger painting, as unless you have a stylus, it is just you and your index finger. I now have a Cosmonaut capacitive stylus that looks like a big crayon, but at the time I drew this, I did not have a stylus. The stylus has a relatively large tip (honestly, looks as large as those big, big Crayola crayons for toddlers) as the iPad anticipates a finger tip touching it and demands a similar stylus 'footprint'. I think the stylus works by transferring energy from your fingers, as again, the iPad anticipates the heat/electrical input from your fingertips to register a touch. I will have to google it.

Frankly, there is a certain amount of cheating going on in this drawing as I did use my original photo as an invisible/barely visible layer to allow me to trace some of the main shapes/folds and to give me a good colour reference. With the dropper function on Brushes, I could simply select the colour off the photograph itself. That said, it doesn't quite work out to be as easy as you'd hope because the colours were too dull on the original (shadows darkening Storm's bright eyes and making the red sheets on the bed look a muddy brown). Also, just like a painting, the more you cover up your original guidelines, the less useful they become. Needless to say, but even getting this far took hours.