I’m not that keen on November as a month. It’s dark, wet, cold and windy. The long lead-in to Christmas has begun and my workplace is getting busy. I feel both tired and restless at the moment so these projects are a welcome distraction.
You remember this papier mache vessel?

Well, I painted it and it now looks like this.


Yesterday, I covered string, balloons and myself in glue doing these string spheres.

The idea here is that you saturate the string in a glue/water solution, wrap it around an inflated balloon, let it dry and then burst the balloon. You should be left with a rigid string sphere.
Hey. Look. There’s a smaller one on my notebook.

By the way, that’s my workspace in my converted attic. Messy. Cluttered. I’ve always been a messy worker. My desk is always cluttered with stuff. It’s how I like it. I kind of need this sort of clutter to be able to work. Both at home and in my office. There are several things on the go here, and a few more out of sight. I do know where everything is. Kind of.
The thing on the right at the bottom of the picture is this.

It’s a little dark in this photo. When I shone more light on it, it lost definition. It looks better in real life. Over the last month or so I felt that I was losing confidence and motivation so I needed to do something like this to restore it. It’s on slate. The slate is painted with acrylic and the flowers are gouache. I really love gouache. I find it easy to work with and its opacity works well with things like this. It’s also quite forgiving, in that you can paint over mistakes.
That’s it for now.