Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you all have a lovely day.

Enjoy the simple things.

Steampunk and an anniversary.

This week is the first anniversary of the Rusty and Boots blog. It's been going for a whole year. Yay! 😊 Thank you to everyone who has read it so far, I hope you've liked it.

For some reason this year I've somehow developed a liking for Steampunk. I didn't like it to begin with; when I first heard of it I thought 'What is this?' but then I didn't really get it. The more I saw of it the more I found out and now I understand the attraction.

As I love fantasy novels and films, Steampunk kind of fits into that genre, along with science fiction, with its nature of being an alternative history of the Victorian era or a sort of dystopian time in the future where we've gone back to those fashions and to steam energy rather than electricity. 

Obviously, having begun to like Steampunk and seeing so many artworks in that style, I had to have a go at creating my own art. This is my first attempt so I'm not sure how good it is yet but I have more ideas in which I hope to improve the imagery and composition.

First of all I painted the canvas in a rose gold shade, then used modelling paste to create the cogs, which to begin with I painted gold with brown parts like rust.

Then I used puff paste on some areas.

 

I painted the puff paste gold.

 

I added some brown cogs and placed some actual cogs on it to see where they might fit in.

 

Then I decided I didn't like the rose gold colour and repainted it with a kind of old gold. I also painted the puff paste creating a rust effect.

 

I added some painted cogs then attached the real ones.

 

So there it is. As I've said, this was my first attempt at anything vaguely Steampunk, so I'm not sure of the result yet and I may change it. This is only experimenting and playing with the style and feel and as I continue on my Steampunk journey, along with all my other textile and painting ideas, you will see the results. I hope you'll like them.

Autumn Colours

Here are some photos I've taken of leaves with their Autumn colours and some work in progress which has been inspired by them.

Some lovely sycamore leaves......

Some astilbe stalks.....

Some astilbe leaves.....

Some cherry tree leaves.....

Finally, this is the work in progress I've started which is inspired by the colours of Autumn and is another version of my Wild Nature wall hanging.

So far, I've cut strips of fabric in amber and chestnut and used machine embroidery over them. There's more work on the way! 😊

Wild Nature

I don't know about you but I feel like hibernating at the moment. We had a lovely sunny day at the weekend but from then on it's been rain, rain and more rain. 🌂⛈ There has even been flooding in some parts of the UK already and the winter weather has only just begun. I send my best wishes to all the people affected. 💖 

It's not that I don't like the autumn or winter, far from it, I love wrapping up to go out in the cold then warming up when I get home. I love the colours of the leaves and seeing them carpet the garden and pavements. (You'll see my love of all this in the future when I complete other pieces of work I have in mind.) It's just that sometimes, when you get several gloomy days in a row, it can get you down a bit. 

So, to try to brighten things up a bit and bring back memories of spring and summer with their warm days and bright flowers budding and blooming, here's my finished piece, 'Wild Nature'. 

I began with strips of fabric in two shades of green, representing the order and neatness some people like to impose on their gardens and nature. (I don't really like to. I try to keep mine tidy but weeds are very welcome. They are only flowers and are good for wildlife. 💮😀 )
   

Then I sewed over these strips with decorative machine embroidery. 

 

On top of that, I layered a piece of organza which I printed with leaves all over. This kind of represents the more wild and unruly side of nature. Nature goes and grows wherever she wants to and doesn't seem to like being controlled. 

 

I then applied some hand stitching over this using organic swirls, again representing the, well, 'naturalness' of nature. 😀 Nature doesn't go in straight lines, but prefers circles, spirals and branching patterns. 

 

I also added some daisies, dandelions and forget me nots. As I said earlier, daisies and dandelions are just flowers, not weeds to me and brighten up everything. 

 

I sewed some leaves onto plain green chiffon with machine stitching....

 

...then cut them out.

 

I sewed them around the edge of the wall hanging to break up the lines that the sides create and to represent nature breaking out of boundaries that humans place on it.

So, that's my Spring/Summer 'Wild Nature'. I'm working on Autumn and Winter will be here soon (quite literally! 😀)

Remembrance

I just wanted to give a small tribute to all the people who sacrificed their lives in wars to fight for our freedom.

When people talk about "heroes" now they mean film stars or pop stars or sport stars, but they are just doing their jobs. The real heroes in life are the people who try to win peace in this world, who try to help others live in safer times and places.

So, to all those men and women who have fought for that, been injured or killed, thank you for what you have done so we may be free.

Batty for Samhain

Happy Halloween / Samhain!

To celebrate this time of year, I've got some lovely batty friends to share with you.

This is an amigurumi bat I made with some special effects thrown in:

Here he is without effects. He's quite cute actually.

Halloween has developed into a very different thing from its original purpose. It wasn't always about ghosts and witches, or even "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" :) Originally called Samhain, it was a festival to celebrate the end of the year. Over two thousand years ago during the Iron Age, this was their New Year, a time to celebrate the end of the old, the beginning of the new and the onset of winter.

They used to have bonfires and feasts. It was also a time when the veil between the worlds became very thin, so the spirits of the Otherworld could come into our world and people could easily accidentally wander into the Otherworld never to be seen again.

It wasn't about being scary or frightening people, though the spirits coming through may have been something to guard against, but it was about a celebration of the turning of the year, the cycles of nature and probably for the harvest they'd had. That would have included apples, of course, which became used, as Samhain developed, in the tradition of apple bobbing - one old thing that still survives. Turnips were carved, not pumpkins, to give light in the darkness and to ward off evil beings in the centuries that followed, especially when Christianity became widespread.

So, although I've made a bat and drawn and painted another, I sometimes wish we could go back to the earlier, nature-based celebration rather than the monster and skeleton stuff of today. But, in the end, it's a bit of fun before the darkness of winter.

Have a spooky day! :)

Photos of Summer

Now that Autumn has arrived, I thought I'd post a few more of the photos I took of flowers, plants etc during the Summer. One last look at their beauty before the different colours of the Autumn and Winter set in. 

This is a photo of rain drops on aquilegia leaves with the sun shining through them, creating sparkling light and shadow.

Here is a tulip with its gorgeous cream and crimson stripes. 

This is one of my regular visitors: a woodpigeon, snuggling down on a branch against a cold breeze. 

 

I intend to use all of these photos in one way or another in my textile work and painting, either through drawing them and turning them into textile art or paintings or by taking influence from their colours, shapes, petals, leaves, feathers, etc. 

Whatever I make, I'll be posting it here so you can see the process and transition from one thing to another. I hope you'll like it. 

Nessie the second.

Remember the Nessie I crocheted for the Loch Ness Knit Fest? Well, I loved him so much I had to make another one for myself that I could keep. This one is a different colour but the same shape and size.

It didn't take that long to make him and I finished him yesterday evening.

Here he is posing on a stone.

Here he is peeping through the leaves, trying to hide just like the one in Loch Ness does.   :) 

I can see myself having to dig a pond for him to use as his own little loch.  ;) 

 Here are some more of my photos that I've taken during the summer. They're mainly plants and flowers as they tend to keep still where as animals move a lot, mostly as you're about to press the button. :D  

These first two are a beautiful pale pink rose with water droplets on the petals. I don't know why I like droplets on petals and leaves so much. Maybe it's because they look like jewels and the sunlight shining through them creates gorgeous light reflections and colours. 

 

 A foget-me-not.

 Another rose.

I happened to see a TV programme last night about a Victorian lady called Marianne North. She was unusual for the time because she was an explorer, plant hunter and painter who travelled all over the world to exotic countries, climbed mountains and trekked through jungles to find and paint the plants she found. She didn't want to settle for the ordinary life of a woman back then and wasn't interested in marriage, preferring to live the travelling life and to do whatever she wanted.

The paintings that Marianne North created are absolutely beautiful, full of vibrant colours and were different from the botanical illustrations that had been done before as she painted the whole environment of the plant, not just the plant itself. She even discovered new species and had several plants named after her, unusual for someone who wasn't a botanist or scientist.

From what I heard on that programme Marianne North seems to be someone who was slightly ahead of her time. One quote I heard from something she wrote was to do with men of the time destroying nature far quicker than animals or earlier humans (she used the word savages) had done in thousands of years. That was back in the 1800s! I wonder what she would think if she saw the world today with all the pollution and destruction. She knew back then that the world needed looking after but it's taken many years for the majority of people to agree. 

It sounds as though Marianne was a fascinating woman, brave and determined and I encourage you, if you like plants and exotic places, or paintings to look her up. There's a gallery in Kew Gardens in London, which Marianne designed and had built herself, where her paintings are all on display.

Sightings of Nessie.

I recently found out about the Loch Ness Knit Fest and the record attempt for the most number of Nessies at Dores Beach, Loch Ness. They want people to knit or crochet Nessies to achieve it and they will then be donated to charity, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I quite enjoyed crocheting Nessie and was very sad to send him to Loch Ness, but I did and now he's travelling there.
Here he is:

You can find out more about the Loch Ness Knit Fest at: www.lochnessknitfest.com

It's taking place from 29th September and there are links on the site to find various Nessies to crochet or knit. I really liked this one because he looked much more like the image of Nessie that I have in my head. The pattern for it is in one of the links on the Loch Ness Knit Fest website but you can also find it here if you want : www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/nessie-4

This Nessie has horns but I left them out. I imagine him without horns, just a nice smooth head! :) And very cute, of course! :D

Altered Art Nouveau

I've been having a play again with art and digitally altering it. This time I've taken some of the Art Nouveau images from my last post and changed them with different effects and using PIP.

I hope the artists wouldn't have minded me doing this, but as Art Nouveau was concerned with taking the old and making it new, I think they would have liked it. That's what I've done: taken old art and altered it using new technology to make it new. It's just a bit of fun anyway. I hope you like it too.

Influences no.5~Art Nouveau

Another of my influences is Art Nouveau. I really love the flowing nature of the forms, the elegant lines and curves, the way flowers and wings are incorporated into the designs and the whole mystical, almost mythical feel to the whole thing.

Tiffany

The Art Nouveau movement began in 1890 with artists and designers in Paris, Brussels and London. Each place had its own interpretation of the ideas and themes behind it, the Austrian name being the Secession, Germany referring to it as Jugendstil and there was also the Glasgow School. The design differed even further when designers in Italy, Spain, Russia and the USA became involved.

Tiffany

The movement lasted until the First World War but had a revival in the 1960s when the look became popular again with the event of the Counter Culture.

Alphonse Mucha

Some of the most prominent examples of the design are Tiffany Glass, book designs by Aubrey Beardsley and posters by Alphonse Mucha.

There are also the textile and furniture designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, and, among the others who followed the style was Arthur Rackham

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

The sinuous lines of Art Nouveau were based on forms in the natural world, one of the iconic symbols being the 'whiplash' line which curls back on itself and seems alive, wanting to 'whip' off the design. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum it is a metaphor; it
    'displays in graphic form the radical drive to break away from the constraints of tradition.' 

Tiffany

This was one of the main ideas behind the Art Nouveau movement: to do away with tradition, as up until then, art had been dominated by historical influences. The artists and designers were influenced by medieval art and also by Celtic art with its intertwining lines, but they wanted to make it modern. Instead of producing work with the traditional, old fashioned styles, they wanted to be original and innovative, taking their influences and making them new with modern looks.

Alphonse Mucha

As Art Nouveau was the movement which straddled the turn of the century, with the old and new combining as new technologies and industries came about, it combined those ideas of old and new, tradition and modernism, playing with the tension that combination created.

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

Aubrey Beardsley

Until the advent of Art Nouveau, art had been seen as superior to craft but the designers wanted to challenge this and bring them to an equal level. Alongside this, one of their principles was that the product should be well crafted and not produced on an industrial level. They wanted beautiful, individual items. Craft was seen as superior to industrial production - something we are finding out again in the 21st Century with the rise of handmade products and their value against mass produced items which can easily be discarded to add to the environmental problems we face.

Alphonse Mucha

Art Nouveau spread quickly through Europe and was applied to a number of different disciplines including architecture, jewellery, furniture, textiles, posters, book covers, glass and ceramics.

Aubrey Beardsley

Another influence of Art Nouveau was the Pre-Raphaelites who shared their love and portrayal of nature. Flowers were one of the main features of the designs, along with tendrils, leaves, wings, feathers and seedpods. However, geometric shapes were used alongside them providing a contrast, particularly in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Women were a prominent feature of Art Nouveau as well, portrayed in a stylised way rather than natural, but they seem to be surrounded by, if not part of, nature, sometimes even the personification of the seasons. This prominence of the natural world seems to be a portrayal of our relationship with and place in nature, an exploration of where we fit in: part of it or have we separated ourselves? Either way, nature was brought indoors with the furniture and decorative objects which the designers and craftsmen made. Perhaps they were trying to influence people to see the beauty in nature again, to reconnect with it after the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

Privat Livemont

Symbolism was another thing the artist and designers incorporated into their work and another theme they shared with the Pre-Raphaelites. The Victorian era was obsessed by all things spiritual and mystical of course and symbols were combined with art to portray mythical or spiritual themes, which the artist wanted the viewer to understand. For example, poppies, lilies and roses were symbols of love and death. The art was meant to say something, not to just be an object of beauty to be looked at and nothing else. 

Victor Horta

When the Art Nouveau movement ended with the First World War, the Modernist ideas within it carried on but within other movements which took its place. Art Deco and the Bauhaus were two of the artistic styles which came in its wake and its influence is still felt today as many look to it for inspiration, so Art Nouveau is still has a strong identity.

You can find more on Art Nouveau by clicking these links: The Art Story 
                                                                                V&A 
                                                                                The Tate

There's also much more on Art Nouveau in this interesting article on Artsy