Pottering on

Tags

adultcoloring, adultcolouring, cats, clay, coloring, pottery

The cat colouring book has been on sale for a few days now. It’s sold six copies so far, which isn’t too bad until you factor in the fact that I bought five of them myself. Not going to be rich this year then?

A few more photos today. First of all, here’s the ratty slab sculpture from pottery class that I promised to show you. I was going to stick a tail on the back but he got a little too hard to add anything to so I cut the tail into the back instead. Then I got carried away with the carving and scoring so he ended up decorated all over. We’ll see what he looks like once he’s been glazed.

Last weekend I managed to get a fair handle on a cup, using my ratty footprint stamp to fix it on and then during the week I made another cup shape and a bowl. The second cup still needs a handle, the bowl got a line gouged in it so it got carved to hide the mistake. The carving technique needs a little refinement maybe.

So today the project was to produce a decent pint mug with a kilogram of clay. Six attempts later I have maybe three shapes that I like. The first two were too straight, then I managed curved but too short, then it began to go the way I wanted. I guess can practise trimming and putting handles on them all and then decide if any are worth keeping. I’m cheating by keeping them on the bats for now so I can do the first bit of trimming while they are still fixed on.

I’ve had a go at putting a pattern onto a plate too. The plate was slab cut and then put on the wheel to shape the edges, following this video:

Then I copied one of my rat pictures onto it using the tissue paper tracing technique, tracing the image onto tissue paper and then drawing over it with a Sharpie so the line goes through the tissue onto the plate. I want to learn to do Mishima with wax to get the line drawings on, like this video from Jessica Putnam-Phillips. I’ve got some wax and some black underglaze on order. I think I can combine my colouring book drawing and the pots in that way.

I’ve been looking at kilns online, but although I have enough pennies put by there is nowhere to put the thing right now, so it really does need to wait.

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Progress

Tags

clay, coloring

So. Progress has been had with the latest colouring book, Cats & Co – drawing 18 is complete, so just two more to do and I can publish the book.

As for the pottery classes, I’ve now done four weeks. Loving it! I would love to learn to make and decorate pots with my animal pictures on. That may take me a few years to attain though.

The first week of class we stamped out tiles and decorated them with textures using a splendidly random set of objects. I made five tiles in all. Not the fastest of workers.

In the second class we built cylindrical containers formed around tubes. Mine was textured using an old jumper and a selection of embroidery flowers. Because I misjudged the cutting it didn’t quite meet at the front, so I cut a panel and pressed buttons down the front to hold it together. I made a cardigan pot!

In the third class we had been hoping that the tiles would be bisque fired, but they were still in the kiln so we made a strange assortment of textured bowls by decorating them with the textural gubbins again and throwing the result onto the bench at an angle, then draping them into slump moulds. The cylindrical pots were trimmed and put to dry ready for bisque firing.

Last Tuesday we had the tiles back to glaze. We had a selection of oxides and stains to use, with the oxides then being covered with white glaze and the stains with transparent glaze. I painted my five tiles and also a few belonging to another class member who had far more and found the process of painting boring. It will be interesting to see how they turn out.

On Wednesday it was my birthday. My present to myself was a little pottery wheel. I chose a Shimpo Aspire with hand control so I can use it on a standing workbench, as my playroom is also my rat room and it seemed best to keep the wheel entirely out of the ratties’ reach.

I didn’t get a chance to try the wheel until Saturday, when my first two attempts at centring made me realise that the clay was too hard for me to learn with, so then I spent some time learning how to damp down and wedge the clay. Today’s attempts went somewhat better. Trying to remember to brace my elbows against my sides and rest my arms on the splash pan.

Attempt three and the clay was easier to work with as it was much softer, but I still failed to centre it. I am also a very messy person. Clay everywhere!

Attempt four started OK, but as I opened it out it turned into a plate that slowly collapsed onto itself.

Attempt five produced a cooling tower pot that actually ‘looked like a thing’, as my offspring would say. On slicing it open I realised that I hadn’t cleaned up around the lower edge, so it was very thick bottomed and there was also an air bubble.

Attempt six wasn’t much better.

Attempt seven I decided to keep and try trimming later on. I’ve got the base a little squarer inside with this one.

And attempt eight was an effort to make the pot as tall as I could, which inevitably collapsed. Then it was time to pack up and go to visit my mum for the afternoon.

I think I need to grab one of the wheels in pottery class and actually get some tuition, but usually all four are in use. Time to be assertive maybe? Or just watch more Youtube tutorials.

Doodle Artist Dogs

Tags

coloring, colouring, dogs

Wow. It really has been too long since I’ve posted. There sits the post for my last book, and here I am with another one. This time I’ve filled a book with drawings of dogs, and having hit the publish button last Tuesday I’m suffering from the usual crisis of confidence as I wait for it to sell. I know these are my best drawings yet, I feel I’m improving with each book, but that doesn’t mean that it will compete with the many other doggy colouring books. So I’ll just leave you with my favourite drawing this time around. The bulldog.

 

Anticipation

Tags

adultcoloring, adultcolouring, pets

My latest colouring book went live on Amazon on Saturday evening and the anticipation is killing me. With every book I feel that my work is improving, and I’m so pleased with this one that I’m expecting big things from it. Doodle Artist Pets has pictures of twenty different pets, two copies of each picture, and I’m aiming to make a big splash with it by setting the price as low as I can for the first week. The trick really seems to be to bump the books right up the chart to make them visible in their sub categories, because once they are there they tend to stay there for a good long while.

I feel so fortunate that this opportunity to earn through self publishing and print on demand is possible these days. My other half is looking at redundancy at the age of 58 and I have the feeling we’re going to need every penny we can find. Amazon is by no means perfect, but it’s allowed me to find an income stream that would not have been available a few years ago. Check out Createspace if you don’t know what I’m on about.

Peaceful Patterns – Giveaway

Tags

adultcolouring, coloring

If you’d like a chance to win a copy of Doodle Artist – Peaceful Patterns, it’s currently on a Goodreads Giveaway offer until the end of January, with five chances to win a copy. Drawing those patterns really did help to soothe away the tension during December, so I’m hoping they will work just as well for my customers too.

Stressful times

Tags

adultcoloring, colouring

It’s been a good while now since I posted, partly because life suddenly became very busy at the end of last year. My dad was taken into hospital on his 85th birthday in November and spend the whole of Christmas there. For the first few weeks he was in a hospital some miles away, and as my mum was determined to visit him every evening and my brother had a broken arm, this gave me the happy task of driving her over there. Thankfully we’re now looking to get him back home again, albeit with a heavy package of carers.

Luckily for me the stress relieving properties seem to extend to the drawing of colouring books as well as the colouring side, and I managed to publish my Rabbits and Hares colouring book just in time for the Christmas rush. The Peaceful Patterns book followed and was published on Christmas day. Not a traditional day to bring out a new book, but the day afforded a break from both my day job and hospital visiting as other family members were eager to have their chance to visit. Self publishing does cut out the delays in publishing a book – once it’s ready to go, it can.

So now I hope it’s not quite too late to wish you a Happy New Year. I hope 2016 turns out to be a good one for you.

 

 

The fanciful rats are here!

Tags

adultcoloring, adultcolouring, colouring, petrats, pets

The Fanciful Rats colouring book went live late last Sunday and is selling better than I anticipated, although presumably mostly to people I know. I’m really pleased with the way it turned out, albeit a little nervous that it won’t be to everyone’s taste. There are only so many ways you can draw a rat to colour in without drawing patterns all over him or her.

This is my sample image from the book. There are a lot of different styles in this book, so it was hard to choose which image to represent them all. If you know of any groups or forums that would like this, I would appreciate it very much if you would share it.

Parallel Universe

Tags

adultcoloring, adultcolouring, colouring

That’s what it feels like. Just slightly out of phase, like one of those parallel universes in the science fiction stories where there’s just one small detail that is different to my own world. That one difference being that my butterflies colouring book is selling amazingly well in the UK, with an Amazon bestseller ranking of 605 earlier today and 31 sales yesterday. I can’t help expecting to slip back into the real world, where my books sell a couple of copies a week.

While I was drawing the butterflies my husband sat at his PC expressing his disbelief in the current adult colouring boom. ‘They’re probably just buying them for their children in the school holidays’. I could have pointed out that it’s equally unlikely that grown men would spend hours in their workshops laboriously scraping surface plates flat. When it comes down to it, it’s a hobby, like knitting or embroidery, or metalwork. His scraping probably generates the same calm alpha waves that people are claiming for colouring-in.

I’m getting on fairly steadily with drawing the rats colouring book. It’s a little like the butterflies in that focusing on a single topic allows you to experiment more with the style. I’ve also started on a third book with a more wintry theme, which is giving me a break from the rats when inspiration is lacking.

Drawing Butterflies

Tags

colouring, digital art

I’ve had something of a side project on the go. When my children were little I used to draw butterflies for them to colour in. They would stick them to pencils and run around making them flutter.

Somewhere along the way the world has caught up and drawing things to colour in is once again a useful skill, so I’ve revisited the pastime and made a book full of butterflies to colour in. (I don’t expect anyone to cut them out and run around with them this time.) 

Here’s a colouring sheet to give an idea of what the pictures are like. This butterfly isn’t in the book, I kept her free to fly the Internet. It would be great if you could share her picture wherever you want to.

I love rats, I do!

Tags

digital art, pet rats, pets

That’s the title of my new book. The phrase is something of a family joke, because many years ago, whilst running a ratabilia stall at a local rat show, there was a small girl with an enormous pet rat who repeatedly came up to us to say ‘I love rats, I do’. Ever since then, whenever the rats have done something particularly cute, silly or gross, we’ve come out with the phrase.

I knew that this book should be a children’s book, but it’s taken me a very long time to put it together. First of all, it needed pictures, so I bought some graphics software and a graphics tablet to plug into my pc, and set about learning to draw. Well as I’ve said on here before, it turns out that the best way around my colour-blindness is to draw directly onto the photographs. Smudge painting. Even cheating like that, it’s taken me several months to gather the right photos and turn them into images that work with the book and that feel good enough to inflict on the public. Then there was the text. It took a couple of false starts to begin moulding it into something I felt right about. Somehow I hit upon a look and a style that suited the topic, and off I went. It felt as if the images were taking forever to produce, and then suddenly they were all finished and it was just the text that needed a final polish. The typeface was a particularly happy find. It’s opendyslexic alta, which is very easy to read and suited the style of the book beautifully.

So now I’m watching the first few purchases and waiting to see how the reviews go, if any come along.

Time to start work on the next book, I guess.