Moroccan Tiles Fabric - Times Two

This fabric design (designs, if you could colour variations) came from a very real need for curtains for my bedroom! I'm sure the neighbours will appreciate it. Here's a photo of my very cool new bedroom in the old house I'm slowly restoring (the colours area  little dark, sorry):

Pay special attention to the stained floor pattern! I did that to excuse the crappy wood planks that are in the middle and are meant to be covered with an area rug. All the rooms are like that, it's pretty common in older houses, in order to save money on flooring. It probably made a lot of sense back in the day when the new area rugs were probably part of the overall house budget. Moving into a house that needs six or seven large rugs (including a custom shape in this one)... a little harder to figure out how to afford them. So, I stained a pattern on them instead. It looks really awesome and is my favourite part of the rooms I've finished.

Point is, it's a Moroccan pattern, and the room has a lot of colour in it, so I decided to come up with a very subtle Moroccan tile pattern for the curtains:

 

But to keep it interesting, I made a colour version as well, and that will be the bottom border, and I'll use a copper ribbon between the two in order to finish everything off.

The cream and white fabric turned out so much better than I ever expected! It's phenomenal in real life! The colour one looks great too, but the different off-white colours really suprised me.

I'll post photos of the finished product as soon as I find my sewing machine and the right ribbon.

Head over to Spoonflower to take a look at and purchase the fabric:

Moroccan Tiles in White

 Moroccan Tiles in Colour

'Comic Book Portraits' - Grant 833

This is a bit different for my 'comic books,' but I want to try a whole bunch of different styles, so it's about tie I ventured out. I found a neat fan-made poster for Green Lantern (which, unfortunately, I can't find again for you) with the code in the background, all in different shade of green. It looked pretty cool, so I did a take on it in Air Force Blue.

This one changed a bit from when I saw the poster it was based on to the final version - I didn't get the photo I wanted and had to improvise, and originally I was going to have a bunch of Grant's nicknames - there are two on our platoon, but decided to go for full hero-mode on this one, so I put the Air Force motto in the background instead.

Lantern Festival

I've had the photo this is based on in mind for something for a long time now. Coincidentally, I've also wanted to try out pastels on black paper ever since I started rewatching Batman: The Animated Series and found out that was how they did the backgrounds.

This was fun just to to work on colour and composition, rather than to strictly follow the photo or work on a portrait. I simplified the background and emphasized the diagonal running top right to bottom left in order to get more movement in the piece. I used stronger, more vibrant colours for those lanterns, but in more contrasting colours to make them pop, and finished them to higher degree then the peripheral lanterns, which I also covered in blue in order to mute the colours that were already there. The one thing I'm not sure of is if I just get another soft white pastel (what always happens to them?) and highlight the light in the middle of the lantern more.

Last Day in My Studio (Caryn's Kite)

I have to go back to work tomorrow after a very enjoyable and productive five days off. Ugh. But at least I spent the last day enjoying the afternoon in my studio! I had a photo I've been meaning to paint for years and years. I've even tried a couple times but always hated what I came up with. But today I managed something at last! Here it is step-by-step.





The finished product! If only it photographed a little better. There are actually hundreds of colours in that big white field, but it all sort of washed out. All the colours that were there a few steps back are still there, just layered and blended. This closeup has a few more of them, try to imagine that anywhere it looks like it's white, because it's actually anything but.