anna violet

Monday, 27 June 2016

Manchester Pride

Thrilled to see my image of Manchester Pride Parade up in the Lord Mayor's Parlour, Manchester Town Hall. The illustration is based on the route the parade took in 2014, passing by Albert Square and Manchester Town Hall.

Ltd edition prints (out of just 5), hand-painted in rainbow colours, available from me.
Also online through Folksy

photo of handpainted ltd ed print

framed print hanging in Lord Mayor's Parlour

Monday, 20 June 2016

New image St Clements Church

St Clements Church, Chorlton taking shape.

pencil outline

focus on church

final image of church in its landscape, available from The Make It Shop or
https://folksy.com/items/6872932-St-Clements-Church-Chorlton-Manchester

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Paper clay ceramics

I've been having a play with paper-clay, after a friend showed me how to make and use it. It's surprisingly tough and easy to construct with.

I used about half a loo-roll to a 300mm cube of very soft/wet school clay. I rolled the clay out to about 2cm thickness, added strips of loo-roll, rolled again and wedged - and repeated - until I had a good consistency and the paper was no longer obviously visible. Then I used like normal school clay.

After making my basic hollow-shapes, I joined them and skewered them onto place, using thin sticks and some saved polystyrene packaging (see photo below). What a brilliant method - it stayed so strong while I added heads.

When the model was leather-hard, I removed the sticks and transferred the model to a board. The holes left by the sticks were easy to plug with soft clay. Now, fingers-crossed it makes it through a kiln-firing.

model skewered into polystyrene with sticks

sticks removed and holes filled in, final decoration added

Monday, 23 May 2016

Clay workshop in Beech Road Park, Chorlton Arts Festival

I was involved with the Art in the Park event at Beech Road Park on Saturday
Friends of Beech Rd Park, part of Chorlton Arts Festival.
The Clay workshop session had a good turnout, despite the heavy downpours at lunchtime. Lots of wonderful models were made - here's a sample from the session, including dinosaurs, hedgehogs, pigs, the Grufflalo, frogs, trees, pugs, pandas and a robot.

Thursday, 5 May 2016

Character development using clay - colours added

Hoink has been fired with iron oxide for orange-colour plus a satin glaze over white slip around his eyes. Clod, the badger, has white slip stripes and manganese dioxide for blackish colour.