Did you know I have a flower blog? It is named “Up Close to Flowers“. It only contains pictures of flowers, with my best attempt to identify them. There are hundreds of flower pictures posted on the blog. Sometimes it just nice to stop and see that large variety of beautiful colors.
Below is a small sample of the beauties.
When you are from Louisiana, but don’t currently live in Louisiana, and King Cake Season rolls around you need a King Cake. You have two options available for your King Cake need: 1) Spend $50 to have one ship to you. Oh, they are so good, it may be worth it. Or, 2) Make your own King Cake. I decided to make my own.
Below is my recipe for a King Cake:
Follow the directions on the back of the box. You could try just using the bag method, but I had the bag break during the kneading process and had to switch to the hand mixer. That was a lot of work. I now use my stand mixer.
The extra flour is for light dusting during the rolling and shaping stage. If you add too much water to the icing, you can thicken it up by adding some extra powder sugar and stirring well.
Let cool and decorate.
The Fall Season has beautiful colors. The leaves are falling from the trees. The berries are a bright red. The sky is a brilliant blue (or it is when I go out.) It is enjoyable to go and experience that colors of fall. Sometimes, I capture something special.
If you would like to see more of my Fall Photos, check out Photos by Sarah Facebook page.
I can’t believe I am finally posting a couple of my vases. They have been done for over a year; sitting, waiting for their pictures to be taken so I could show them off in my blog. Other items were finished and posted after these vases were made. I thinks they are camera shy and hid everything I went to take pictures.
Some of my favorite flowers are the one that has multiple colors, especially the ones that go from yellow, to orange, to pink. My mother grew roses that were those colors and I thought they were absolutely beautiful.
I covered two glass vases with black Sculpey polymer clay. I blended yellow, red, and hot pink polymer clay and cut out each petal and center circles. I placed each petal on top of the black clay to make the flowers. After the flowers were formed I stamped each petal. I didn’t glue the petals on because it is clay,. Polymer clay items will stick to each other. Afterward, I baked to vases in the 275 degree over for about 10 minutes. When outside temperature was above 70 degrees, sprayed the vases with several coats of Minwax Polycrylic
The vases are not identical, but they are simular.
The roses were also made from Sculpey polymer clay. One day I should capture how I make roses.
How can something dying be so glorious?
Here is my latest vase I created from polymer clay. The clay was put on top of a glass vase. I used polyurethane vanish to seal the clay.
Today’s Art of Concentration experiment did not go well. Not well at all. Below is the line drawing. It is a nice line drawing made up of spirals, or swirls, or curls, whatever you would like to call them.
It is impossible to use only two colors in the drawing and still follow the rules. Using three colors is possible, but difficult. Spiral are meant to be continuous.
The Art of Concentration rules are:
The colored drawing came out nice, but there were several restarts. That is what is good with coloring on the computer.
PDF version of the line drawing created in Corel Draw is available for download on the Coloring Page or you can click here.
Today’s Art of Concentration drawing is more typical of the drawing I used to do in meetings and classes. It wasn’t anything too complicated, just some lines and occasionally other objects.
Remember you can do these types of drawing on any size of paper from “Post-It” note size to letter size, or larger. If you create them using ruled paper, you already have some lines premade.
The line drawing:
The Art of Concentration rules are:
The first object created was the flower and than squiggly lines added. Notice the top left of the circle in the middle of the page. There are more than two section that are touching. The rule “Section of the same color can not touch” will not work here. To solve that dilemma, I used multiple colors.
The flower petals were done in a deep red and white. The center and background was done in black and white. It doesn’t even look like a circle. That is why I named today’s hand drawing “Squid”. Looking at if after is was done, it looked more like a squid then a flower.
Squid
Squid was done on a black Studio Series Artist tile using Sakura gel pens.
The line drawing was done in Corel Draw and exported as a bitmap to color using Microsoft Paint. I decided to use three colors and black on the second drawing with white line.
Click here to download a PDF version of the line drawing. All of the line drawing are available on the Coloring Page.
I must be crazy for drawing so many lines on a page and than coloring them. And, on top of it all, doing two drawings. I must be crazy. However, they were so much fun.
That is probably another rule of Art of Concentration – have fun. Enjoy what you are doing.
The Art of Concentration rules are:
The first drawing was a small drawing. It has a simple flower in the middle with a bunch of lines going through it.
There are some many colors that could be added to this line drawing. The first example started out as a simple black and white, but I could not leave it as that. The gray background the flower jump off the page.
The colored version is very busy, it draws your eye all around the drawing. It reminds me of a out country kitchen pattern.
Below is the hand drawing of the x-treme flower. It was done on a Studio Series Artist tile with Faber Castell Pitt Pens and Crayola markers.
Boxed Flower
Even though this Mandala started out as a sketch, I thought I could not do it justice on paper, so I put it in Corel Draw, increase the size to 8.5″ squared, and drew circles to the extreme.
From the center, a beautiful flower appeared. There are so many way this could be colored, so many possibilities. After creating a bitmap and using Microsoft Paint to color it, below is the results at my first attempt to color the Mandala. The black background made the color more vibrant.
AofC Mandala
PDF versions of the today’s line drawings are available on the Coloring Page for downloading. Starting with today, I will put the newest drawings at the top of the page.
Sometimes, with art, you need to break the rules to create amazing pieces.
The Art of Concentration rules are:
The extreme line drawing.
Rule three does not work for black and white drawings. If you follow the line from the bottom right corner to the center, there are occurrences of one section touching two sections. It may be more obvious on the black and white example below. Even though the rule is broken, you still can get lost in the drawing, or dizzy.
To follow the rule, I used multiple colors on the one below.
This is the original had drawing done on a black Studio Series Artist Tile with Sakura pens.
The X Divides
Click here for a PDF version of the line drawing. It is also available on the Coloring Page.
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