Parcels, Parrots & Picking...

Last month I joined something called Art & Parcel, where you get a box of mystery art materials each month.  I love a parcel, especially one with surprises inside!  This month I received an A5 pad of painting paper, a bottle of Indian ink, a bottle of luminous green acrylic ink, a diffuser, a bamboo pen and a paintbrush.  They also have a little competition running for art made using the contents of this box, the prize being having your work on the front of a sketchbook.  I thought I'd have a go...

The green was the sticking point - it's very bright and not a natural colour. However, I thought a parrot, or rather a conure, would be an ideal subject to use it on.  I sketched one out, drew around it using the bamboo pen & the Indian ink, then set to colouring it in.  I did have to use a few more items - an orange paint pen from last month's box and a couple of watercolours for the blue & red.  It's not my usual way of working, but it was good to experriment.

The diffuser is a mad thing though - it consists of two metal tubes joined with a hinge, one of them having a mouthpiece.  You insert one tube into a bottle/jar of colour, then blow hard through the mouthpiece.  I had to do this over the kitchen sink as the colour spatters far and wide.  I can see me using this for things such as sea spray though, but precautions need to be taken if I don't want to Jackson Pollock the surrounding area!

Our apple tree survived collapsing face-down into the pond a few weeks ago and has produced a good crop this year.  I picked a trug full yesterday, and we also picked a bag of blackberries, so crumble is the order of the day.  Blackberries seem to be hard to pick this year - there was the promise of a huge crop, then we had weeks of torrential rain and the most of them seem to have rotted before reaching ripeness.  Consequently, there are not many decent ones around.  I've scraped together a few bags for the freezer but not as many as anticipated.

On the needles: a gorilla, designing it from scratch and having difficulty!
On the easel: still the black labrador