Planet Ruby Starrs

We have had no internet at the house for about 10 days now...Its a technical fault and should be mended on Monday but that's what they said on Thursday so I'm not holding my breath. Its very frustrating but also highlights just how much this household relies on that connection with the world wide web.  we can only watch TV through the firestick and of course Netflix goes out of the window, no spotify and our mobiles don't work very well as the signal is poor and the internet connection is moderate to say the least! Its been a quiet week regarding communication but we have had lots of family to visit which has been nice and we nipped back up to Northumberland for a lovely walk on the coast and lunch and tea with old friends - a week of catching up with real people rather then virtual chat!! I have also got on with quite a lot of work.  the psychedelia continues and this week I have printed out a couple of final designs to decide if I need to embellish or not.  The design...

My work is taking a very psychedelic turn.... it may turn back but I am loving the craziness of these colours and images...

Fun afternoon making a lampshade.  First I had to sort out some fabric, I didn't have long to play about, so I took a drawing I did of Sadel Castle on the Mull of Kintyre and sliced it up and stuck it back in an 'abstract' manner and them scanned it in to further play on Photo shop.  I recoloured it using my colour palate - which incidentally is slightly changing to become a tad brighter... and then prepped the design for printing on the Sublimation printer at college.  Still not really liking polyester fabrics but needs must as time (and money) was a factor I decided to use the synthetic linen as it has a really nice texture - its probably the least synthetic looking fabric.  (the sub printer only works with synthetics).  Once my fabric was printed I then cut it to size and started the surprisingly easy and very therapeutic process of making a lampshade.   I've been so centred on design lately that it feels really nice to be actually making somethin...

After the fiasco of disastrous hand rendered repeats - which incidentally I am going to reattempt at some time... I have been putting some images together digitally.  This has been a much easier and consequently more satisfying experience - I never thought I would be saying that!!!! However it is worth remembering that all these digitally manipulated images started off as hand rendered drawings done by my own fair hand and I have done about 70 different drawings over the last few weeks, some in situ and others from my own photographs.  I have hand coloured a lot of the drawings using promarkers, water colours and pastels.  In some cases I have used all three and added a quantity of inks, brusho and even emulsion paint!!  I'm in a blue phase at the moment (even considering painting the living room) taken from the fineliner pen drawing I did of the'atrium att eh Old Place Of Monreith All these drawings and paintings have been scanned into the computer and then ...

I'm having one of those weeks where nothing is going quite according to plan..  The good ideas are there but I'm not managing to execute them them in quite the way I envisage in my head! It started with some very sumptuous looking cushions I found in a posh magazine which I thought "oh yes I can emulate them - in fact I can IMPROVE them" ha ha ... In my defense I want to say I am writing a report about being confident so I am being extremely enthusiastic and practicing confidence in large quantities... what I really need is patience and a steady hand or at least some one else with a restraining order!! So back to the cushion... basically it had fancy sides and I thought yes I can do fancy sides!! I decided to see if I could follow through my concept idea and incorporate traditional and fancy - a bit rough and ready and with that thought, started a sample for raggy rug type sides for my own version of a posh cushion - how to refine raggy rugging?  still not sure...