I've been working on two sketchbooks these past couple of weeks with a mixture of frustration ( chuck it in the bin!) to finally feeling I'm getting somewhere.
These are for my city lit course and I've been using photos of pebbles from the beach at Westward Ho! in North Devon.

 Here I have traced over photocopies of a variety of pebble photographs. I used pro marker pens, which are alcohol based, to shade in the pebbles with an aim of showing contrast between them. My sketch book is A3 size.

Here I traced again but this time through the page of the sketch book followed by cutting away sections of each pebble with a craft knife. This can then be overlaid an image lying underneath - in this case, a photocopy of the pebble picture shown previously. Hard on my wrist but good fun!

Last week in the course I used an embellisher to create designs based on rock strata...a very loose interpretation!! These samples are made of wool felt, wool rovings and habotoi silk.

Silk enbellished into an acrylic felt base. In real life the colours in this are gorgeous and I shall definitely give this another try.

In my Design Matters creative sketchbooks course I've been doing some block printing from a pattern on an Ottoman vase from the V&A. I carved the shape out of soft lino but don't think I will be doing this again as it hurt my wrist. I'm going to try out something called" Easycut" because it's a really fun technique and something I want to do more of.

 Repeated pattern on textured background using acrylic paints

 Pattern printed twice with second print a contrast dark over light and slightly off centre to create a shadow effect.

The two pages were collaged with three types of paper and painted over with water colour paint. The image was stamped over using acrylic paints.