Um... how long have you got? It might be easier – shorter certainly – to ask what haven't I tried?
Here goes: I've done knitting, knitted four squares, two big ones, and two little but long ones, sewed them all together leaving a slit in the top of the two big ones for my head. A jumper. Not a particularly good one.
End of knitting.
I've done paintings were quite a lot of time: watercolours, acrylics, oils, and some encaustic wax painting too. Got paid for a couple of the oils, portraits. Did quite a good one of my father and my eldest daughter playing chess on a wooden table in the garden through an archway in the holly hedge. Quite proud of that one. Managed to finish it just in time to give it to my mother as a Christmas present the year after my father died.
I hope to do one of my brother, might do a few. If my fingers can remember how.
Did some watercolours of flowers, hollyhocks, fuchsias, things like that.
I took up making cards once, as soon as my relatives discovered what I was doing, they all demanded home-made cards for Christmas; I gave up making cards after that year. I actually found it a bit limiting.
And recently I've been doing mixed media things which I find much more exciting, especially if you don't limit it to cards but do it as art pieces, whether that's on a canvas by itself, or as a book front, or a covering for a box, being able to use anything at all is much more freeing. And I do like SteamPunk.
I have done 3-D art for quite some years, so much so that I even went to University and took a degree in animation. I enjoyed that tremendously.
Unfortunately it did not lead to a job, but I still dabble in it now and then, and hope to eventually complete an animation about a green pea and various other pea characters.
I've done decoupage, silver metal clay, done a little work with metals, mainly copper and brass, mostly ageing them; it's amazing patterns and colours you can get on copper with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.
I also love textures, and photography, took a course in photography, a couple of them actually, wouldn't mind doing that again, a course I mean. I still take a lot of photographs of both scenery and I still do textures too.
When I did animation at uni, we did cell frame animation, drawn animation, glass painting animation, 3-D animation, stop frame animation and some of it involved quite a bit of modelmaking, I made a river bank scene, an artist's house, a little boy's house, and a wood, a dragon's cave with a waterfall outside it, and the cave opened out in two halves so that you could film inside as well as outside it. I made a dragon with an armature, using sculpey clay, he had a jaw that opened and closed and inside his body I put the rods from a helping hand's magnifier. However I used milliput for the body, and it was too heavy: we had a wonderful time smashing the body open to get the bits of my helping hands out again!
The second dragon was made from my design, using copper mesh in segments, so that the body and tail moved independently and my husband soldered it together, that was when we used a lot of copper wire, I think that's what we bought it for. But that copper mesh was awful to use, he had little scars all over his hands afterwards. But it was such a beautiful piece I didn't hardly have the heart to cover it with clay or papier maché or anything else, but we took lots of pictures of it.
I've still got the dragon's cave, but the riverbank used a lot of scenic water and it never entirely cured and when it got stored sideways the 'water' shifted so I'm afraid that was the end of that.
The boat I used for the riverbank, was a boat my father made when he did an animation of Ramses. All his figures were made from plasticine, I think we must have that film somewhere but it would've been done on super eight cine, and would cost a lot to transfer to DVD. Still, one day maybe.
Yes, it would have been quicker to say what I haven't done. Lol!
There's probably more but I'm beginning to lose the will to live, God help those who read this.
