Portrait

This is what I am currently working on, a portrait of baby Ezra... who is not really a baby any more. This is definitely a portrait of a little boy. 

I had the idea to do a leafy foresty background and then really wanted to paint it on an interesting piece of wood. So I went along to the Bristol Wood Recycling Project and found this which sort of has its own ready made frame. I think its suits the portrait really well...

Below you can see the progression so far, although I didn't think to take a photo before any paint had been applied.

first draft

Finished set of images

  Finally I have finished the Sleeping Like a Baby illustrations. The idea is that its a kind of souvenir of Ezra's first year. Now that he's a toddler getting on for 18 months, I can see how fleeting babyhood really is and I'm really glad I did this to remember the early days.

There are so many new experiences you encounter when building a relationship with your child and every parent's experience is different, but I hope others can relate to this in some way.

                                      

new sketchbook

I got a new sketchbook for Christmas so here are a couple of pages...

Christmas craft

One of the fun things about Christmas is its a reason to make pretty things to decorate the house with, so here are a couple of things we've made this year. One is using a natural material  (oranges), the other not so natural (resin, the earlier stage shown in previous post).

For the orange decoration I simply sliced up an orange and put the slices in a low temp oven for several hours, then threaded them together with a bit of festive ribbon. Smells nice too...

resin with various designs

resin decoration with fairy lights behind

ink and glitter

   

Snoozing again

I've almost done all of the images for my "Sleeping like a baby" book... eager to get it finished but I guess there's no rush really.  I'm imagining a day when Ezra is much bigger and sleeping in his own bed, and we can look through it and wonder how sleep, and whether he slept through the night bla bla bla, could ever have been such a big deal.

Resin craft

first try..

bits and pieces

lots of ink...

blue and purple ink

with cut paper shapes

Me and Ashley have been experimenting with resin craft, which is really fun... you make it up as a liquid and can put pretty much anything in it to make little knickknacks like paperweights, keyrings, christmas  decs etc etc. The results can be a bit hit and miss.. the first one I made, I took out of the mould too early and hence it was a bit of a blob. The trial and error is part of its charm though, I think... Putting blobs of ink and swirling it a little seems to be one of the most successful creations. It sort of moves around by itself as the resin sets so its hard to tell exactly what it'll end up like.

yet more on the subject of sleep

A couple more images I've been working on. I've also been trying to put together some text to go with these 'Sleeping Like a Baby' images which is proving to be quite challenging. I'll get there though! Watch this space...