It's Raining, It's Pouring...

so I can't play in the garden, as I intended, but I can get on with working on the Brusho book, which is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm at the interesting moment in writing a book when I decide it's time to rewrite it altogether. I start with a structure in my mind, but nine times out of ten, I find that it doesn't work quite as well as I thought it would, so around the half way mark, I tend to go back and restructure it. I'm also adding photographs, which slows the work down a bit. Plus, I'm looking at the photos I've already taken, and deciding which are acceptable and which not. I've written a section on making watercolour washes, for example, but I feel the photos I have to illustrate it could be a lot better, so back to the drawing board on that one. And I'm picking up on other things that could be illustrated with a small but telling photograph, so I'm building a list of what I need to do next.

The image here shows two of the effects I've been experimenting with while writing the book. I didn't really understand how versatile Brusho is until I really started to work with it. This is a small image of a tree on mountboard, which has been stamped using thickened Brusho, on a background that was produced by printing on shaving foam. I'm quite pleased with the way it has turned out; I think it has movement and energy about it. It's as if the tree is dancing...or is that too fanciful?

This afternoon, though, I'm going to take a couple of hours to sit at my sewing machine and get some work done there. It's related to the Brusho book, admittedly, as I've prepared a painted flower on some cloth, which is ready to stitch into. I'll show you the results tomorrow.