Thankyou Gina.

On Gina Ferrari's blog - 'Fan my Flame' - she has posted a little tutorial of design exercises which I thought I would try out. She explains it all much better than I have here. I took my shapes from this book of plant photos which I bought on a visit to Laycock Abbey. The photos are all black and white and taken in about the 1920's .

I don't draw often and know I should practise more - if I did I might improve!

Gina used a poppy seedhead for her examples but I couldn't find one I liked, so drew a very simplified thistle and fern. The photo showed up lovely textures but I only needed outlines for this. We then had to cut them out and use them as stencils, having first prepared some coloured background pages. I was reminded on another blog, of the lovely marks you get if you spread a piece of clingfilm onto wet watercolour paint and leave it to dry, so did just that. Some pages have better marks than others as there was a bit of wrestling going on with the clingfilm - we don't get on!

Here is my thistle outline, cut out and ready to be placed onto a page and have oil pastel applied all round it's edge. In fact, if you look carefully you can see oil pastel already on it - I had forgotten to take the before photo!

I love gold and turquoise together so used a gold pastel and rubbed it carefully into all the little spaces. After lifting the stencil away a darker coat of paint was applied and allowed to continue across the page. The oil pasted resists the new colour.

This is as far as I have got with the fern shape which I treated in the same way - I might do a mirror image with the cut out piece on the left. Gina suggests we work further onto these pages, perhaps adding shading and cutting some parts away to reveal what's on the next page. I like that idea but will have to think about what to do next. I've enjoyed this exercise and it's not often I let my sketchbook out in public!! Come to that, it's not often I work in it.