Quirky Dreaming

And then, the sun came out...

Today was the sort of day that makes the buds swell on the hedgerows, the daffodils grow another inch and the frogs flock to my pond to lay their annual mounds of gloopy spawn.

On a less romantic note, I phoned Plasti-kote this morning to ask about varnish compatibility. The gold spray paint I used is not actually recommended for sealing as this affects the metallic shine, nor for use out-of-doors – so that will teach me to be spontaneous! At a meeting in Sheringham last week, aimed at helping people with the technicalities of painting and decorating their crabs and lobsters, it was pointed out that the yacht varnish used on one of the North Walsham Hippos was peeling off in chunks and taking the colour underneath with it (my worst nightmare). This is because the colour underneath was water-based, so the varnish coat should also have been water-based to be compatible. However, my Brilliant Gold spray paint is not water-based, although the acrylic paint I'm using on the figures is... According to Plasti-kote, I will need to varnish with Plasti-kote's Super Gloss Clear Acrylic. I've been checking this out online and it looks as though it will work over both the Brilliant Gold and the acrylic painted figures – fingers-crossed that it does.

After the phone call I went outside to unwrap my lobster from its plastic covers, but found the wind overnight had already done the job for me. And I think there must have been rain, because the golden surface is looking rather beautifully weathered in places – this is clearly why the product is not recommended for use out-of-doors.

Interesting though this is, it is not really the effect I was looking for, so I am going to have to touch up the lobster with another thin spray of paint to tidy it up.

Anyway, I managed to drag the unwieldy beast off my drive where it has been wheel-deep in gravel since it arrived, and onto the middle of the lawn, where I had the space to stand back and consider my plans from every angle. I then cut greaseproof paper into templates to fit each of the back sections, blu-tacked them in place and roughly sketched my design onto them. 

So I now have a pile of greaseproof paper shapes on my ironing board, sketched with artwork, waiting to be transferred onto...

...these sheets of coloured paper. On Sunday I painted lots of pages of the EDP in bright acrylic colours so now I have a very pleasing stack of coloured sheets waiting to be cut into interesting walking characters, each, I hope, with a personality of its own.

I am increasingly aware that the lobster needs to be finished and in position by 9th April, which according to John Morgan, who is charge of PR for this project, is the day the Crustacea Trail leaflets will arrive from the printer, and is therefore the launch date for the Trail. This gives me 24 days. That sounds quite a lot, but I do have a series of clients with deadlines for me to meet at the same time!

My plan is to cut everything out and then have a couple of intense days of sticking everything into position and sealing the whole thing with varnish – 3 coats, I'm assured, is best. So I'm hoping that the weather at the end of the month will be as glorious as it was today.

 

Come Walk With Me...

Yesterday was my birthday and I treated myself to a visit to the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Not only did I think about the words to go on my lobster on the train journey to London, but I also got some colour inspiration from one of Van Gogh's brighter portraits, and bought some beautiful coloured and textured paper which I plan to cut and use selectively to illustrate the ground and the sea.

The sentiment of my lobster is, and has been ever since I conceived of the idea of putting it up on Beeston Bump, Come Walk With Me. I plan to repeat this line on each segment of the lobster's back, along with a short defining sentence eg Come Walk With Me... let us escape for a day, Come Walk With Me... we'll hunt for fossils below the mammoth cliff. And, of course, below the words, and holding them up, will be the figures walking. So here is a (very rough) page from my notebook as I try to work out which words to keep and which to discard!

It's difficult to decide how much or how little to include. The Norfolk Coast Path runs from Cromer over Roman Camp, down through the Runtons and over Beeston Bump, and then all along the coast through Salthouse, Cley, Blakeney, Holkham, Hunstanton, Thornham, Weybourne, Wells and Brancaster to Holme-next-the-Sea, where it joins Peddars Way and continues all the way to somewhere SE of Thetford. So I could list the names of these places, maybe on the many protuberances that litter the lobster's stomach.

Originally I thought my words would describe a specific walk; meeting on Cromer pier, running barefoot in the surf, walking hand-in-hand by Runton Gap to below the mammoth cliff to look for fossils, then up onto Beeston Bump to fly kites and to feel them fluttering and straining to be free. But as the Trail doesn't actually take that route from the pier to the Bump, I sort of feel I should be true to the route. On the other hand, I prefer the journey on the beach and walk it (or parts of it) a lot when the weather is a bit more favourable than it is right now.

The other thing to take into consideration, is to make the finished decorated lobster desirable so it raises as much money as possible at the auction – which means you need at least two people who want to buy it, so they bid against each other to get the price up. Which might mean making the words a bit more general, so that anyone along the coast might be pleased to own it.

So, it seems, I am still struggling to get the words right.

The picture that inspired my sense of colour was this one:

 
I feel the painting was much brighter in real life. I wrote down 'red, green, orange, turquoise (white)', which is pretty much the colours I used on my buttons. The red and green dominate this image, but the orange was really very strong in the centre of all the little circles in the background, and the turquoise blue inside her sleeves and in the background was also a striking contrast.

And as for the paper, with its combination of colour, texture and slight sparkle, I couldn't resist buying this:

I saw the gold/green sheet first, and thought it would be perfect below the feet of my figures, to give a sense of them walking on grass, rather than just floating – and not too far removed from the background colour of the lobster itself. And then I found the blue which is perfectly the colour of the deep blue sea.

I'll leave you with some words that Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother when he was working on his painting of The Zoave in 1888.

"I'd always like to work on portraits
that are vulgar, even garish…  It teaches me,
and that's what I ask of my work above all."

I hope my lobster doesn't prove to be too vulgar in the end, although I am already learning a lot along the way.

One thing leads to another...

It's strange how one thing can lead to another.

After a conversation with creative friends in the pub on Friday night, I found myself making little decorative buttons out of polymer clay on Saturday morning – something I didn't really have time for, but then, I often do things I haven't really got time for, and leave the chores for another day (or just leave them altogether). I've had the little packet of white clay sitting on my dresser for months, waiting for the moment of inspiration.

The polymer clay was OK to work with; not as pliant or responsive as real clay, drier and a little more prone to cracking – but then, like acrylic paint compared to oil paint, this is a plastic based product and is never, in my view, going to truly emulate or be as desirable as the real thing. The advantage, though, is that you can cook polymer clay for 30 minutes in the oven to harden it, whereas pottery requires the expense of a proper kiln and the gradual build up of heat over many hours to over 1000°c to successfully fire it.

So I cooked my little buttons in the oven and decided to paint them in jewel colours with acrylic paint. I then edged them with gold and varnished them. Here is a little batch of 16 that I managed to make all around the same size.

As you can see, they are assymetrical and a little curled – definitely decorative rather than functional. I'm just hoping I can find a needle slim enough to go through the holes!

I was very pleased with the colours once I had varnished them and late last night I wondered whether I should paint the people on my lobster in these mixed jewel colours, rather than boring old black. I have also been wondering how practical it would be to cut the figures out of newspaper. I like the idea of recycling one of the many hundreds of newspapers that my husband buys every year, all of which end up in the recycling bin, into something artful, bright and beautiful.

So I sketched one of my kite figures quickly onto a piece of yesterday's car section from the EDP, cut him out (this one is my brother Patrick, struggling to keep his kite up) and painted him green. The newspaper curled up rather badly as it was drying, which could be an issue when I finally get down to cutting out and painting figures en masse. Having flattened him out, I then varnished him and stuck him onto the piece of paper I had sprayed gold just before I rashly started spraying the lobster itself gold. So here he is:

I like being able to see the newsprint through the paint. I think it helps give the image some character and a bit of movement. And I think that with all the walkers, talkers, runners, hoppers, skippers and jumpers in bright colours, my lobster will look like a huge bejewelled piece of golden treasure; one of a pair, perhaps, recovered from guarding the gates to Neptune's very own palace somewhere in the deepest part of the ocean...

There's a lobster on my lawn...

I have just taken delivery of my eagerly awaited 6' white fibreglass lobster. It is lurking furtively in the shrubbery – and its ungainly shape, lurching weight and lack of any proper means to manoeuvre it without fear of the whole thing toppling sideways and smashing to smithereens, means it will probably have to stay there, under a huge plastic bag to protect it from the next onslaught of snow and sleet.

Now that I've finally got my hands on my very own lobster, the creative side of my brain is chomping at the bit to get out the paints and start decorating, but my design is still very loose in my head – in fact several ideas are fighting with each other for priority – and I have got rather a lot of other desperately important things to do this week, so I will have to restrict myself to making notes in a sketchbook.

My lobster will be a part of the Cromer and Sheringham Crustacea Crawl 2010 which comes hot on the heels of the Norwich Elephants and the North Walsham Hippos and hopes to draw lots of visitors to the area over the Easter period. I shall be studying these to see which I think are the most successful before committing myself to a design for the lobster. My favourite elephants are numbers 12, 45 and 52 – I haven't had a chance to look through all the hippo photos yet.

An auction on 23rd May of the finished crab and lobster sculptures will raise funds for the local RNLI stations and Help for Heroes. So one of the most difficult challenges ahead is to decorate the ugly beast in such a way, that someone might actually want to buy it!

I also have a responsibility to the National Trail and NCC 'Norfolk Health, Heritage and Biodiversity Walks' who have jointly funded the project with me. 

The plan is to site our lobster at the top of Beeston Bump to encourage people to get outside, find the local trails and footpaths and go for a walk somewhere new!

If you live locally and you haven't seen this book of walks you ought to get hold of one. It is free, very well produced and certainly inspired me to walk some new routes last year – including the one that goes over Beeston Bump!

There should be copies available in Cromer and Sheringham. I got mine at Randall's Electrical last spring. I know they had some in the Town Council at Cromer at the end of last year. Or contact Carrie Kerry on 01603 228923.