Whoooooooo! I just went and bought a desk lamp and a UV bulb… this is the painting I did earlier shown under black light!

Even the ‘pale pastel’ painting lights up!

 Standard white does not, but you can see the blue dots among the flowers catching the light.

 Here it is; my new black light desk lamp for painting at parties! I’m so excited!!

There’s a real risk with a small business like this one, of funneling all your profits into more and more products and gismos, so I’ve been very restrained and only allowed myself standard bright paints and the metallic/pearls… Then I upgraded my brushes to quality ones. Then bought a new kit to put everything in as the old cardboard file box was pretty hopeless. Then upgraded my paints to better quality ones… added only gold silver and crystal glitters… and just the rainbow one stroke and split cake… then the rainbow in pearl… then three more one strokes from workshops… you see the progression! I’ve now got 6 powder glitters and 4 gel glitters, (this is still the highly restrained expansion you understand!) skin safe glue, googly eyes, gemstones in a variety of colours and sizes from 4mm – 8 mm, and UV paints, ointment for glittery lips, stencils for special designs, personalised business Tshirts, a velvet dress for fairy parties, and my own picture booklets of photos of my custom designs. Lordy, lordy. But how WONDERFUL to be this excited about my work! 🙂

 It doesn’t have to be so intense – you can also apply it for a more pastel effect… although let me tell you it doesn’t photograph HALF as bright as it is in real life… amazing colours!

 Here’s the culprit! A neon rainbow split cake. This (for those who care) is a DFX rather than my usually preferred TAG, for the simple reason that it is a proper six colour rainbow in the correct order – which is oddly rare in the world of facepainting split cakes. Weird!

 And I ordered some DFX white too, on the basis of web chatter that it held a white line better than TAG… I can’t tell the difference… I might try Wolfe next and see if that’s any better. If not – must need some work on my technique.

So yes, once again I’m covered in paint and feeling quite relieved that my dentist cancelled my appointment this afternoon!

So I was almost ready to give up on the class. It’s an hours drive away and I was worried about how sick and stressed I was feeling. Rose encouraged me to keep it and talked to me on the phone about her day on the drive up (using handsfree) to keep me company. I’m so glad I went. I learned so much! Not just the flowers we were being taught, but asking questions about other techniques that had confused me and so on. I also got a lot of encouragement for my business, which is wonderful because I’d had a few disappointing phone calls lately and my confidence has been low. You can check out my wonderful flowers over at my website www.sarahkreece.com.au here’s a sneak peak:
I also managed to get out of the store without lightening my purse too badly, which is a minor miracle. But I did bring home some little treats for my kit, and I’m relieved to be feeling so excited about painting again. It was a big boost to master the new designs quickly and get a thumbs up about my business practices from someone much more experienced in the industry.

After the couple of days I’ve had, it feels like someone has lifted a huge boulder off me, my heart is much lighter and even chirping into song.

It’s a steep learning curve but I was ill the other day so stayed home and spent it in my studio. I’m working on a new tree spirit – a weeping willow. This is the progress so far:

Almost finished our first stop motion project for digital media class. This has over 500 still images, 2 transitions, and was edited in Premiere by complete novices. 🙂

Love this class 🙂

I really enjoyed this. I love sculpting these little items, it’s so fiddly and interesting. The paintwork is madly fiddly too but I really enjoy it.

Detail – face

Detail – shirt and buttons

Detail – shoes

So, filming for the stop motion animation begins on Thursday, editing is on Sunday, and hopefully by Monday we’re ready to assemble it into a short film.

See dogboy before he was painted here.

See dogboy in our stopmotion animation here!

And here’s the little taps for the sink and a door handle:

My second one had to be a self portrait using text, created in Photoshop. This was a much steeper learning curve for me. I abandoned one project part way through because it was driving me crazy and looked like crap. The second one I worked out a lot of faster ways to do things and I’m very happy with it. 🙂

Now I’m exhausted and off to bed.

So, my digital media class at college has thrown me into the world of gifs! I knew nothing about this area until last week. This is one of my first gifs, made this evening on my phone. For those of you not in the know, a gif is basically a tiny video that loops, and is a very small file that can be quickly loaded and hosted in many places on the net. You won’t see them on Facebook but they’re pretty common everywhere else. A couple of our assignments involve creating gifs this term.

This particular one was created using an app, photographing the shadow of my hand in various poses, and then joining those photos to create a very short film that endlessly repeats itself.

Our journal for this class is online, documenting our work, research, and idea development on a tumblr account. I’ve never had one of those either. Now I do, so if for some reason you’re interested in gifs or animation or tumblr or spending an evening in your pj’s eating cookie dough and browsing the net, you can have a look at my developing journal and truly jaw dropping efforts in gif creation over at sarahsdigimedia.tumblr.com 🙂