Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Really, it's more like Pyrography 067: Remedial Woodburning. I'm a novice. I was gifted this woodburner last year for Christmas and I'm only just now trying it out. I thought I'd share my experience with everyone so they can decide if it's the kind of thing they'd like to try out too. I have an inexpensive wood burner with 4 different tips. My first step towards figuring this whole thing out was trying each of the tips out. I grabbed a pine board from our scrap pile (this one is actually a breaking board from my husband's TKD stash...already broken in half). This first angle tip was good at making fine straight lines, but not much else. It didn't work well for curves at all. The tips just screw in to the tool. I used a potholder to hold my tips while working and a pliers to swap them out. The directions say to let the tool cool when you change tips, but they unscrew more easily when they are warm, so just be careful. The second ti...

Time for another watercolor painting! I have painted two butterflies from photographs I found on google, this time I'm painting a blue jay. As a reminder if you haven't been following my blog, I started painting with watercolors this summer and have been teaching myself various techniques via the internet and lots of practice (so I'm a beginner).  I sketched out the bird and the branch, but not much else on this one. I figured I'd wing (pun intended) the background as I went. As you can see in the painting above, I wetted down the background and laid down some color. In the first pass of the background, the crabapple blossom areas are purple, I changed them to a pinker shade as I worked on the background. I also ended up removing the branch on the right. It left the painting a bit off balance, but I didn't like the angle the branch was coming out at. Every layer of paint, brought the colors closer to what I wanted them--that's one of my fav...

I recently ordered some water pens and wanted to try one out with rubbing alcohol in it to paint with alcohol inks. I've dripped and blown and stamped alcohol ink on just about everything I could think of, so I wanted to try out painting. I grabbed a couple 4x4 ceramic tiles (as they are cheaper than glossy card stock and Yupo to practice on--and they are easy to wipe off with a paper towel and some rubbing alcohol if you don't like what you've done), a plastic palette , my craft mat , and my alcohol inks and got to work. I filled my medium water pen with alcohol ink and dripped several colors of alcohol ink onto the palette. You only need a couple of drops to make a painting. Just like painting with watercolors, if you end up not using some of your ink, you can re-wet it with alcohol later--so there's no waste. After figuring out how the brush painted, I filled one of the reservoirs on my palette with alcohol ink for cleaning off the brush between co...

After a brief break from painting, I'm back at it. I decided I liked the first butterfly painting I did so much, that I'd try it again so that I could hang a pair up on my wall. I googled "butterfly on a flower" again and waded through the images. This time I wanted one that was facing the opposite direction. I also wanted one that had a nice contrast of colors. I picked the above photo. Then I sketched it out onto my watercolor paper. After I had the sketch, I wetted my paper down to do my background. I did not wet the flowers or the butterfly on my first pass. Then I watered down some green (and a little brown) and yellow paints and got started blotting it on. In the original photo there are these almost purple/brown fern-like leaves in the background, but try as I might, I couldn't get that to look right. I mixed up more green paint to go over it. I also blotted off areas that I didn't care for with a napkin and then painted green ove...