Yay for Saturday

It's Saturday! Yay! Time to attend my best friend daughter's 6th birthday party, help Jim take the photo's and look after little Ollie. Cake, face painting, balloon modeling....not sure I'll have time to take the photo's ;o)

Happy Saturday to you all!

Ps.....wonder if Bear can squeeze his way out of the Penguins to come along?

Gruffalo party time

I made a Gruffalo invitation for my friend's little boys second birthday party recently and she asked if I could create a menu to give to the children so they could select the food they wanted in their little lunch bag.

So I set to work and instead of painting this one I decided to really try and get to grips with Photoshop. Over the years I have used it but I really do have a limited knowledge. Fortunately Jim doesn't and after installing a Wacom pen tablet on my laptop (which I have had for 2 years but never used), I decided to use it and have some fun. Again with help from Jim we got it up and running and then I just played about.

Here's the menu as it is right now. Not sure I will change anything else as my friend loves it....it just depends on how well it prints as I hope the background won't be too 'busy' once printed.

Hope you are having a great Sunday. Today has been lovely and relaxing so far with the family. Perfect!

Added to Sunday Sketches - please head over to Sophia's blog to check out the other entries,

Watch out there's a Gruffalo about!

Ages ago I created a Charlie and Lola party invite for my best friends daughters 5th Birthday party. And I loved every minute of it. I learned lots in photoshop thanks to my lovely Jim and I was quite pleased with the invite. You can see it here. It's now approaching her 2 year olds birthday party and I have been given the task of producing a Gruffalo themed invite, so last night I got stuck in!

As I was waiting for the wash to dry I looked around and my other paintings winked at me.....so I got out my yellow acrylic ink and did some drizzling. Then sprayed water over it and tilted the canvas until I liked how it looked.

I also decided where I wanted the flowers to be and used the children's numbered tubs to draw round for perfect circles. And to think I nearly chucked these away - these are perfect as you have all different size circles!

And once done, I laid the canvas flat to dry.

I will do some more to the invites tonight as my 'client' is very demanding :o)

Good times

I had a lovely weekend as it was spent with friends and family and lots of children. My best friends little boy is 4 on Tuesday and she threw a party for him at one of those indoor activity play centres yesterday. Needless to say Daisy had a brilliant time and slept all the way home.

Here's a photo of me and Daisy just before we left the centre.

This week I will finish off Gruffalo party invites for my best friends youngest boy who will be 2 in November. So quite looking forward to that!

Have a great week and a Happy Monday too!

I'm still here...

Brighton Beach

Sorry I've not been around much but it's all gone a bit mad really!

House renovations, children, family, friends, photoshoots and the like hasn't left me much time or energy for blogging!

In the UK we have had two long four day weekends on the trot and I have loved every minute of them. I've seen family, friends, done stuff to the house, played in the park, ogled from afar at this photoshoot, helped photograph a childs 4th birthday party, helped market my lovely Jim's event business, watched a Royal Wedding a great band called The Slammers play, and those are the things I can remember.

So not much time to paint and the like.

I had a feeling it would get like this a little while ago and I hope to catch up with your blogs soon and get back to my Sunday Sketches too - I've missed it!

Have a great week!

Helen

Maddie's invite

I’ve had so much fun this week making the party invite in photoshop. Lovely Jim helped me with some of the technical stuff I wasn’t too sure on and then came up with some great ideas to make it a really special invitation. It was fun working together with him on it especially as it made a really nice change to be creative using a pc and not a paintbrush.

I’ve been so tired too as going back to work after some time off over Christmas is taking it’s toll. But I will not let this stop me from being creative in the evenings and weekends....just need to make sure I plan things right and look after myself too so that I don’t burn out (ooh am I really living and learning from my past mistakes)!

Now the invite is done I will look at finishing the Esher painting I started some time ago, then there is just one more to complete in my series. And I already have a new painting project bubbling away which I will share once I work out the details. All exciting stuff!

Anyhoo, here’s the invite and if anyone would like one designed for them, just drop me a line.

Have fun and be creative x

Ps, I've changed some details to protect the innocent ;o)

52 weeks, 52 photos

I've decided to take up another photography challenge which I feel more confident in completing. A picture a week for 52 weeks!

Last year I did the 365 photo project, but being ill for over a month kind of put paid to wanting to take a photo every day, and so I didn't finish it. I tried hard to not let it get me down, as I had managed to take a picture every day for ten and a half months before disaster struck! On the positive side I learnt heaps about photography, my camera and my subjects, so all was not lost. Plus the people in group I joined on Flickr were amazing, very inspirational and really friendly.

I also want to encourage myself to be creative every week in addition to taking a picture, so I have decided to give myself a theme of creativity for the entire project. Which means that every picture has to be of something creative, either what I am working on (which I aim to be working on something every week) or what someone else is working on or has worked on.

So without further ado, my week one picture is the mock up of my children's party invitation which I have worked on this week. I do realise that this picture has already been posted, so I have jazzed it up bit in Lightroom. The finished invite has been approved by the client (almost 5 year olds know what they like) and I will share that with you soon.

Have a great weekend and let the creativity flow x