BOO!

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and HAPPY Halloweeeeen! :D 

This is my first ever carved pumpkin, I made it a week ago. Sadly, it didn't live until Halloween, but luckily I did take a picture of it before it molded. :) Hope you're having a fun weekend! :D

Wood-burning: Totoro

Here's another wood-burning project that I did in my last few days in Russia, and then colored when I was already back in the USA. It is a picture of Totoro (the cute main character from the Japanese "My Neighbor Totoro"). :) And it was a birthday present for one of my good friends. :)

I started out coloring it with watercolor paint, but it bled more than I expected it to, and I ended up buying some acrylic paints to use on this picture. This was my first time ever using acrylics, but I think they worked out well. :)

The back is pure wood-burning. And Russian is my nickname at college. :)

Wood-burning: 1915 Fashion

Please excuse that I have not posted in a while... Here is something that is actually different from my usual repertoire. Wood-burned pictures! :) I was unable to take any of my crafting stuff with me to Russia, but I found my mom's old wood-burning tool (~30 years old.. :D ) in the attic.. And thought I'd play around with it. I did a few little pictures at first to try it out, and then went on to burning and also coloring in the image... Here are the results.

These two ladies are from a book of postcards that my mom has. The postcards are of 1915 fashion from New York, copied from French fashion (probably of the same time). Their faces and hands look a bit awkward.. But that is how it was in those pictures. :) *I don't mean to plagiarize the pictures, these were done just for my personal practice in wood-burning.*

Coloring was done in watercolors. I don't know why the left lady did not bleed much (I mean the paint, of course :) ), but the one on the right did bleed alright... However, that was not much of a problem, because my mom (who I ended up gifting it to) said it added a cool effect to the picture and she liked it better that way. :)

Here they are a bit closer up:

Here you can see the bleeding. Not bad when it is around the picture, but it does not discriminate and when purple and blue bleed, for example, from her collar onto her face... It's not so great.

This concludes 1915 fashion show for tonight, ladies and gentlemen! :) However, I do have another wood-burning project that I will share with you in a day or two. :)