Cath Sheard Art

Category: Uncategorized

  • Getting other people into scrapbooking

    We’ve been celebrating heroes this month at our LibraryPlus. As many of you know, I love to scrapbook – paper, scissors and glue for adults. I decided to make up a ANZAC / Heroes scrapbooking kit for our customers to try as part of our ANZAC events. Lats week a few ladies gave it a try at Patea and tomorrow they’ll be doing the same in Waverley. We had a wide range of ages and abilities in Patea that morning and they all did so well; going home with a finished page they could be proud of.

    This is the basic layout they made. Each brought along a photo for us to copy for them, and we handed them a kit with  a page of step by step instructions. The packs are random colours, but all pre-coordinated so they just have to put it all together. This is my Dad, in 1945, as a young man in the Navy.

  • Excited!

    This year I entered Dale Copeland’s International Collage Exchange after a break for a couple of years. You send off collages, Dale does a huge amount of work to swap them round, and you get a package of collages back (bit more to it than that, but anyway…). I opened my package, looked at one of the collages, and went “Oh my god, I don’t believe it!”. I was 99% sure straight away that the work in front of me had been done by Carol Staub, an artist whose work I have admired for years. And I was right! So excited. So grateful. The image below is not the one I received, it’s the one that was for sale on the Virtual Tart site, but shows the style of work.

    Just. So. Happy. 

  • More on the Freezing Works

    Last night was one of those nights where all I wanted to do was paint – not sleep, work, or whatever – just create something. Turns out it was the full moon. Along with many other creatives, I suffer from “full-moon-itis”! About 10pm I gave in and opened a packet of A4 size Hahnemuhle watercolour paper. The 300gsm is heavy enough that I can work on it without needing to stretch it; perfect for doing mixed media at my desk, and it’s a lovely surface to work on.

    I have done a lot of works inspired by the old Patea Freezing Works over the last few years, and since going to Italy in 2010 I’ve also done a lot of works that involve poppies. Last night I combined the two and depicted the freezing works site regenerating, with poppies growing where the land has been disturbed, just like in Cassino, Italy. I kept one derelict building at the far right, and a few ‘ghost’ buildings along the horizon, where they still exist in my memory. I used Golden airbrush acrylics, a super fine Sharpie pen, Faber Castell aquarelle sticks and Caran D’Ache Neocolors, then added text in Photoshop.

  • Crusade 61: end of an era

    I’ve been doing the Crusades off and on for years now. Michelle has enriched our lives in so many ways; thank you so much. The sense of community is huge. Michelle’s taking a well earned break. So this is my final Crusades entry for a while – the writing says it all for me. By the way, the challenge was to “show restraint” – to leave some space and let the work breath.

  • More collages

    The only thing I have to show this week is more of the collages I made for Dale Copeland’s International Collage Exhibition, so here we go. I have done lots of study for my Museum paper, and quite a lot of work towards next month’s newspaper already (in my own defense!)

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