Sharon Golding Designs

 Hello everyone! When I’m stuck or in need of motivation I always look for a challenge.  It gets me off my butt and making.  It’s great fun too. So with this in mind I signed up to take part in the Find Your Joy challenge this year. So far I’ve only done assignment 1, but my goodness, it’s such fun! Take a large piece of paper.  Using masking tape divide it up into either 4 or 6 sections.  Then using just 3 colours plus black and white, play, make marks, mix colours, have fun.  Paint over the tape disregarding it.  The only limit is to keep within 30 minutes. When finished, peel off the masking tape and magic happens! I enjoyed it so much it became almost addictive and I now have lots of little paintings to use in my journal or as collage or book covers, whatever. I decided to use yellow ochre, ultramarine blue and magenta as my 3 colours plus mars black and titanium white. First try:- Old masking tape gripped paper so hard and ripped it when removed! Second try:-  I used same colours

This was such fun to make and I changed things as I went along.  Using a glass bottle (this one is a gin bottle as I rather liked the blue glass) and some air drying clay, I left gaps for windows as I wanted to add lights inside.  An egg box was used to create one wall as it was my intention to make it look like stonework (kind of like crazy paving). Originally I intended to make the roof with strips of card stuck to the bottle stopper, but then I realised this would not be practical as I couldn’t easily open the bottle to add the lights or replace them if necessary (when the battery fails).  So I scrapped that idea and chose to make the roof slightly lower down. I used little strips of wood for the panelled door. Will get some updated pics of the progress shortly. Happy creating!  See you soon. Best wishes Shari 😊  

Hello again,  Shari has been busy once again with painting a landscape.  It’s as easy as 1-2-3 … 1. Draw 2. Block in and 3 refine.   Of course after the refine there is something else needed and that is finding the One Thing.  That’s where we review the painting and look for the one thing that will improve the painting.  Live with the painting, keep it in sight each day and keep looking for the One Thing.  Eventually, it will jump out at you and niggle you so much that you have to fix it.  That’s when you figure out how to fix it and voila! Your painting is finished. Waterlily Lake   With this painting I had used a photo reference as a starting point.  I had drawn out my shapes on the canvas with thinned oil paint.  Then I blocked in the big shapes.  Having refined and put in the detail I was not really happy with the result.  So I set about finding the One Thing.  Of course there is more than one thing needed to fix this painting but I always just focus on one thing (at a time). First

 Now here’s something interesting.  I was playing around with polymer clay with my grandchildren, just showing them how you can make things like jewellery and Christmas decorations then bake them in the oven and hey presto! You have something that lasts. I then started getting out some scraps of sterling silver and here’s what I came up with.  To make it even more resilient and hopefully long lasting I coated the clay with clear resin.  I’m quite pleased with this and will make it into a pendant. This is the front with the diamond cut into the silver And here is the back with the polymer clay coated in clear resin. What do you think?  Any ideas that could help?