sketch book and GCSEs

Normally my sketch book has just straight forward drawings that I work on to transfer into images for the pots. At the moment I am working on owls. What I am looking for are shapes that will fit into a landscape shape on the pots. Still got plenty of work to do on that yet.
However, my son has just started his art GCSE. So I thought I would try it myself to encourage him and feed him some ideas.
The first thing he had to do was alter the cover of his sketch book. I've built a sort of box on the front of mine to house one of my keys.
The next subject was leaves. As you can see I've looked at some ideas that don't need a huge amount of drawing skills. It's a long time since I taught what was then O levels and things have changed a lot since then.
Does anyone know of a good web site out there on this sort of thing just maybe mum helping, even at arms length, isn't too cool!

I've been playing about with this cardboard template to work out some ideas for a reliquary. I was quite pleased with it and remembered just in time that I needed to make the templates bigger to allow for shrinkage. I'm calling it 'the birds and the bees'.

This is one of the casseroles out of the kiln this week. I am very poor at taking photos of my work and so often things go off and I realise too late that I haven't kept a record of them. Sometimes it's helpful to keep a record to go back to ideas and build on them. So today in the middle of cooking Sunday roast I shot outside into the sunshine to try and record this weeks firing. I only photographed this one though because I had to re-organise my priorities and rescue the lunch!

Inspiration

I'm trying to multi-task this morning whilst awaiting the arrival of a new washing machine. Trying to clear space for the men to get the new machine in through the hall and clean the mess from the old one whilst cooking and blogging. You may not be surprised that it isn't working.
It's a beautiful day and when the sun comes out the garden is fluttering with blue tits. The other day they settled onto the seeds of the crocosmia and looked beautiful. I couldn't catch them on camera so I decided to put them onto the casseroles. They are such colourful, bright birds.
You have to look very carefully but you may just see them in the photos.




Whilst I'm in the house I am also planning on making some templates for a smaller reliquary. I'm hoping to get back out the studio this afternoon as I've still got jugs wrapped in polythene awaiting decoration.

West Wales

We had a wonderful break in West Wales for the week-end. This little harbour of Porthgain was within walking distance of where we were staying. We were able to walk there and then follow the coastal path around to the next village.

The vernacular architecture features these stone cottages, they seemed to nestle into the hillside. One of the industries in the area had been quarrying and this quarry has been flooded by the sea. It was breathtaking to see as we came over the hill and saw it below. Although you can't see it in the photo there was a seal bobbing about in the 'lagoon'.
It was a beautiful magical place and my head is full of images of ravens falling through the air over wind swept woods and waves breaking on craggy rocks.