During the spring term on the painting course, this was the last painting I finished. I think it just might be my best so far. The teacher agreed that I’ve come a long way from the start of the autumn term.

I paid special attention to making the eyes realistic, and I’m very proud of their look. The face overall has a pretty good resemblance to the model, Cillian Murphy. He’s been one of my favorite actors ever since 28 days later, because he has such a distinctive, peculiar face. High and sharp cheek bones, gaunt cheeks, full lips and very light blue eyes. Very strange, which I like.

(I no longer know how to link the small pic to a larger one on WordPress, thanks so much update 3.01)

There are some  minor things off about the face, but I came to a point where making any changes would have probably jeopardized the painting as a whole. Usually it’s best to just leave it as it is at some point and make another version if you are desperate to get it exactly right. I think I will paint Cillian again later, but from a different picture and angle. Even though I’m not perfectly content with the actual resemblance, I like the color combo of earthy tones combined with cool blue. Besides, we had a live model once during the course, and she came by to look at it and recognized him immediately.

In other news, for a while I’ve meant to move my pictures to some other gallery than Photobucket. It’s just so sucky. But moving the pictures and updating the links won’t be a walk in the park either. As for continuing my painting, I’m thinking of joining the Saturday group in the autumn term. I can no longer attend morning classes just in case I get work, and that unfortunately means I will have a different instructor.

The Saturday group is actually 5 hours for independent painters to come and make use of the facilities, without any guidance from an instructor. That would be fine, since painting without guidance is better than no painting at all. It’s the facilities that I most appreciated in addition to the instructions, since it is very complicated to set up my painting table at home. Plus, having a set time for painting never hurts.

I’m also considering making a website for advertising my translation and proofreading services. I have my own personal nerd to help me so basically I just need to come up with the content and design. I might not get customers anytime soon since I have so little on my CV as far as translations, but I might have a chance with low pay rates and with a convincing website.

Even small jobs would add to the groundwork for getting to my ultimate goal, i.e. some day successfully getting employed at a translation agency. It’s difficult to convince them that I could be a great translator when I have done so little of it officially, with proofs. I believe in my own abilities but I have little to show for it. But maybe one day.

Hmm, maybe we could make it a tradition to exchange xmas presents in March or April, since it’s such a long time until my birthday and next Christmas… Anyway, in exchange for lol-slippers, Deniselle gave me fridge magnet poetry!

It’s a collection of words and punctuation marks in the form of fridge magnets that I can use to compose sentences, poetry in particular, by arranging them around on my fridge. I tried to group them according to word class, but soon discovered that my powers of classifying Finnish are less than perfect.

But let’s move on to the slippers! The pattern is from here, the Ravelry link is here. They are called Peter Pan’s slippers, but since mine always turn out too big, I call them lol-slippers.

Here are Deniselle’s slippers:

Deniselle really, really liked them! I guessed her taste in colors quite well – I don’t like blue much myself, but I don’t have a problem making something for someone else in colors that I don’t like. She thought they look absolutely hilarious with the pointy toes, which fits her endearingly silly personality very well indeed.

And here are mum’s slippers:

Mum commented that the pointy toes seem to want her to keep turning to the left all the time. They twist like that because I wasn’t careful enough with lining up the sides properly when I sewed them together.

Just like my dad’s slippers, these are huge. The cat in the photo is about the size of a real cat! The weird thing is, they are 12 rows and too big for mum, but at the same time the 10-row slipper she crocheted herself turned out too small for a friend of hers who has big feet for a woman. And when I asked Amoena about the size, she recalled she may have made only 8 rows in slippers she gave to a male friend of hers! Strange.

In any case, mum was thrilled with the colors and she decided she wants to try to make her own to give out as presents. She used to crochet, knit and sew her own clothes when she was young, because back then she was too poor to buy her clothes ready-made. She used to have a decent skill at it at least, so no reason why she couldn’t re-learn it.

So I urged her to buy  a crochet hook (her old ones were so short that they felt difficult to use) and some yarn, so I could teach her some basics before I have a 3 week break before my next Irish dance classes. She obeyed and I translated and printed out Finnish instructions for the slippers. As soon as she made her first double crochet, she immediately exclaimed “ooohh this is fun!”. Hooked from the first stitch! I had to draw a detailed series of pictures as a reminder of how to make the first slipknot and the first stitches in a magic ring, but otherwise she got the hang of the different stitches very quickly.

So the next time I’ll show her how to make hexagons (see on the sidebar in my projects – oh dear, I’ve completely neglected to blog about my hexagon blanket that I also gave to mum?!), since the slippers are quite fast to make and can get boring really quick. I can’t wait. It’s fun to spread the joy of handicraft.

Once upon a time, I felt inspired to paint Sofi Oksanen, the latest Finnish author to win the prestigious Finlandia Prize. Not only is she a goth chick, she also has interesting features. Her apparently nonchalant basic expression conceals an intelligent, idealistic and thoughtful woman. I haven’t read any of her books, but I plan to. My wild guess is they didn’t hand out that prize to her for nothing.

Long shory stort, she’s fully deserving of a portrait. One painted by me, now that’s a whole another matter. But doesn’t stop me from trying.

I knew from the start that it wasn’t going to end well. I was more anxious to paint anything, rather than Sofi and Sofi alone. I decided I’m too lazy to go for as perfect resemblance as I can, which basically means my whole heart wasn’t in it. Thusly, I started hating the painting long before I got to the point it is at now.

But since it’s Sofi, I must say there are some minor things I like about the painting. I like the scarlet around the eyes and eyebrows, and the salmon-y hue on the chin and the right temple contrasting against the white skin. I like scarlet and salmon a lot.

Other than that, this painting was a disappointing attempt. I shall paint it over some day and make another attempt, or it will haunt me forever with is accusing eyes.

Pichu, on the right, is definitely cuter than Chuckychu! I think I’m getting better at making amigurumis already, on my second try! I’m a little miffed that I can’t seem to find black safety eyes with light spots. There are hundreds of variations of eyes with a white, brown, green or any other color background, except black! And none with a light spot. And black eyes with light spots are essential to pokémons!

Oh well. I just have to be extra careful in cutting the eyes from felt. As with painting, the shape of the eye is a delicate matter. A tiny bit too small, big, oval, anything, and it won’t look quite right. Pikachu on the left there is a prime example.

Next up will be Eevee. Crocheting adorable creatures is a really nice change. They’re so fast to make and they’ll do a great job at establishing my reputation as a creep. Or more specifically, engraving that reputation on stone.

EDIT: I completely forgot to give props to the person whose pattern I used. It is of course Wolfdreamer, whose blog has many cute Pokemon patterns! I will probably make most of them before soon.

It feels like I worked on this beanie for an eternity, hence the ingenious name The Eternity Beanie (TEB for short). In actual fact, however, I started it before Christmas, went on until about 90% and then stopped. I got hit hard by the Terror of Finishing a Work and Realizing the Yarn Will Run Out (or TFWRYWRO for short; a devastating, mind-affecting condition documented in various medical publications).

So in the end, I probably worked on it only for a month at best, since I finished it in like two hours. I was ecstatic when I realized I won’t even run out of yarn – there is still at least one meter left. I’m truly pleased with this beanie, as I’ve always wanted this kind of slouchy beanie. I couldn’t find a good one in stores, so I had to make one.

The pattern is called the Sockhead Hat by Bohoknits. It only requires 100g of sock yarn, so I thought my two skeins of 50g Teetee Pallas yarn would be perfect. I fell in love with this beautiful variegated yarn and I think it suits the beanie perfectly. The pattern was very easy for a beginner knitter such as myself, so I strongly encourage any other beginners out there to start with this pattern. I only dropped one stitch and my decreases didn’t go all wonky. Yay me.

Without further ado, may I present my fairly recent painting:

I made this during the autumn semester of my painting course. I didn’t plan on it at all, it just happened while I was waiting for Amoena’s portrait to dry so I could finish it. With oil painting it is basically a must to have several projects underway at the same time, or you will have to take irritating breaks from painting altogether.

The male was supposed to look like a photographer whose work I’ve been admiring for a couple years now, but it doesn’t look like him at all, hence no reference picture. The female on the other hand was based on Noomi Rapace, the actress from the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She’s really stunning. I think I may have to paint her another time and make a real effort to try and make her look exactly right.

For once though, the characters were not the main point about the painting. I wanted to create something colorful very quickly, so I speed-painted it within an hour. But at the time, Tuomo the professional painter and painting instructor had just introduced a new painting technique to us novices. It’s called glaze, or lasuuri in Finnish. It was the perfect opportunity to try this new and slightly intimidating technique on a painting that I didn’t feel very passionate about.

A glaze in oil painting means that you choose a transparent kind of color that isn’t too rich in pigment – titanium white is a no-no, but lemon yellow or viridian green, much better. You thin the paint with water or turpentine, depending on whether you use water-soluble oils or not. I do, which means I can thin my paint with water without the hassle of turpentine. The paint should be very thin, almost like water colors.

Then you apply the extremely thin and flowing paint on the whole surface of the painting, preferably with a large brush so you can avoid too many brush marks. The point of a glaze is that you shouldn’t be able to notice it. It is simply a layer of color with very little pigment, but enough so that when light reflects from it, the other colors in the painting will get a different hue. You can add several layers of glaze as long as you let the layers dry in between so you can achieve a wonderful effect of depth to the painting.

There’s only one layer of glaze in my painting: I used ultramarine blue on the left just trying it out, but went with lemon yellow for the rest. The imprimatura color is a rosy pink, but it looks more earthy after applying the yellow glaze, and bluish purple on the left, aptly demonstrating the striking difference that a glaze can make. The two faces really seem to pop out from the background – they look like they are floating in the middle of nowhere. The effect is so cool that I am definitely using it more from now on, probably for every painting.

There is one difficulty with a glaze, however. If you do not know your color theory through and through, it can be difficult to predict how the hue of the background color will change from the glaze. I have spent a fair amount of time pondering on which color I should choose for the glaze with my latest painting in progress.

In the end, however, I have never felt like an unexpected color change actually does any harm to a painting. I have no preconceptions of what colors my painting should have or what color my subject-matter should be. I simply go with the flow, using colors that please my eye. That may sound like a cop out, but the truth is I can’t bring myself to be too determinate about colors. As long as the colors work well together within the painting itself, I don’t care if a face of a character ends up being green, pink or blue, or any other color for that matter.

The painting course starts again this week after the long Christmas break! I haven’t signed up, so I will just waltz back in on Friday morning and hope there’s still room for me. If I don’t still have a job in February, I’ll even pay the bill for rest of semester (50% off for unemployed persons!).

Anyways, I’m very pleased with this painting. I started the course with it and took my time to make sure it actually bore some resemblance to Amoena. Behold and judge for yourself:

(Painting of Amoena…)

Now that I can see them side by side, my suspicions are confirmed: her eyes are slightly off and too small in the painting and her mouth slants the wrong way. But by the time I had fixed the position of the eyes, it was too late to change them, or I might have done irreversible damage. Painting with amateur skills is like that sometimes. Her jaw is also more angular in the painting than it should be, but I think the overall look is similar enough to see who it’s supposed to portray.

(..and Amoena herself.)

The teacher, Tuomo Rosenlund, had an interesting interpretation of my painting. He saw symbolism in my color choices – red implying there’s something evil or devious behind that apparently innocent look on her face. This was highlighted by the way I divided the background into two colors and made the left side lighter and the right side darker red. After having said that, he concluded that painters often unknowingly paint people they know in a way that the view them as persons. In other words, I view Amoena as an apparently innocent but actually devious person?

Yes, she’s pure evil. She likes to knit, crochet and watch reality tv. She even coos about her dog Papu all the time and posts videos of the doggie chewing carrots! That’s evil and devious on so many levels, I’m sure you’ll agree!

They’re huge! They’re shapeless! They’re absolutely ridiculous!

I laughed out loud when I finished the first one. I can’t wait to see the expression on my dad’s face when he uncovers these. I bet he’ll need a minute or maybe ten to figure out what they are.

Good thing though, I used nearly three 150g skeins of Novita 7 veljestä on these slippers, yarn which I didn’t have any other use for. I think the mismatched colours go well with the general ridiculousness of these slippers.

If for some completely strange reason you now feel the urge to make a pair of your own, I used the pattern by Gabriela Ordenes, Peter Pan’s slippers. They were easy and fairly quick to make, one of those brainless-projects-for-watching-tv.

In other news, my yarns are even better organized now, thanks to Deniselle‘s generous gift of these pretty canvas bags:

She got these by attending some religious happenings or events. The black one has a slogan which has the idea that people have even chances of finding happiness. (I’ll get a better translation as soon as Deniselle wakes up, she’s a better translator than I am.) And the white one on the right has a cool drawing of a church from Leppävirta, with the slogan “strength from the stream of mercy” (again, horrible translation).

Aren’t they really cool? Deniselle asked me if I wanted them on the spur of a moment and was surprised and amused that I jumped at the chance. I had been wanting some canvas bags for my yarn, and I got these for free, with pictures and text too!

I’m a very unreligious person, but I think for that reason it’s wonderfully random and funny to have religious yarn bags. Amen.