I finished my portrait of Amoena ages ago. Last year, in fact.

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!

Yesterday evening I finished my first ever crochet project — the Skunk-punk scarf! Behold:

I’m very happy with how it turned out! It’s very soft and warm and thick. For a while now I’ve been yearning for a black-and-white style in my clothes, so I figured this would be a good way to start. I call it the Skunk-Punk scarf because skunks are black and white, and black and white stripes are part of the punk style. (Something I learned from Avril Lavigne.)

The yarns I used were Novita Kaarna and Novita Marjukka, both off production by now (couldn’t even find a decent link to Marjukka), so they were on sale. Kaarna is 50% wool and 50% acrylic, Marjukka 100% acrylic, hence the softness. Plus Kaarna is superbulky and I’ve grown quite fond of bulky yarn. It makes for a very fast project if you need something quick. And I did, since none of my scarves seemed to work with my new winter jacket and its generously opening neck.

I was so proud of myself when I came up with the “technique” for this scarf. It shows I’ve understood the basics of crochet and I can perhaps experiment and improvise more in the future. It’s very simple and obvious: start with a loooong chain of chain crochet stitches, then continue with single crochet stitches and leave fringes at both ends. I know that’s super simple but it was a revelation for me, the n00b crochetress.

I also got this Estonian yarn from Obiskus as a belated birthday present:

It’s Artistic (or similar) by Aade Lõng, an Estonian manufacturer. It’s 100% wool in three colours: fuchsia, burgundy and light purple. The colours don’t change very quickly along the length, so it will be interesting to see what it looks like on a finished project. There’s 250 grams of it!

I have been brainstorming about what I’m going to make from it. It’s a little coarse, so it wouldn’t be nice to spend a lot of time on something I’m going to wear close to my skin and not be able to wear it because of itching. Well, maybe I’ll just knit a gauge patch to get a sense of how it feels against skin.

Let’s cut her some slack shall we!

I know I’ve been a bad, bad bloggeress. Two weeks since my last post, and they passed by so fast. I’ve been crocheting like a maniac and it shows: my blanket is about one square metre big right now. I’ll post pictures later.

I figured a way to tie the hexagons together, differently from what the pattern proposed. Instead of crocheting them together as I go, I’ve been joining the hexes with slip stitches. They make these shallow ridges between the hexes and I kinda like the look of it, plus they make the blanket feel sturdier. Now I just have to keep up with it and decide how big and how many is enough.

I finally did what I’ve wanted for years now: I took up a painting class! It’s at the workers’ institute and it costs a little something, but I don’t care because my mum pays for it. She thinks it’s a great thing for me and she wants me to develop my painting hobby as much as I can. Nice to have support!

There are both watercolour painters and oil colour people in the group. The teacher started from the basics of oil painting because we’re mostly beginners there. Yesterday we made a little rehearsal of blending a single colour with white, trying to create as many hues as possible. Then we applied what we’d learned from mixing the paints to a painting of some object. The others painted some vases and boring stuff like that, but myself  I just started sketching Amoena‘s portrait. I felt inspired to paint her, even though I thought I would paint La Roux at first.

I’m very happy with what I got, at least everyone else was impressed and said it looked exactly like the photo of Amoena. The perfectionist that I am, I’ll say not quite photorealistic, but I definitely got something right. You’re not ugly and grotesque, Amoena! Not yet anyway. Heehee. That was just a rehearsal, I’ll start on the final painting perhaps the next time.

I’m so happy to be painting again. I’m so happy that my darling Pretty Head rescued me from the sauna bathroom. He’s got such lovely eyes. I also went to a drawing class on Thursday, but I lost my nerve with drawing. Drawing isn’t painting, and that bugs me out so much. I need colour! Lots of it! Being a good drawer definitely pays off when you paint, undoubtedly, but I can’t bring myself to draw. Perhaps when I develop some patience one day in my life.

Well, now that I got this off my chest and over with, I can take another break of two weeks from blogging! Let’s hope not.