The day we got withy it!

This is something we had never intended to do but the art coordinator at Workbase, Ruth, brought in a load of willow withies from wasteland she new. If you cut them near the base they grow again and will remain supple stood in water for a good while. Also if you stick them in the ground fairly quickly they will start to grow new plants.

We started of bending and fastening the withies into heart shapes wrapping string and strips of cloth round them. When you twist two together they pretty much stay put. Some of us thought we had a selection of carpet beaters. We also added tissue paper to fill in gaps. If you paint over the tissue with PVA it goes taught across an area when it dries.

After getting more confident some of us became a little more sculpture inclined and the projects began to get a little large and intricate!

The day we did Scottie Wilson Pics Again!

We enjoyed using the Artists pack from Pallant House Gallery Outside In that we did it again. We had some new group members who wanted to have a go so we did. Scottie Wilson worked in pen and filled in areas with colour. The mix of colour and pen seems to lift the image and make it more vibrant.

The day we rearanged Kendal Town Hall!

This is an easy on to do. Take a photograph of a building. The more interesting the better. Blow it up to A4 or bigger and then cut up the bits. If you look at the picture you can cut out chunks of window, doorways, roff etc. Then rearrange the bits to make a new building and stick them down on a new piece of paper. The result is an odly familiar building. They catch people eye as they are never sure if they recognise the building or not.

When we had done this we realisewd they would all join together to make one long town scene. We added a few small pics and gave it a sky.



The day we made decorations

Sorry for the gap in posting- things were very chaotic over Christmas and it's only the last few weeks the WellArt group has gotten going again. Anyway, the last post was about melting wax to make fridge magnets. This is just an extension. We dipped ping pong balls in different coloured molten wax then dipped them in sparkly stuff. How easy is that. Word of caution- danger of having a wax covered sparkly finger!

The day we made fridge magnets

Jo had the brilliant idea of creating fridge magnets using the wax crayons and some small magnets. We used small foil pie dishes and cut up the wax crayons in fairly big chunks, about half a centimeter, and arranged these in the bottom of the dishes in various patterns. Then we applied the heat gun to melt the wax until it all went runny. We left them to set a while but before they completely hardened we dropped on the magnet to sink down into the wax a little. A few moments later the wax was hard and we tested it on the fridge!

You can glue the magnet onto the back as it can be a bit hit and miss dropping it on while the wax is molten.

We also tried writing into the foil on the bottom of the dish to have a message showing though this didn't work too well!

The day we tried Thermowaxonography (made up name!)

The WellArt group has a history of heating things up so when we discovered lots of cheap wax crayons we decided to apply more heat. First of all we tried shaving the crayons onto small pieces of card, covering them with paper and ironing them. The results were quite pleasing but a lot of wax stayed on the paper (though some of these looked good too!). Here are the cards:

The bits of paper we ironed looked good too. If you do this don't forget to put a piece of paper over the crayon when you iron or you end up with a very messy iron!

Then we used a heat gun- sort of a hair drier but hotter! Again we arranged shavings and bits of wax crayon onto card then heated them so the wax melted. One word of caution- don't get too close with the heat gun at first as it will blow all the wax bits away and it is a real pain to hoover. Here are a selection:

As we went on we became better at arranging and mixing. As we had more ideas we thought we would try again in another session.



The day WellArt put up a front.

After having the gallery recently in an empty shop the management of the Elephant Yard in Kendal kindly let us use another empty shop and fill it's window with our work. This gives WellArt and Workbase publicity and it looks far better for the shopping centre than having an empty shop. A win win situation!