Home is Where the Hearthstone is

This was a quick project I did as a housewarming present for someone. I was foolish and didn't get many (ie. any) shots of the process. There's also really only two shots of the final product.

I used binder paper to make a quick template of the spiral and pillow shape (which, given the pen I used, turned out to be a very messy endeavor). I used the same patchwork-style for applying the spiral to the outside of the stone as I did in my Companion Cube pillow.

The pillow is made out of a soft woolen fabric and the spiral is polar fleece. I liked it because it was smoky with the two shades of blue.

You can't see in my photos, but the pillow is actually about 1.5-2 inches thick. I cut a rectangle strip of fabric and ran it around the whole edge to give the pillow some depth as opposed to just being a front and back stuck together. If I can get my hands on a photo that shows that off, I'll add it up here later.

I made the swirl design go opposite directions on each side so that if the grey were transparent, you wouldn't see a conflicting design in the blue. When you flip the pillow over, the design curls the other way.

Whole project took about two hours. It was a very quick way to kill time, but I still like it.

Doctor Who Tardis Explosion Shoes

I know it's been done before (time and time again; no pun intended) and I know I don't have the airbrushing or painting skills required to do true justice to the medium, but I was feeling like coloring on some shoes in the midst of reliving a Doctor Who marathon. This was just a little two-day project I decided to test out.

I bought some plain white canvas shoes at Target (I went cheap because this was my first attempt at this kind of project and didn't know how it would go) to use and did some sketching on a sheet of paper to get a feel for the size of my Tardis. I used a pencil to sketch the Tardis on the shoe and then used my yellow pen to start adding the base of the explosion. I knew I had to use the yellow first (else it would bleed with other colors and ruin my pen) and add layers of color as I went. It was weird because I'd never really colored like that before. Definitely a learning curve involved in this process for me.

Once I had the toes colored with yellow explosion, I outlined the Tardis.

The outline was probably optional, but I was having a hard time imagining the end result and I really wanted to see it in there, so I decided to just go ahead and do it. From there, I freehanded the swirls and just had fun with making loopy designs all around the shoes.

I had originally made the trim on the shoes yellow in hopes of it breaking up the darkness (and adding to the BLAM EXPLOSION effect) using the natural design effect in the style of the shoe. You'll notice in the final image up top that the trim is black. My coloring hand got a bit unstable a few times and I hit the trim with my blue pen in a terribly obvious place. =( Thus, black trim in the final result.

After I had my swirl base, I used another shade of yellow to outline and then add depth.

Then, because I got a little anticipatory for results (as with the Tardis outline), I colored in the toe of the shoe to get a feel for the way the explosion colors would stand out against the background.

You can see the layers being added in at this point. Oranges, yellows, all the various bright colors I had. It was all random and freehand from this point on. I tried to keep the design sporadic and unpredictable. Once I had all the explosion layers added in, I filled in the blue of the background and the designs on the heel and tongues (which I forgot to photograph in-progress). Once the blue was all in, I used dark purple, a little black, and some neon blue highlight over thinly colored patches to add depth to the backdrop. Overall, I had fun and I'm pretty proud of them. I don't care if they're not the best rendition of the Exploding Tardis, they're mine and I love them.