The Advent Project
Once again, this is rather stretching the definition of "crafts", but... 'tis the season, so I thought I'd show you something I did for Christmas 2015, all unsuspecting that six months later I'd be fighting for my life in the Northern General Hospital. Sometimes it's good not to know the future.
I'm not going to show you all the panels, but this is what I started off with on Advent Sunday that year:
Obviously the framed picture on the left-hand wall has nothing to do with Christmas; you've seen it before. That's Alatos at his forge. I just brought him in to make it look a bit more like a living room. Both the wallpaper and the carpet are made using textures from GIMP (I think the carpet one is meant to be moss or something, but it does actually look quite a lot like one of my mother's fitted carpets). Everything else is hand-drawn, but the tree is a bit of a cheat, because I just drew the trunk and one branch, then I resized, rotated, and pasted to give the impression of a lot of branches, occasionally titivating with a few extra needles. As for the candles... well, yes, I'm basically FIEC-style evangelical with a few tweaks, but I do have an Anglican background and my sister's a Catholic, so I'm not in any way against a bit of carefully chosen symbolism. And I have a certain fondness for Advent candles, so in they went. I was extremely pleased with the pewter candlestick; I like drawing metals.
And then, every day, I added a decoration; and every Sunday I lit another candle as well. (Those very tiny baubles counted as one decoration.) I had an absolute ball drawing those. Because I was just doing one a day, I could take quite a lot of trouble over them. Many of them were based on baubles that I'd grown up with, or in some cases had been bought while I was a child; but a lot of them were older than I was, and my mother still has them, though she can no longer put up a tree on her own. The little house at bottom right, for instance. The red and green panelled baubles on either side of it. The robin (just as realistic-looking as I've depicted it here). The snowman. The white frosted bauble with the coloured metallic swirls. The dark green bauble near the bottom of the tree with the stylised white flower-like thing on it. And, of course, the really tiny ones, with the exception that I recoloured all the blue ones purple because I don't do blue (except in certain very limited contexts). I don't think you can get such small ones any more, but they really make a Christmas tree; they give it a very delicate air.
And then there were the ones I just made up out of my head. For instance, there's the Steampunk Special near the middle of the tree; as far as I know, there is no such bauble, but if I ever see one like that I'm buying it. The snowflake about a third of the way down the tree also doesn't exist; that was a case of "you could make a nice tree decoration using peyote beading, couldn't you?". I never made the actual decoration because I was afraid it would fall apart, but that didn't mean I couldn't paint it. And, of course, there is the angel, who has no visible means of support (if I made an actual angel for the top of a tree, it would most certainly be built round a loo-roll tube or even a kitchen-roll tube, but this one appears to be practising to dance on the head of a pin). He, or possibly she, I'm not sure, was created with the aid of a figure from Posevault; for a small monthly subscription you can access a set of figures generated in Blender or something similar, in a variety of poses, and each figure comes as its own subset showing it rotated at many different angles. And, rather conveniently, these figures do include angels (and fairies, for that matter)... so, no, I did not actually draw those impressive wings. I just drew the hair, the halo, and the clothing.
The lights are based on the ones my parents had when I was a child; I put them on the tree a few days before Christmas, but I didn't switch them on until Christmas morning. Switching them on was a matter of lightening and brightening the colours, and then throwing a little bit of coloured light onto any reflective surfaces nearby. The tinsel was very easy to draw, but not very quick; tinsel is simply a question of drawing a tight zigzag line, or a couple of them superimposed, and then making them metallic... and the way you make anything metallic is to introduce high contrasts into it. With something like the pewter candlestick, that means it's mostly fairly dark but there are a few very light areas where the light is reflecting off it; with tinsel, it's pixels. Pepper and salt pixels. So you might draw your initial zigzags in a mid grey, then sprinkle liberally with black and white pixels, and before you know it you have a pretty convincing bit of tinsel. It was a similar story for the lametta (the metallic hanging strips); I should probably have used a little bit more very light gold or even white, because it looks a little bit dark here, but it does still look metallic. My parents' lametta was silver, but I thought gold would look nicer, so gold was what I painted.
I think this is going to have to be my Christmas tree again this year. I do have an artificial one, which somehow managed to survive 2016 (I'm not sure how that did when I lost all my precious CDs, but there you go - it was all a little bit random at the time); but in a tiny and rather chaotic flat that looks something like the result of a collision between a highly eclectic bookshop and an excellent haberdasher's, I have no idea where I'd put it!
