Louise Smith

This miniature is based on a view from a beach in Hawaii, but I guess it could be anywhere you like to imagine.   The sky, distant island (Kahoolawe), and blue-coloured water are hand-painted, and so is the sand at the bottom.

There’s machine stitching to create the look of the white water, and some lint from chopped-up wool glued to the very edge of the water.  It helps bulk up the wave and hopefully make it look like it’s just about to break over your toes.  Then a hand-stitched boat and some tiny stitches in shiny invisible thread to make glints on the water, which don’t show in this photo.

And I can’t mention Hawaii without recommending slack key guitarist Makana.  His music’s featured on the film The Descendants which I (wrongly) haven’t seen yet, or look for him on YouTube.

My husband and I became Canadian this week!  What a relief to get through all the paperwork and tests, and I’m so excited to be able to vote.  Also wondering when the jury service requests will start rolling in, as I seem to be highly magnetized that way.  Coming soon to a courthouse near you!

At only 3 x 4 inches this was fairly quick to do.  (It didn’t really take a month, I’ve been on vacation : )

I squeezed out a line of gutta along the water edge.  When the gutta was dry I painted the sand below in quick strokes with a brush.  The gutta stops the sand colour bleeding into the part I want to be blue.

When using gutta there is always a slightly heavier deposit of colour right next to it.  The paint stops dead at the gutta and has nowhere else to go except back over on itself.  Luckily that’s exactly what I wanted in this picture, as there is naturally a slim shadow cast by the foam itself and the sand really does look darker there.

After painting the water I machine-sewed all crazy with white thread in the foreground to look like foam.   This is so forgiving, mistakes only make it better.  I also hand stitched some white wool in there at the thickest part for extra volume.

For the gull I used some white wool chopped up and glued down with tacky glue.  There are some stitches in there for his legs and wings, and I had to use tiny dots of pastel dye sticks (applied using the tip of a pin) to get the detail of the beak and eye.  For a long time little Kenny hovered between life and the dreaded fate of being unpicked and sewn over into foam, but he made it.  His shadow was the last thing I painted, and he was all “yay.”