I’m in awe of your talents!!!
I admittedly can’t paint for toffee - I’ve tried and failed many times, despite coming from a family of very talented painters.
But I do love to draw. I enjoy charcoal, but my favourite is fine pencil drawing. Having spent most of my drawing life doing portraits, during the pandemic I ventured into a different subject.
I’m a bird lover, especially birds of prey, so where better to start than with a portrait of an eagle, especially considering that there’s a campaign to successfully reintroduce them to Wales. Here’s the finished product…
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The way you’ve captured the light is wonderful.
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This is really original Jason—the scuptural form is wonderful, but I love the idea of its shadow being thrown onto the flag. How did you do that?
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What a gift! I could look at this for hours because of the light on the stonework transporting me to a beautiful, sacred place. It really shimmers. Thank you!
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The amazing detail in every feather gives a texture that contrasts with the shiny roundness of the eye looking at the viewer. Glad I am not a field mouse!
This is brilliant. Diolch yn fawr.
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Any guesses again? Yes, it is in Wales—it’s in my blood, which is why I spent most of my career in mining. So here’s an extract from my thesis about the Welsh here in B.C., Canada…
Nighttime—not that it made any difference down there. ‘Duw, this is doing absolutely nothing to enhance my career!’ His Valleys accent said it all—I knew what he meant. Shovelling coal, sweat glistening in the dim light at the bottom of the breaker station as we dug out the tail pulley yet again, his sing-song humour relieved the frustration and struck me as strangely comforting deep beneath B.C.’s snow-clad mountains. As a proud Welsh woman and engineer who had emigrated to Canada in the 1970s, I had done my share of pioneering and welcomed the adventure, but this had to be the low-point in my upwardly-mobile ambitions—my partner’s too, apparently. His wry, almost incongruous comment spoke volumes, summing up our situation precisely.
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You must have such a steady hand to get all those fine lines on the headstock so thin and straight.
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It helps having started my enineering career in the ‘good old days’ when we drafted everything by hand.
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I can only upload 5 pictures at a time.
The original picture was on FB back in 2018/19 and I contacted the artist, Sam Brown, who was working in Carmarthen at the time and asked him for permission to print the map onto a T towel. This is what I did with it. I gave it to someone here in the SSIW world.
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What a fantastic idea Margaret, and what painstaking, neat embroidery. This will be an heirloom. Have done more textile projects—samplers maybe?
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Brilliant idea Margaret! I can appreciate how much work that was - I did a similar thing with my old PE shirt from school with signatures of my schoolfriends.
Due to the nature of signatures though, mine is no where near as tidy as yours!
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Am lun hardd! (Please correct me, if I got that wrong). The glassiness of the eye and the bird’s focussed gaze are beautifully captured. Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus! 
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Wow, that’s really fantastic! If you ever do another one, I’d be thrilled if you could squeeze Tylorstown (or, even better, Pendyrus - fewer letters, original place name yn Gymraeg) in somehow. 
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Diolch Marilyn. I paint 2D subjects and sculpt 3D objects (yes, you really can!) on an iPad using a pressure-sensitive Apple Pencil. Having created a bird, or a dragon, or a flag, or whatever, it’s possible to ‘light the scene’ with one or more light sources to create shadows and add depth. Sculpting the dragon took me hours and hours, but it’s a fun hobby and I’m still learning how to do it, like my efforts to teach myself Welsh. I use an affordable app called ‘Nomad Sculpt’. Professional digital artists obviously use much more sophisticated and expensive creative tools and produce amazing results. I’ll post a simpler, dragon-playing harp separately on this thread in a bit for your amusement. If not today, then when? Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!
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Thanks. Yes, I was trying to make him look suitably feisty, without being too aggressive. I did a bonkers dragon version last year which I’ll post separately on this thread a bit later today. Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!
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Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus! Here, as they say, is one I made earlier (1 March 2023). Hope this link to the YouTube video clip works. Apologies in advance for my poor harp playing.
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