End of 2011!

I know I haven't posted in a while (usual excuse, I was busy xD) but I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, and is currently having a great new year's eve! Only one more hour to go.

So to sum up this year, I made a list of the highlights (and some lowlights, but they're all in there for a reason), and a couple of resolutions I'll hopefully keep next year, unlike previous years:

At the beginning of the year, obviously, I celebrated new years with my family! Followed by finishing art coursework and heading back to school to study for my GCSEs.

I turned 16! :D I spent my 16th birthday sleeping over at a friends house, and we did a playing card queen photoshoot.

My beautiful friend Jen as the Queen of Hearts

I spent Valentine's Day with my lovely boyfriend. :3

I finished and passed all of my GCSEs with good grades, and left school.

My class on the last day of term. I'm the one at the front with the "I <3 Wendy Craig shirt." ....It was a school injoke xD

I went to prom...

I'm 3rd in from the left in the black dress, between my two very good friends Kathy and Laura.

And Alton Towers (even better!)

Ha, that's such a scary face I pulled xD

Throughout the school year, I had a lot of fights with friends, and evidently they became not my friends. However, I have no regrets about all this becaaauuuse...

 I started college!

Me and one of my friends at college.

And I made lots of wonderful new friends, with people that actually respect me for who I am.

First time hanging out with some of my new friends, who decided to make me wear a beret and draw a mustache on me while sitting in TGI Friday xD

I celebrated my 2nd anniversary with my lovely boyfriend :3

I enjoyed a fantastic Christmas with my friends and family, and got a sewing machine.

I improved my artwork, in both drawing and photography.

And best of all, I got to dress up, on more than one occasion >:3

Myself as the Queen of Spades

My messed up uniform for the last day of term

Overall, I'd say I've had a fantastic year, and hopefully next year will be just as good, if not better!

So to finish off, here are a few resolutions~

1. Keep fit! Ever since I started college, I've lost my weekly hour of PE, and I really should try and do something to exercise in its place.

2. Enjoy the time I have with my wonderful friends, as I've learnt this year that you never really know how good or bad things are gonna get.

3. Celebrate a 3rd anniversary with Nizz :3

4. Pass my AS levels, with good grades.

5. Dress up even more >:3

6. Improve my art skills even further!

But most importantly, enjoy the year, no matter what happens.

So Happy New Year everyone, I hope 2012 is the best year yet!

Fancy dress day!

It's very difficult to keep up a blog AND make sure I get all my college work done D: I'm not doing too well in some subjects right now, so I've really been concentrating on work.

Anyway, today was the children in need fundraising day! And we had fancy dress at school. I went as a pirate :3

I took an old long sleeved school shirt, cut the collar and cuffs off, and then ripped it up a lot. On my legs, I wore some wet-look leggings (although they're quite worn now, not as shiny. :c ) And pirates have to have some boots! So I wore my lovely mid-calf doc martens.
I wore more bangles than you can imagine; obviously it's all gold I have pillaged on my travels, and my black fingerless gloves with skull and crossbones on, along with a bandana, and an eyepatch I made out of felt and some thread.

I put some mini-braids in my hair, and stuck a bead on the end, inspired by Jack Sparrow of course. I love pirates, so the costume was lots of fun to wear (I'm actually still wearing it xD)

Everyone elses costumes were amazing too! I got some photos:

I present, a purple-caped superhero, Ash Ketchum, Amanda (formerly Adam), myself the pirate, the mad scientist,  the fairy godmother...

Batman's sidekick, Robin.... (She made the costume herself!)

The Jedi...

The bandit...

Misty, and Ash once again!

It was £1 to come in fancy dress, and £2 to come in regular clothes. A lot more people came in normal clothes than fancy dress, but I'll just assume they were feeling generous, rather than way too lazy to get a costume sorted...
All in all, it was a good day! I hope everyone else had just as good a Friday :3

Art update

It makes me really sad that I don't have as much time to draw what I want anymore, especially with taking art for A level, as mostly everything I draw revolves around that now.

However, I started keeping an A5 sketchbook to doodle in whenever I'm stuck in a queue, long car journey, or sat in costa while my friends all drink their coffee and I try to distract myself from almost throwing up due to the smell. (I really, really can't stand the smell of coffee.)

Since it's half term, I've managed to get one or two A4 drawings done, but I thought I'd upload some of my sketchbook stuff too.

I don't normally draw in biro, but I really like the way this turned out.

The Autumn Witch, of whom I'm naming Fenella.

Practice using coloured pencils. (Oh look, MORE Chinese lanterns!)

This one isn't finished yet, obviously. It's a Halloween themed drawing of my friend's character, Gigi.

They're all Halloween related in some way. I'm really in the Halloween spirit this year. xD Hope everyone has a nice Wednesday!

Halloween Ideas for the absolutely skint! : Halloween Chinese Lanterns

Hello! Sorry for not updating in a looong time, college has been taking it's toll. -__-

However, it's my half term this week, and it's almost Halloween! Halloween is definitely my favourite event of the year, after Christmas, of course. Unfortunately, this year I don't have any plans, and Halloween is on a Monday, when I go back to school. Ugh!

Anyway, I decided I'd still celebrate it at home, and decorate my room a little. As I have absolutely no money whatsoever, I've been making my decorations, and thought I might post a step by step guide on everything that I make.

Today I made some paper Chinese Lanterns (Note: These lanterns are paper replicas of real chinese lanterns, and cannot be lit, so don't even try. I don't wanna be responsible for any accidents!) and now my floor is covered in glitter. Hooray!

Uuugh, horrible quality camera, I am sorry!

So, let's begin shall we? To make one, you will need:

A few sheets of A4 card, in the colour of your choice
A ruler
A pencil
Scissors
Glue
Tape
Felt tip pens
Glitter (it's optional, but I love the stuff!)
And a workspace that you don't mind getting completely messy. xD

Step 1. Depending on how large you want your lanterns to be, you can either cut the A4 sheet in half to make A5 card, which makes much smaller and cuter lanterns, in my opinion, or you can stick to the regular A4 size and make bigger ones.
Once you've decided how big you want your lanterns to be, fold the card in half lengthways like so.

Step 2. Now is the best bit. Decorate your lanterns with whatever you like. I used a black felt tip pen to draw little black bat silhouettes and stars on, and then put glitter around the top and bottom edges, but you can decorate them however you like.

Step 3. While the card is folded, cut straight lines from the fold upwards, but do NOT cut all the way to the top. If you want your lanterns to be particularly organised, you can measure and draw on some guidelines with a ruler like I did, but again, it's optional. If you're feeling particularly dangerous, why not cut a wavy lane, or a zigzag and see how that turns out?

Step 3. You should now have something like this! This is the point where you can add some more detail, if you wish, or rub out any pencil guidelines you left behind.

Step 4. Take each side of the card and roll it around on itself to make a cylinder, like so. Stick the two edges together using glue or tape. (I used double sided tape, I find it holds better, but regular cello-tape works fine.)

Step 5. Push the two ends of the cylinder towards each other, so the slits in the card spread out. You should have something looking like this.

Step 6. Now to make a handle. Cut a a long, fairly thin strip of card in a matching colour.

Oh god, the glitter!

Stick one end of the strip on the inside of the lantern. Bend the strip over so that it reaches the other side, and stick it down there too.

Step 7. You should now have a lovely paper lantern! The only thing left to do is hang it up somewhere. You may want to make a few, as I did, and string them across a room, or you could even attatch them to a stick of wood, and use them as part of a witch costume. You can probably think of tonnes of other ideas.

If anyone makes any of these, please link me a picture in the comments, I'd love to see how other people's turned out. I hope you all have a lovely Tuesday, and a great Halloween!

Ladybirds everywhere!

Things are perking up a lot. The family issues are mostly sorted, at least for the mean time. College is awesome, even if I get tonnes and tonnes of homework. I've made lots of lovely new friends and I've really enjoyed my lessons so far.

Today I went out with my lovely boyfriend Niall (or Nizz, which is what I normally call him xD) We didn't really do anything in particular. We sat in the park cuddling and just messing around, dancing, tickle fighting and giving piggy backs and things for most of the day, which is always fun. We got surrounded by hundreds of ladybirds. Well, not hundreds, but I counted at least 14.

Towards the end of the day we went into town, showing a little lost punk the way to the Durham Punk Festival on the way. After she'd left us, we explored the shops for a little while. In HMV, I found one of my current obsessions on DVD; Repo! The Genetic Opera.

Nizz bought it for me <3 It is an amazing and very underrated movie. I've been meaning to do a review of it on my blog for a while now. Since coming home I've already watched it twice, and I know just about all the words to all the songs. I'd definitely recommend it.
We rounded off the day with some greggs sausage rolls and a doughnut before heading to the bus station to say goodbye. I had a lovely day with him. n__n I'll add a few photos just to finish off. Hope everyone's having a nice weekend.

WHEEEEEEEEE!

Buttscratchaaah!

 

 

How a gentleman drinks Dr. Pepper.

College!

Sorry for not updating in a while, there's been a lot of things going on at home lately, and I haven't really felt much like it.
Anyway! Yesterday was my first day at my new College/6th Form. It was mainly just a get-to-know-people day. We were mixed up and put into different teams, played lots of "team building" games, did a few quizzes, and chatted. We were then put into our forms to meet the people we'll be spending the next year with, and our new form teacher.

It was a great day and I've made several new acquaintances, which hopefully will become friends, although everyone seemed to be feeling shy at the time. The games consisted mostly of things like "Get into height order and then introduce yourself to the person on your left", "Now get into first name alphabetical order in silence," and the dreaded "Let's go round the circle and each tell one interesting fact about ourselves!" I really hate that game because I can never think of anything interesting in time, I start to panic when I see that it gets closer to my turn and end up saying something like "I'M PHOEBE AND I'M A GIRL!" Then later I sit and hit myself when I think of plenty of other interesting things I could've said instead.
Then we were mixed into teams, and given a "quiz pack." We had to sort the different types of quizzes between everyone in the team to see who was best at doing what, and we had 45 minutes to complete everything in order to win a bag of m&ms. I had to make an origami frog, balance a fork and spoon on the edge of a glass using a toothpick (which I did quite quickly, I'm proud to say >:3) and build a perfect cube out of different shaped pieces, which I didn't manage and it frustrated the hell out of me!

The last game was mostly just for fun. We had to make a "Makarapa" (I think, I could be wrong..) which is an African football supporter's hat. We had 20 minutes to build it, and it had to support fair trade along with the 2012 olympics. It was hilarious. My friend did get a picture of me wearing it on her phone, so I'll add that when she sends it to me. I start officially on Thursday, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Anyway, I do have some arty things to upload, and my camera is fixed now too so expect some photos at some point. =D I hope you have a lovely Tuesday!

Results Day!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while (I bet all one of my followers are disappointed. xD)
There's been a lot going on, family things and whatnot. Anyway, I got my GCSE results today and I am very proud of myself. I think I did well, and I worked my socks off to get them. I'm not gonna post em all, but A* in art. ^-^
Just a quick post today, nothing interesting really, just getting results and registering at 6th form and whatnot. Then ring all my aunties, uncles, grandparents and cousins to tell them. I'm really tired because I've been up since 7am, but I got some good marks and a silver balloon out of it, so I'm happy. Happy Thursday everyone, and well done to anyone else that got their results today!

Arty Bits n Pieces

My OC, Mistress Arachnis.

WIP for a friend.

Those masks I promised.

Monster!

Fire faery!

For a friend.