The Pinnacles

The value of a compliment

In 2006, my Hubby and I spent two weeks in Western Australia. It was a fantastic holiday, WA is a wonderful place for the nature lover. It is gorgeous. About halfway through the holiday we had a long stretch of a drive between Albany and Toodyay. It was a road trip where we hadn’t planned […]

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Seed beads

How I fell into the world of beads

In January 2014 I had a random idea. I had been looking for different ways to use my butterfly paintings and I came up with this: And I love these earrings, they go with a lot of things. I have since created more, but at the time I was distracted with another idea. Which all […]

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Punk grandma

About me

I thought a good place to start would be me. Who is Liz Powley? (Yeah, I know, I need a better photo. It is on the list 😀 ) Liz Powley… Is a visual artist who is exploring all kinds of art, seeking inspiration and finding it in its multitudes. Is a writer of fiction […]

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Silver Sands

G is for Grey

Recently, greys have been a little baffling for me. Grey has always been a mix of black and white, but for anyone who has been looking at colour theory, as I have, will discover that the theory says that if you mix complementary colours (those opposite on the colour wheel) you will get a grey.

This is news to me. I’d always considered those colours to be browns, often very useful browns, but the literature says they are greys (or grays if you prefer the traditional American spelling).

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Isabel pastel portrait

F is for Flesh

I have to say that the title of this post is a little creepy. But no, we are talking the colour of flesh, one of the most challenging colours to create, particularly if you are painting caucasian.

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Altamira Bison

E is for Earth

When I was a kid we had some friends who were building a house not far from an old quarry. Being kids we played in the quarry which was literally dripping with clay deposits (it was winter, there was rain, and can we say mud?). Little did I know that I was playing with the raw ingredients of the paints I would end up painting with as an adult. There were several different colours and I had the time of my life getting myself coated in them. The quarry is gone now, eaten by housing estates, but it would be fun to go back and look at those colours and wonder.

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Dioxazine purple

D is for Dioxazine Purple

When I first threw Dioxazine Purple into Google I was very surprised at the lack of information that popped up. I was thinking, hey, this is my favourite purple, a stunning purple beloved by many artists, why isn’t there a chemical breakdown or a hazard report or a history of the chemical? What the heck is dioxazine?

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Cadmium sulfide

C is for Cadmium

Cadmium is an element and a metal that was discovered in the early 1800s by two German scientists. It wasn’t developed for use as a pigment until the mid 1800s, but has since proven itself to be a strong vibrant and reliable source of yellow through to red pigments.

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