Airbrush practice

I've always been a fan of different kinds of art I guess but I know I've wanted an airbrush since I the first time I saw one. Since I found out about youtube I've been looking for airbrushing videos and actually started learning before I actually owned an airbrush.
But finally in the summer of 2008 my dad bought me an airbrush and a compressor!! So anyways I tried out a few things at first to get the feel of it and then started on my first real freehand project:

I made a blown up copy of a Yu-Gi-Oh card monster art thingy my brother collects. It's a purple red eyed dragon (I think). So the first thing I did was mask the dragon part to create an outline.


This is what it looked like after the white and the blue. The dragon emanated a blueish glow, so here's where the white and blue is for.


Once the mask is taken off the edges look nice and crisp, and luckily there's no bleed :D


After the unmasking there's filling in to do, and because of the many different shapes and the fact that masking is a very timeconsuming thing (well it is for me..) So I started filling in the shapes of the scales freehand.


After layers and layers and layers of airbrushing, this is what it looks like :) I'm very happy with it because it's actually my first (semi-)freehand work and it actually turned out good!


And here's a picture of the proud owner: my brother Shiwi:


I'm hoping to do a lot more of these :D

Crocheting again

Soo since I finished the bonnets a while ago I decided to start on the other garnstudio yarn I bought. I bought 100gr. of drops Safran only to realize I actually need 150gr. for the top in my size. To make it even worse I needed a 3mm crochet hook but only own a 4mm and a 2mm hook...
Anyway, stubborn and impatient as I always am, I started the top anyway. Since it's not finished yet I can't really tell if I'll need another skein or not, but since I'm crocheting with a bigger hook I'm sticking to the smallest 'size'. So far it seems to fit and 100gr. appears to be enough, but only time will tell I guess.

Anyway I actually wanted to have it finished first before I posted it online, but today I realized that I had made a big mistake somewhere at the bottom and actually had to unravel the whole thing so I couldn't finish it.... So anyway here's a picture of what it looks like right now.



I'm actually very happy with the quality of the garnstudio yarn. It's so incredibly soft! Especially the cotton-viscose ones, I can't wait to start on those when I'm done with this top!

Anyway, before I came across the Drops yarn I had bought 9 skeins of some brand (I actually forgot the name) to make myself a crocheted poncho. It's very basic because I wanted something that was easy to make because it was my first crochet'project' after a very long while but I actually like how it's looking so far and try to work on it as much as I can. It's supposed to become 1.40mx1.40m and the hole for the head comes in at 55cm. Right now I'm at 30cm after the second skein so I think I have enough.

I think I'll have a hard time 'calculating' where the hole should be because I know I'm very good at messing up at important points of the process haha. :P

Here's some pictures of the 'under construction' poncho

Art Journaling

So today I've been making some additions to my art journal. I've got inspired to make even more art since I started this blog so I finished one page and then made another. There's nothing like making art and drinking tea on a stormy and gray day like today. I don't know where you are and what the weather's like where you live but in Rotterdam it's windy and rainy today. So I'm sitting by the window (and the radiator) and I'd like to show you what I've been doing this morning :)

The funny thing with me is that I sometimes buy art supplies but don't use them for a long while. The same thing happened to my watercolor pencils and oil pastels. I'm a sucker for art supplies and stuff. Shopping for clothes just doesn't do it for me.. shopping for shoes however does, but even them I'm mostly thinking about customizing them. Like the new rip-off all stars I bought made my boyfriend buy me. I'm going to customize them soon and I'll post the pictures here when I'm done :D

Anyway, when I buy art supplies I usually get very inspired to do a lot of drawing and such. This actually goes for everything creative or possibly creative I buy. But with the pastels it didn't work. I was in a rather uninspirational period of my life back then and as a result the pastels and the watercolor pencils remained untouched. That is, until I started journaling. I've noticed there's a LOT you can do with oil pastels and watercolors. I, unfortunately, don't have water soluble oil pastels but I can still get cool effects with mineral spirits or my clover mini iron.


I use the mini iron for wax as wel. This is a little trick I learned from Suzi Blu (you really should check out her videos at youtube.com). Though instead of using beeswax I use colored candles. I really like the effect the colored wax adds to the pages.


I don't think is really visible on these pictures but I've used some of the glitter glue pens on these pages for a little sparkling effect :D I'm really happy with how it turned out :)


This page is actually not for me but for little princess Mandana. My cousin gave birth to a cute little baby girl three weeks ago and I can't help but wonder about how she's grow up to be and whatnot. So I wrote down all of the things I whish for her to have and be like happiness and all of the advice I could give her. I then wrote some more things that I'd like to tell her when she's grown up and all of the things I wish for her and then covered it with a magic princess wand and little harts.

Are you feeling the love yet? hahaha
I also made this on tho it's not really finished yet :) I'm going to finish it soon.

Knitting hat

When I was little my mother used to knit a lot and on rainy sundays I used to sit with her and knit or crochet some but since I was soo slow I gave up on it altogether. Last week I was browsing in the internet when I stumbled on the website www.garnstudio.com and when I was done browsing through the free patterns they have I decided to buy some of their yarn :D



here's a before and after picture of a bit of yarn I had left :D


yay! my bonnet has a little friend to play with! :D


Anyway while I was at it I made a little sock for my phone :D

Dollhouse Drama

I've been inspired a lot by a few people (a lot of people) on youtube.com but especially by Suzi Blu and Willowing. I've always been interested in drawing and painting but the concept of an 'art journal' was unclear to me untill a few months ago. I was browsing on youtube when I came across this very personal art journal and amazed by the way these people told their life in images instead of plain writing in a diary. I realized it Before this happened I had actually stopped drawing for a few years and had forgotten how happy it used to make me to draw.

So I started an art journal. At first it was more an attempt at drawing than an actual art journal but in time the drawings started to actually mean something and I got better at making an image of what I really felt that day. The journal was a small blue molesine like booklet i got from an ikea store a while earlier and was not exactly what I felt my art journal should look like. It wasn't the least bit inspiring to draw in so I worked on the cover untill it looked nice :)

and this is what the cover looks like now:





My art journal isn't filled with pretty images yet but I'd still like to show a few pages that mean a lot to me already:
These two images were both made after a dip and both made me feel ver happy!







One of the things I sometimes find difficult is to show people who I really am. I can be a very loud and happy person but I can be extremely shy and quiet as well....





Though it may sound strange or lame, it really has helped me out a lot :) I don't want to spend my life in the shadows, being affraid of what people think of me.

Anyway, so I got myself (actually I made my boyfriend buy it) a pack of Glitter Glue!! I'm going to have so much fun with it! I'll put some pictures online when I've got some nice drawings :D


bye for now :)

Creative Blog

Hello everybody !

first of all I'd like to thank you for visiting my blog. I've been thinking about starting up a blog for a while now but I've been too busy with other things and I've been affraid of starting and not being able to keep updating. But since I don't want to be lazy all of my life and want to keep inspiring myself I'm starting this blog now, this way I can feel guilty about not being creative and push myself to continue doing what I like.

The first barrier I had to overcome was the title of the blog.. I'm one of those people who needs to work off a list before being able to start. I HAD to find a good and nice title before I would even think of starting a blog at all! So I decided it would be Elnaz Crafting, even though I actually still don't like the title and still am stuck with the url... :P At least I started it and you know what, maybe it'll actually grow on me :D
Anyways, another thing readers of my blog should know is that English is not my main language so if you see some messed up sentences or strange typo's I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me about it!


Soooo let me tell you a little about me and what I do.
I'm a master student at the TU Delft and I study architecture and urbanism at the factulty of Architecture. I've been a big fan of drawing and painting since I was very little and have become more and more interested in doing creative things from drawing to knitting and sewing. So in this blog I'd like to make an archive of the things I've done and the things I'm working on and hope to get some advice from people who stop by. Beside the crafting there's also music. I'm learning to play the santur a little bit and I'm taking vocal classes to get better at singing.
The last two or three years it's become increasingly difficult for me to manage all of these hobbies and at times I don't know what to do with myself. I like all of my hobbies but it's hard to spend enough time on each of them to actually get somewhere.
So there's another reason for me to create and update a blog.

take care!