Every Christmas, there is a German market in Bristol City Centre with lots of little huts and people selling things.

It looks really pretty at night.

This is my favourite stall. The candied nuts are so delicious, I look forward to eating them every year. My favourite is the pecans. Mmmmm.

This is what we call the Jesus-Copter. It’s a bit random!

The market is right next to the giant shopping centre, Cabot Circus. I like their giant fairy lights.

Does your town have a market like this? Go and taste the yummy foods if it does!

It was my second illustration class on Tuesday night. I would have blogged sooner but the rain destroyed what I had done on the way home so I had to re-do it all!

We looked at colour this week, using gouache paints. I had used gouache once before and hated them but this time round I think I like them a little more. I think I could get used to them.

After using Photoshop to do so much of my colour work it was fun to get messy and use paints, mixing up different colours. First we made a simple colour wheel and then went on to add white and black to create different shades of colour.

I found some cool templates so if you want to have a go yourself they’re here and here

This week’s cat isn’t one of ours, it’s a cat we met on Wednesday. We went to St Werburghs City Farm for a wonder. It’s a small place with a few animals and birds. I love going in the spring when there are piglets and kids (baby goats not little humans).

There used to be a lovely black cat called Murphy on the farm but we haven’t seen him for a while. I was overjoyed when I spied this little kitty in one of the empty pens. She was so relaxed and enjoying the sun. We had fun playing with a stick by mostly she just wanted to lay upside down. She was like a little leopard.

This goat kept sticking it’s head through the fence and chewing my bag whilst I was taking photos.

Last night I went to my first illustration class. I decided to do an evening class at the Bristol Folk House. I love doing classes, I don’t spend much time with other people so it’s nice to be doing something creative when I do venture out. I’m always a nervous wreck when I go to a class for the first time but I think a lot of people feel the same.

We had to introduce ourselves to the group which is always scary. I seem to lose the ability to form coherent sentences when talking to a group of people! We then did some basic observation exercises to get into the swing of things. I’m sure lots of you have done them before in art classes – drawing with your left hand (if you’re right-handed), drawing without looking at the paper, drawing something with one continuous line. I’m quite embarrassed by my scrawled attempts at it but I promised myself to blog about each class so here are some of them. The object I chose was a small hip flask.

Being a neat freak, I’m so out of my comfort zone posting these!

We then had to pick a word randomly and I got ‘menacing’ so I had to draw a menacing hip flask! It was quite a challenge and was something I’d not tried before. After that we were given a new object and a new word. I got a walnut and the word ‘melancholy’.

I’ve done these exercises many times in various classes over the years but I think they still help. I am looking forward to getting stuck into the more interesting stuff though!

Are you doing any classes?

Bristol hosts lots of great events, one of which is the Kite Festival. It’s at Ashton Court (where the Balloon Fiesta was), on top of the hills above Bristol. There are lots of incredible kites, inflatables and some very skilled kite flyers.

I was hoping to see a cat kite but there wasn’t one. There was a giant tiger though so I’ll post pictures of that soon. Maybe I’ll have design a cat kite.

I haven’t had my films developed yet so I thought I’d share some of my photos from the last time we went. You can see lots more on my Lomography Home.

Last night, along with 100,000 other people (!!) we made our way to Ashton Court for the night glow at the Balloon Fiesta. It was pretty spectacular. There’s something really amazing about hot air balloons, the way that they’re so big yet so graceful and so quiet apart from the sound of the burners every now and then. The only complaint I have is that they played such loud music, my ears were ringing afterwards.

We’re off to see them launch this afternoon with my parents.

The LC-A cameras are by far the best of the Lomography range. This is the LC-A, you can also get an LC-A+, LC-M and LC-Wide (of which Daz has at least one of each!)

The best results are when you use slide film and get it cross processed in normal colour film chemicals. The results are great colours and contrast. The film I used in these photos is Kodak Ektachrome and developed at Photographique.

Here are some of the photos I took last week when we went for a wander around the harbour.