So I guess this is just a diamond painting blog now, but there’s nothing else I’m excited to talk about these days as the world burns and I need respite in something cozy and comforting. I recently finished this smallish mountain-and-lake scene for Mr. Typist:
I was very motivated to complete it because the deal I made with myself was that I would then be at liberty to splash out on a fancy, flashy kit from Diamond Art Club, the queen bee of diamond painting companies. I also really wanted to do a square painting, because up to this point I have only worked with round drills. However, all of three kits that I have my eye on over the last several months were out of stock. I don’t know if this means I have common taste, or if they are just having manufacturing issues, but either way, I didn’t want to spend $80.00 or more on a kit that I wasn’t totally in love with, not to mention the time commitment. Some of these kits are huge, with upwards of 75 colors. I would be in it for the long haul, and it had to be really special.
So, instead of buying something new that I didn’t really want, I decided to be brave and tackle a square kit from Diamond Dotz that I had attempted a few months ago and rage quit. It’s a beautiful kit, but I didn’t realize when I bought it that it’s a “full”--meaning that that the drill field takes up the entire canvas--and huge swaths of it were big chunks of solid black. The cobalt-black drills are such a dense black that I needed a magnifying glass to see if they were set correctly, because they absorbed all of the light. Also at that time, I wasn’t very practiced with the multi-placer, and the prospect of placing thousands of black drills one-by-one just felt too existential.However, the non-black parts of it are gorgeous, vibrant reds and pinks that really pop against the deep black. The photo doesn’t really do it justice—the colors very rich and deep.
Once I dug the box out and got it all re-kitted up, I remembered the Washi tape trick and sectioned it out into a series of bite-sized blocks, which makes the black feel much less overwhelming. I have been getting better at the multi-placer and I was able to multi-place a few lines with minimal corrections. It’s very hard to get used to placing squares versus rounds. Rounds are a lot more forgiving. You can see there are still some gaps, and a lot of straightening that needs to be done:
The colored sections are much easier to do, because I’m not having to place long rows in a straight line. All in all, it’s definitely a difference experience. I’m looking at this as a low-stakes practice run at squares before I invest in a giant, pricey square kit that I would be really bummed if I botched.
And that, my friends, is the latest episode of Diamond Painting News. While everyone else will be outside today enjoying the Seattle False Spring, I will be huddled over my painting inspecting each square for straightness and fit, because I’m like, a really fun person.
--Kristen McHenry
Lovely painting, Kristen. 💖