Today started out at 8 a.m. at Tuscan Cafe in Northville with Suzanne Schimanski-Gross. Suzanne is a Teen Services Librarian at Northville District Library.
We met up this morning for coffee and shared a sandwich and talked about all kinds of stuff...like Detroit Derby Girls season and Art-o-mat and sewing and sock monkeys and artist trading cards. Suzanne also brought me a bagful of plastic lids and tops for me to use in my plaster cloth projects.
Next it was on to Brenda's house in Harrison Township.
Brenda has a kiln and we have been playing with clay on and off for a while. Today we unloaded the kiln from last week.
Brenda glaze fired two of her large leaf pieces that she makes for gardens.
I am planning my things for Art-o-mat (of course). Since I don't have my own kiln (yet) and Brenda is about 45 minutes away on the other side of town, this is becoming a drawn out/time-and-labor-intensive project. I am going ahead and making the pieces all at once, but the prototype still has to be submitted and approved first. That is why I am not going to reveal exactly what it is I am making just yet.
Here is Brenda unloading the kiln.
This large leaf has a baby's face on it.
This one has a dragonfly.
My stuff was way underneath everything else.
ta-daaaaaaa
sneak peek...no details yet
Today I put a second color of watercolor underglaze on them.
On the way out to Brenda's this morning I stopped off and got us both a large canvas.
It has been quite a long time since I made my last vision board. I first learned about this exercise in "The Artists Way". Actually, that is how I met Brenda...she was the instructor when we took the course. I figured it was about time she and I both made new vision boards (and the last one I made proved to be really powerful).
When I got home this afternoon one of the first things I did was to pull the wrapper off of the canvas, take it outside and spray it with two colors of paint. Then I brought it in the house and slathered the canvas with matte medium and laid down a piece of mulberry paper -- all so that I couldn't stall and say I was chicken to start on a blank canvas. It is hard to tell with the lighting in that photo, but half of the canvas is "Sugar Melon" and half is "Poison Light" -- both colors by Montana Gold. The mulberry paper is a light pink color. It looks better in person...LOL. Now I have no excuse to not get started on it.
And then -- a little later on -- Matt Gordon came over so we could talk about my painting some more.
And we talked a little more about doing something for Art-o-mat. That will done in small increments. It'll take a while...but it will be worth the wait.
And now...back to the next step in the Tookies assembly line!
