2012/365 - Day 218

getting back to work on things I have been putting off

I have really dropped the ball on my end of the collaboration for Art-o-mat with William Hessian.  Today I finally started painting the edges of the little "portraits" that William delivered to me in late June (!) when he was here for the Arts & Acts Festival in Northville.

You know how much  I hate to paint...well, I really hate to paint (neatly) the edges of the MDF blocks -- they don't take paint easily -- and -- I am having to choose the edge colors myself (oh, poor Took).  Each time when Juana and I made an edition of Penciled In, she'd also pick the colors for the edges for me.  I think she even chose my edge colors on the last edition I did on my own -- LOL.  Yes, I have that much trouble with choosing colors.

Anyway...

Here are the first ten of the William Hessian collaboration edition.  One has pewter edges, the others have dark purple...I think it's called grape.  I really had to force and threaten myself to settle down and just finish ten...then I could take a break.  Ha -- that break has managed to fill the rest of the evening so far.  Ten down, forty to go!

But it's not like I am not doing anything else in the meantime...I'm just not painting edges anymore tonight.

My attention is now on the ATC's I should have figured out already -- the meeting is on Wednesday night.  The theme this month is "dream".   I usually like this theme, but I was having a bit of a hard time with it today -- it is feeling too broad of a topic.  How was I going to illustrate or represent the word?  Song lyric, quotation, drawing, eraser carving, collage...yikes!  I couldn't narrow anything down.

Then it hit me.  I just brought home my artist proof print of "This Bear Dreams" from the Northville Art House store...they are changing some of the art and I was kind of glad this hadn't sold...I wanted it back.  It inspired me at the last moment to try something.

When we were in the thinking stages of the yarn bombing (of the Art House) I looked online and printed out some pictures I liked.  After we were done with the photocopies I brought them back home and I was using the paper as a coaster for my ice coffee.  The condensation on the glass made a little puddle and pattern on the back of the photocopy...somehow changing the colors as it got wet.  I was going to toss the pages into the paper recycling bag when I thought they looked pretty cool.

Then I laid them all out face down on the studio floor, spritzed them (and played around with spritzing some glasses) and tried to recreate the effect.  I like how the colors look...sort of like water color washes.

This is an example of the "right" side of a water-ruined photocopy.

















This is the "wrong" side of the same photocopy where I have spritzed more water and set a glass down on it in several places.

It is strange and cool to me how the colors are different -- more blues and purples than the "right" side with the reds and yellows and greens.

This is the one I am practicing with and that I will keep for myself.

I found an area on the photocopy I liked and glued it to an ATC-sized playing card.

Then I started fooling around with an image of my printed eraser carving in my computer's photo program because I knew I did not want to print the actual eraser carving -- it is too large -- and while I was messing around I decided to do a mirror image of the bear so that he is facing the other direction.  Then I printed the reversed image onto card stock and cut him out.

For now, this is as far as I have gotten -- just gluing the reversed bear onto the flipped over wrecked photocopy paper.

I really like this so far...pretty dreamy.  I will be calling it "This Bear Dreams, Too" -- I am not sure what else I will do to it -- or IF I will do anything else to it (besides putting the title on it).

Happy accidents.