365/2013 - Day 44 (two days late)

I needed to take a short break from the blog for a couple of days

But here is the blog post for Day 44 (which should have been posted on Wednesday, February 13).

The day started out with a mobile version of Wednesday Morning at Joan's at Leann's house.  We worked on a printing technique using contact paper as a resist.

I didn't get very far with mine because I had so many cuts to make in the contact paper.  I ended just pulling most of it off and the photo above is what I was left with when I did the floating-the-acrylic-paint step.  I intended to work on it more when I got home but I didn't have time to.  I will work on it more eventually because I like it.

I needed to bring all of the seven pieces I am working on for the spirit show to the ready-to-paint stage.  That meant a couple more coats of gesso for a couple of the plaster cloth guys.  I mixed black paint into some white gesso for this coat so I could see where I'd already been.  I also intentionally made the gesso darker because the light in the temporary studio is odd.  Gah!  A few of the guys still need another gesso coat and a couple will need a touch up coat after that.

Whew -- then it was time (already!) to go meet up with Jane and Leann for a quick dinner before the Artist Trading Card meeting.  It was a great meeting.  We exchanged our ATCs and house book pages and bound our books.  I still have to make my cover but I wanted to get it bound while the equipment was there.  I will blog about the book more when I finish it, but here are a few photos.  The pages by the other nine artists are all so different and so wonderful.

I was so worn out by the time I got home and settled in front of tv with medication/elevation/cold packs that I apparently fell asleep and missed my deadline for the day.  That is why this blog entry is late.

I will catch up with Day 45 a little later on today...as well as posting today's "real" entry.

365/2013 - Day 11

more Tookies and starting to think about the house pages

Today's ten Tookies finger puppets --

No matter how many I make, they are never the same.

 
Looks like there are a couple of shy Tookies in this batch.

The Tookies jar -- 65 down, 35 to go!
















I am starting to put some ideas on paper for the "house" project at the ATC Exchange Group.  The ten of us participating in this side project will each make ten 4"x6" (horizontal) pages and we will get nine back in exchange and then we will have a total of ten pages to bind together into a little book (leaving a half-inch margin on the left side for the binding).

This is one very basic idea I have.  Something like the front of an apartment house with doors and windows that open to reveal stuff going on inside.  These are very rough sketches.

 

The thing is, I have so many ideas and so many materials in my studio that I have rarely used -- that'd be perfect for this project.  Sometimes having such open subjects is a problem for me...We can interpret the term "house" in any way that strikes us.  I have a whole lot of ideas...maybe I will make ten totally different pages...or maybe I will develop several and then choose my very favorite one.  But then again, collage and eraser carving both would be great for this project, too.

I have lofty ideas of making pop-up features or sliding things, etc.  Those may not happen.  I am excited about this project and I hope my pages come out the way I see them in my head.  I can't wait to see everybody's pages!  The pages are due at the next meeting in February.  We will bind our pages that night at Scrappy Chic.

2012/365 - Day 284

Wednesday Morning at Joan's  -- and later -- ATC 

This morning was another mobile session of Wednesday Morning at Joan's.  Joan, Leann, and I had an art date and went over to the Village Theater at Cherry Hill to see the 20th Annual Canton Fine Arts Exhibition.

It was pretty cool having the whole place to ourselves!  All three of us were drawn to a pen and ink piece by Ron DePentu called "Grape Eater".  I think there were just too many people at the opening reception and I missed seeing it the first time.  I have included a number of detail images from the piece -- I am just fascinated by the straight lines making the curved images.  I really like all the colors in the lines, too.

On the way home Joan and Leann and I went to a late breakfast/early lunch at Crawford's in Old Town in Plymouth.  Really good food -- especially the acorn squash soup.  I love butternut squash soup and I am sometime a little leery about ordering it for fear it will be too sweet.  This was totally different...more like half chunky/half mashed up squash in a light broth...I got a cup to bring home, too.  And our waiter was delightful.

Then I came home and worked on my idea that I finally had for this month's artist trading cards theme -- The Devil Made Me Do It.  I wanted to incorporate collaged elements with acrylic paint and lettering but nothing was cooperating.  The paint wasn't drying quickly enough to be able to add the wording to the surface and then the cards were really warping...it just wasn't happening.  I will try the concept with another theme when I can put more time into it and experiment more.  

Ruth and I had no cards to trade this month, but we wanted to go to the meeting because we wanted to see Jane's demo on paper mosaics.  With a few tweaks of her own, Jane guided us through some of the basics of cutting strips of decorative papers and using a laminating material to make small sections of patterned papers.  Jane found examples in Susan Seymour's book "Perfect Paper Mosaics".  

Jane's samples were fantastic!  I have little to no patience with measuring and cutting paper accurately -- and needing a lot of pieces that are going to fit together and figuring out a pattern, but I enjoyed the project very much.  It is definitely too math-y of a process for me personally, but I really liked how many people's pieces turned out.  It is the sort of work that I love to look at and admire the work and precision that go into it...but that I am pretty much incapable of creating myself.  A lot of the members of the group are also people who sew and are used to cutting and being fairly accurate and piecing things together.

Just before Jane got started with her demo, Leann talks about the optional book project we will be starting next month.

We also welcomed our newest member Jan to the group.

This was a project that I needed to follow along as closely as possible (so no photos while I was listening) -- and I still needed a lot of help and coaching from Barb (who was sitting next to me and who knows how to use the paper cutter I had with me...the one I have had for years and have never used until tonight.)  Thanks, Barb!

These are all Jane's samples/examples.


 

See how uniformly the strips of paper are?

Heh...this is mine.  No sense of what papers/patterns/colors will go together to make a repeatable pattern or contrast enough to be interesting.

I really enjoyed trying it out, though!

And -- of course -- here is Leann's.  Evenly spaced...evenly cut...with a really good sense of putting four papers together...but hey -- this is just not my strength and that is fine.


Next month's theme for the artist trading cards is: "poetry".
And the theme that won for the optional 4"x6" book is:  "house"...I am looking forward to working on that.  We will get more details next month. 





AND -- at the end of the meeting, Karen showed me her prototype for Art-o-mat.  Wow -- it is really wonderful -- I can't wait to stock it in my machines!!!  More details on that once it has been accepted for the project.

12/365 - Day 102

Artist Trading Card Exchange Group

Tonight was our ATC Exchange Group meeting.  This month's theme was "Flight".  There were a lot of different takes on the idea of flight...all of the cards were so great!

Leann brought a ton of supplies and showed us part two of her carving techinques.  We all made reduction prints by carving little erasers and printing with different colors of ink pad.  Such fun!  The time just flew by!

I didn't get around to see everybody's prints, but Ruth was sitting to my left and here is one of her carvings.  The colors are so pretty.  They remind me of the tulip from last night.

Ruth is so good with the use of color.

This was my first one.  It was done in three stages on the flip side of a little cow head eraser.

I used a flower-shaped eraser for my second print and took Leann's suggestion to carve the eraser on the end of a pencil for the center of the flower.

I don't usually try to just make a pattern so I looked at a design book that Leann brought and put a couple of ideas together and came up with this.  I sort of like it, but it was more of a learning experience to see how things would look the more I carved spaces away.

These are the cards I made for trading.  I printed out photos I found by Googling the word flight and the word crow.  I couldn't find the sources again when I went back to look up who made the original elements.  I used details from several photos.  The wings are from a Tiffany's ad in a magazine -- they are white diamond earrings with other parts that hang down from them.  I scanned the magazine picture and changed the color in my photo program.

The three light green dots on the cards above the open card are chartreuse colored brads that let the wings and head fold up from behind.

These are the five wonderful cards I got in trade.  They are by Margie, Emily, Jane, Barb and Sandy.

I was also lucky enough to get one of Leann's "extras" of her flying chicken reduction print.  And Barb had a few Circle cards from last month (she had to miss last month).

Barb also brought her two cards for our tarot deck project.  I am still waiting for the last two cards before I show all of the ones in our set.

What a marvelous group of fun people -- the time just flies by so fast!

2012/365 - Day 74

printing with and carving (new to me) materials, plus trading ATCs


Tonight at the ATC Exchange group Leann showed us a couple of methods of printing.

I knew about carving, but I had never carved an eraser like this or used this type of vinyl. Both were smoooooooth like buttah!

She also showed us about making impressions in a foam material that is similar to what packaged meat at the grocery store comes on...but thinner. It was way cool and held the impressions I made with a stylus remarkably well.


Very fun meeting.

These are the marvelous artist trading cards I got in exchange for the ones I made. The theme this month was "circles".


Most of us have traded our tarot themed cards but I will wait until next month for the last couple to show my complete set. They are great so far!

2012/365 - Day 63

thinking...thinking...

I am feeling sort of sleepy tonight but I still need to DO something for today's blog post.




I was driving by Scrappy Chic tonight on my way home. When we were there for the art quilt class I saw some paper floss at the counter in a display.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, so I stopped in and bought three spools. Now I wish I had grabbed some green, too.

Anyhow...

I also remembered tonight that I had a pack of "paper needles" in my stash.

And yes, indeed, I DO have a couple of circle punches...as well as a whole bunch of different sizes of caps to trace around.

The theme for this month's Artist Trading Cards in the ATC Exchange group is "circles". I think tonight I will play around with these items and try to come up with a few designs. Ruth is coming over tomorrow to work on ATCs and also her two tarot cards for the trade. If I get my idea(s) down tonight I will be that much closer for assembling them tomorrow.

UPDATE:


Yeah...not so much. I like the idea of sewing paper onto the base M:tG card with paper floss...but it cramps up my hand too much because it is hard to get the needle through the card.

Back to the drawing board.

I will use the way cool paper floss for something...some other time.

2012/365 - Day 61 -- part two

my other tarot card


Oooh -- I didn't think I'd be able to call this post "part two"...but I made it before midnight!

I am going to print out the smaller versions of this card and hand color each one differently.

I drew these elements free-hand and carved them separately.

I am pretty pleased with the way my cards turned out!

2012/365 - Day 61

tarot to trade

Whoa -- I was so intent on working on my tarot cards for the ATC Exchange group that I might've missed my midnight deadline if I hadn't come in to the printer to see if I had worked out the size correctly.


The cards I am making for the trade are The Hanged Man and The Lovers. They are the cards that I got at random when Leann dealt them out.

These cards are artist trading card sized -- 2.5" x 3.5" but I was having a lot of difficulty working in that actual size with the methods I wanted to use.

I photocopied the back of a Magic: the Gathering card (my "normal" base for all of my atc making) and enlarged it to twice its size. That gave me more to work with...5" x 7". When I was done I cut the border off of another enlarged M:tG card and set it over the artwork. Then I came back in to printer and reduced it by 50% and day-um...it worked!



For this card I made a free-hand drawing of my interpretation of The Hanged Man and then I cut out each element from paper and collaged it all together.

For The Lovers I did carvings of all of the elements and I will stamp them out onto the enlarged blank and repeat the border and reduction process. I will blog that tomorrow because I won't have time to do it before midnight for this post.