New Painting

Sometimes I just have to try my hand at it….8 x 10 on canvas board. Acrylic and paper.  No name.

Painting with 3 circles

I love making small art!

I LOVE making ACEOs…those are the 2.5x 3.5 inch small pieces of art that I make a lot of. I use papers, bits of fabric, paper towels and other fun things. I use a product called Fast2Fuse interfacing. It’s fusible on both sides, which is great for layering stuff, then fusing it, then I cut it up, and then I work with each piece individually with paint, inks, gesso, etc. Here is a group I finished recently. Making these is just too much fun! They are $40 each. (First row, on the right is not for sale.)

 

 

2015-01-07 16.08.09 A                           2015-01-13 12.41.32  A             2014-10-13 17.49.40 A2015-01-07 16.08.15 A

2014-08-19 15.20.51 a

I’m Still Here

Yes, I am still here even tho I don’t post very much on this blog. I am still doing stuff…

I do love to take leftover bits and pieces and put them together into a piece of art. I suppose it’s the way I was raised, to use what I had and not waste. So here is art with leftovers of this and that, all put together and sitting on a little easel for sale. It’s a little three-dimensional as I didn’t glue it down flat. I like that.

 

 

bits and pieces

Junk Mail Art

There is a group on Facebook called Junk Mail Art Collective. I listen in and ooh and ahhh over the artwork posted there. I don’t contribute because I usually don’t get anything done. But this week…..I got to play around a little. There has been some really cool junk mail art posted on FB. I only wish the junk mail I get was that interesting.

DSC05588

Payne’s Gray paint, acrylic INK in Yellow Ochre, label from a shipment I received, acrylic ink in Earth Red, and black acrylic paint.

The acrylic inks are FW Daler Rowney. These are AWESOME inks! I had so much fun playing with them. They are full pigmented COLOR! Very nice! I only have three colors right now, but that is enough. They are beautiful.

Now for the Fun…

During the Paducah quilt show, I was asked to demo at Rend Lake. I actually took a few things to demo but one of the easiest things to demo is mono printing on a gelatin place. I did some with fabric and some with paper. Then I played with the paper ones in Photoshop. Fun results! Such yummy patterns.

  1. paper patterns3 equalize


paper patterns3 ink outlines

paper patterns3 posterize paper patterns3 red

Class on February 22

So far, Saturday afternoon classes seem to be doing well in the small town of Norris City. There is quite a bit of interest in my 2 hour classes. Coming up on February 22 from 1-3 p.m. is a new one called, Create Your Own Painted Papers for Collage. I think the idea came from seeing several of the gals in the Paper and Wax Collage class go through and pick out a lot of my dyed and painted papers to use in their own collages!

So call me at 618-383-2040 to sign up or come by the Studio and sign up. I’m here on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10-4 and most Saturdays. (I work for the newspaper across the street the rest of the week).

Here are samples of what we will be doing.

painted papers

 

Next week the Home Extension crew comes in to watch me demo some dyeing and printing techniques.

Spontaneous Screen Printing Class

Beth gets ready to print with a glue screen.

Beth’s freezer paper prints.

Laurie’s unique pumpkin prints

Mark tries adding color to his freezer paper prints.

I love how this one turned out.

Jan works on a piece of commercial cloth, adding more designs to it.

One of Jan’s paper designs.

This is another of Mark’s designs. It took him a while to paint this design on the screen, consequently some of the dye dried and when he printed it, it had a breakdown printing appearance to it.  Of course, I love that.

Susan paints some of the open areas of her prints.

Some of Suzy’s work.

A pretty cool freezer paper screen made by another Beth in the class. I really like this screen design.

 

First Strathmore Workshop

Strathmore is hosting more workshops this year.  The first one is being taught by Traci Bautista.  Here is my first week’s work…er…play.

There are layers of stuff on here…Smooch Spritz inks sprayed over resists and plastic canvas, acrylic paints, acrylic inks, markers of all kinds, white-out pen, and oil pastels last.  The neat thing about these workshops for me is they help me get acquainted with different products that I have not used before.

Monday

Today, my intent was to get started on printing some silk scarves in Christmas colors for my opening reception.  Well, getting started is about all I’m getting done.

First the scarves have to be soaked in white vinegar, then they have to dry.  That takes some time.  Then I made a silk screen with glue…and now it is drying.  So I decided to blog while I’m sitting here waiting for everything to dry!

First, I gotta tell you about all the new flavors of fudge I came across this weekend.  I’m in fudge heaven. I went to a craft festival in Harrisburg to purchase some lotion bars and other products for Christmas.  I came home with MUCH more!

First, the fudge.  We taste tested pumpkin, dreamsicle, white chocolate with apricots and walnuts, white chocolate with cherries and pecans…oh. my. gosh.  I’m in love with the two white chocolate fudges.  I purchased these to send to my mother-in-law for her birthday.  She is a fudge lover, so that is usually what I get her.  I was going to order some from a catalog until I saw this locally made fudge.  I purchased both the white chocolate fudges and some Rocky Road that I knew she would like.  Of course, since I brought it home with me, she now has to share some of it with me! She can’t eat 3 lbs. of fudge by herself anyway!  I have since found a recipe online for the white chocolate with apricots and walnuts.  I will definitely be trying that recipe this year.

drool.......

Yesterday, I crocheted the other wrist warmer.  I had made one and embellished it and had never gotten around to making the second one.  I finished it and then fished out a pattern for a flower that is used on a strand to wear around your neck.  So I had to try those out….

Cute? I think they are.

Little crocheted flowers

I love the yarn.  The red and purple flowers are made from Deborah Norville’s Everyday soft worsted anti-pilling yarn.  There’s no fuzzies on it.  It’s very nice yarn.

So now I put a question to you….should I use this one on my wrist warmers?….

 

…or this one?

I’ll probably just end up putting a row of buttons on the left one, but I did think it would be fun to have different embellishments on each one.  These are fingerless and fun to wear!

Masters: Art Quilts Vol. 2

Martha Sielman’s second volume of the Masters: Art Quilts published by Lark Crafts is definitely 400 pages of eye candy,  a colorful, visually stimulating treat to the art of 40 contemporary  artists working in textiles.  Sielman features work, not only from the United States, but from across the globe, including Switzerland, Australia, Hungary, France, So. Africa, the Netherlands, Canada, Israel, Russia, Japan, Norway, and England.  I love this global selection, as well as her exploration of the career and personal backgrounds of each artist and how this contributes to the way they work.  This background provides a rich supplement to the amazing art featured in the book.  There are ample selections of each artist’s work, with 5 to 10 pages of full page photographs  devoted to each.  I feel that I have seen a good representation of the artists.

There are many familiar (to me) artists featured: Paula NadelsternLaura Wasilowski, Nelda Warkentin, Jane Dunnewold, and Linda MacDonald. Others are totally unknown to me, but their addition to this catalog greatly enrich my visual experience with every page.

Sielman’s choice of artists who work in a broad range of styles and techniques contributes to the appeal of the book.   Some are personal histories providing a view into worlds unknown to most, such as  Carolyn Crump’s portraitures which feel very much like linocuts because of the black outlines she uses.  Dutch quilter Miriam Pet-Jacobs uses commentary with messages both obvious and elusive.  I love Netherland’s resident Leslie Gabrielse’s combination of collage and realistic figures.  He states that he is “very drawn to commercial fabrics…fascinated by the variety of motifs and textures they have to offer.”  Pamela Fitzsimons’ work is based on the Australian landscape, creating lines, colors, and patterns reminiscent of the country.   Dirkje van der Horst-Beetsma creates landscapes based on her native province in the Netherlands which are made up of several sections laced together with unusual materials such as zippers or inner tubes. Izabella Baykova’s depictions of Russian cityscapes and fairy tales are renditions of views from her St. Petersburg apartment and folk stories using layers of sheer silk and paint. I find her work to be amazingly intricate. Daniela Dancelli’s abstract work, using a combination of different textiles along with plastic, laminated newsprint, and found objects, incorporates strong colors, bold marks and handwritten letters into her symbolic pieces.

This volume is a must-have addition to any serious textile artist’s library.  It will be kept in my home alongside Volume 1 and studied over and over again.  Martha Sielman’s curating has provided an invaluable service to the textile art community.

For those interested in supporting the arts, Masters: Art Quilts Vol. 2 can be purchased through SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Association).  Lark is donating the full $24.95 amount to SAQA.