Brown hills

I'm obsessed with making these.  They remind me of bad 70's motel art, but I LOVE making the papers, and cutting the strips, and fitting them together.  Sometime soon I'll have to stop, but right now, it still feels like Christmas.

Right now I'm off to the print-making studio.

Bathroom art

That's art that gets hung in the bathroom, not art that gets made in the bathroom.  This is so not what I usually do, but I started making these textured papers, and have gotten so into them, that I have to make something with them, and this is strangely so satisfying.

I am also working on four different intaglio prints, but they're not done yet, so I'll post that when it's time.

Saran Wrap textures

Here is the result of an "art day"--a whole day of hanging out with cool women, making stuff.  On the first day, I made a bunch of little pieces of paper with cool textures, but using a saran wrap and wax paper "lift-off" with black acrylic paint on top of sealed paper (some of which I had painted on first).  I think there might have been some metallic paint involved too.

I really really liked the textures, but then what to do with them?  I cut them into one inch pieces, and glued them down on some sturdy paper.

This is all in the name of experimentation, but now that I've done it, I see some possibilities, and will aim for something a little more deliberate next time.....

Fear #1

This is for a challenge--"fear."  But this is obviously way way way too bright.  Part of it is the way it scanned, which I'll try to fix, but part of it is the colors themselves....

Here it is, washed over and then dabbed with a paper towel--much more the feeling I was after.

...but it captured it so well that I can't stand to even look at this.  Usually I prop pieces up where I can look at them during the days--sometimes that unexpected glimpse will show me things that I couldn't tell otherwise.  But not this one.  It got put away immediately.  I don't WANT to see it!

Round Robin Project

The other thing that I've been working on has been "round robin" projects.  With a group of nine women (who all want to be doing more art than they have been), we each started a project, and then each week the project goes to someone else.  This is the first one I've taken a picture of, though many of them are pretty exciting.

This isn't the best picture in the world, and without getting a closer look, it's probably impossible to tell which part I did.

But here's how the process went for me.

When I got it, I was envisioning drawing, in white, a flock of birds flying across the top, to go with the cranes on the bottom.

The white pencils didn't work on the fabric.  I bought some white pens, but that didn't work either.  It'd have to be something else....

But then I noticed that she had already made flying birds in the middle, and the ones I was picturing would be bigger than those, and that somehow didn't seem right.

How about a bigger white bird on the bottom right?  But there was already a bird there, fainter, sitting on the twig.

Dancers then,  in the space in the middle left.  Good--and I had just the image.  It needed to be smaller though, so I reduced the image on my computer.

Now, how to get it onto the fabric, and in white?  I made a stencil with my image.  I rummaged around in the basement but couldn't find the white spray paint.  I experimented with painting acrylic through the stencil.  It worked great on paper, but when I did it on the fabric, it bled into a huge blotch.

I had to let that blotch dry.

I traced around the inside edge with red pencil, and then started hatching around it with a thin sharpie.

I had also bought feathers when I bought the white pens, to use in a soft ground on my intaglio plates.  They'd probably print, and that would go with the birds in the other two parts.  But the only water-soluable block-printing ink I had was red (the other colors were all oil-based inks, and I didn't have any solvents for cleaning off the glass or the rollers).  But red would look good on this fabric, so that'd be okay.  So I rolled out the red on a piece of glass, pressed the feather onto the ink, lifted it, placed it on the fabric, and then rolled over it with a clean brayer.  Nice!

I hatched some more behind the dancers and feathers.  And then some more.  And then some more.

And stuck the feather with the dried red ink on it in the twig.

And then the dog found the whole thing and decided that the stick that it was attached to was a stick, and started chewing it up, so I need to go outside and find a new stick before 10:00 this morning when I have to go meet with folks and pass this on to the next person.

Intaglio?

So, I have to post these, because otherwise my adoring fans (my mother, anyway) will think that I haven't been doing anything at all, and I have.  I've been taking a print-making class, and tormenting myself through the incredibly slow process (of two hours/week) of working on copper plates, and an acid bath that takes FOREVER to do anything.  We're doing aquatint next week, and I am very much looking forward to that.

These are all on pieces of copper that I got out of the "scrap box" (I thought I'd experiment before committing to expensive not-scrap plates), and are the result (so far) of essentially three sessions. 

I do love intaglio prints, but I don't know if I have the patience for this.  I'm actually quite frustrated.  There are some really cool textures if you look really closely.