graffiti wall project
i cut the 2' x 3' floor cloth that was covered with pieces of collaged paper from seth and julie into *mostly* 6" x 6" pieces -- turns out the floor cloth wasn't really 2' x 3', so these four pieces are smaller than the rest. they're my trial run...
i added paint
stencils
and oil pastels...
i attached
40 gauge copper sheeting with brads and eyelets to the back of each flag, after i embossed a design in it...
not only was the copper karin's idea, but so was the flag idea! thank you karin! i was gonna make a book out of the pieces (shocking, huh?).
i ran the wire through the rope (will use lighter rope the next time) so that the flags wouldn't slide to the center.
definitely smile making!! thanks seth and julie!
i'm thinking the next ones will be individual flags; maybe heavy copper wire in the eyelets to hang them from (so they'll swing). ribbons, ripped up fabric hanging from the bottom... definitely want to put some in the forest for the trees...
must cut new stencils before proceeding...
i spent a lot of time last week fooling around with paper clay. first i made molds with it using things i already have. here are three pieces that i made from a sterling hand charm, a milagro, and a doll arm. once the mold was dry i just mashed a gob of paper clay into it, after i'd covered it with badger balm. what took so much time was experimenting with ways to make the paper clay look like, well, something besides paper clay. i'm still experimenting... oh, and the matchbook is another idea i'm messing around with. i liked the milagro piece here...
at some point during the week i picked up a piece of muslin instead of a paper towel to wipe off paint... good-bye paper towels! the pieces are perfect to use as the base for another painting, or... the round marks are from a stencil dauber.
this is my version of a card... i got a bunch of brass (or maybe they just look like brass) safety pins on ebay for a dollar or two. they seem so useful.
been wanting to do this for a while...
it's warm! i can play in the creek! the holey rock usually goes somewhere where water can flow through the hole, but when i picked it up this year it'd cracked. so now it just sits there looking beautiful...
one more thing! a big 'ol wave to roxanne who had a group of us at her home on saturday for art and drumming. thank you, roxanne!!
XO
i woke up on sunday morning thinking that it would be our first non-sunny solstice in 15 years of life in northeastern california... i decided that it'd have to be a day for a BIG campfire instead. but late in the morning the sun started to peek through here and there, so we decided to go to mt. shasta, hopeful for the presence of sunshine. the pic above was taken about half way there. incredibly beautiful clouds and sky stretching to the horizon... sun was visible!!
at the far end of the road is where mt. shasta sits, but it's still hidden in clouds. i'm hopeful though...
usually we stop at the 'seven suns cafe' for coffee and the worlds best scones when we get into town, but they'd closed early for father's day (what?!). so onward we went to the food co-op, where we bought enough treats to last us the rest of the day. the main delicacies were a piece of chocolate cake from the deli, a pint of ice cream, veggie rice rolls, and a micro brew -- they had so many!!
a gorgeous label wins every time, right?
after further messing around in town doing stuff like buying prayer flags and listening to the quartz bowls at the crystal shop, we headed up the mountain with our portable feast.
we can almost see the top!
the road is still closed at 'bunny flats', so we walked from there.
oh what a view this home has...
we got off the road at panther meadows, which was under a couple feet of snow in most places. the snow melts in patches, and in places you can see streams of snow melt racing to the bottom of the mountain. the gurgling of the water echoes under the snow (the water is under the snow in the upper part of the pic) and sounds loud... panther meadows is a lovely, lovely place, sacred to several native american tribes in northern california. it's a place where one walks very quietly.
i left a flag near the meadows... that's the silhouette that karin sent me, in action again.
now we're headed back down... this is the very top of the mountain and it's completely clear. sooooo quiet and beautiful.
we drove a ways down the mountain where we'd have a view of the sun while we ate our supper (the ale was damn good). we sat in the car because it was getting cold -- i took this a little after 8 p.m. and the light was brilliant. i'd gotten out of the car to take a pic of the light on the trees, but this pic of the car turned out best!
now we're back in town getting gas -- no clouds in sight!
of all of the wonders of the day, drawing the lid of the ice cream container provided the greatest revelation. first i drew the rim of the lid and then started on the writing. well, duh, the writing's not gonna fit in that space, but i kept going. afterwards i thought about how crazy it is to start a contour drawing by drawing in the boundary first -- good grief! you limit yourself right off the bat! this was followed by the even greater realization that this is what we do when we define our lives by the boundaries that we already know, or what we think we want, instead of living each day from the present moment -- from the center...
to the beautiful mount shasta, i give my heartfelt thanks...
XO
somehow this piece sums up how i'm feeling these days... having had a bad case of Art ADD for weeks now, i'm feeling pulled in ten directions when it comes to projects. and the weather -- it's so crazy!
below are most of the pieces i've done in the last two weeks. i didn't do much art when i was gone, and then i was resting up from the trip for a couple of days... boy did i miss stenciling when i was gone! i've always loved to travel but now that i can't carry all of my art stuff with me it's losing some of its luster...
there's a full face under here - i finished covering it up when i got home. several layers of acrylic and watercolor here and there. had to get some stenciling in, you know...
i bought a book about marc chagall's art and life at the used book store on my trip. maybe it influenced these pages? oh how i love his paintings...
"he distrusts the word symbolism as much as the word literature. he never stops repeating that all he wants is to paint."
uh huh!!!
the once radiant (and giant) christmas cactus bloom with the last of my scaped off paint pieces...
a stenciled postcard i made when i got home.
i got a book called 'the natural way to paint - rendering the figure in watercolor simply and beautifully', by charles reid in the mail last week (see, i keep adding fuel to the AADD fire). the author encourages the reader to do contour drawings, so i was practicing that here.
believe me, neither the buddha head nor jimmie look even remotely like this!! but it sure was fun...
i've been out walking once since i got back. i sat on this juniper tree and painted for a while. this is the trunk you see here -- it's grown horizontally out from under the rock on the right, and to the left (outside the picture), it turns skyward and looks like a regular tree. i don't think my arms would wrap around it, it's that big.
before i got to the 'laying down' tree i saw this. i dearly love dead standing trees for the home potential that they are...
happy solstice to you -- may the sun shine on us all tomorrow!
XO
prior to painting this page i thought that devil lynne sat on one shoulder and angel lynne on the other... angel me on one side reminding me that everything is a reflection of me, so why get upset; why shoot the messenger? (metaphorically speaking, of course...) on the other side devil me quickly responds with the same thing every time -- shoot the messenger! NOW! oh it's funny the way they go back and forth, back and forth... well that's the way i *thought* it was. now i know that they're one and the same person! the things your art shows you... ; )
i painted her with watercolors (twinkling H2O's and caran d'ache crayons) on a piece of muslin that i glued to the page. i love muslin... the next time i paint a face on it, though, i'm going to work more quickly and with less precision. that'd work better...
this is a roll-up jewelry case that i made a few years ago. i painted the bone and lotus with caran d'ache crayons on muslin, then ironed it (to heat set the crayons) and threw it in the washer to see how much of the paint would survive the washing machine. i was amazed at how much of the image was left. caran d'ache crayons are pretty miraculous...
by the time this post goes up i'll be long gone down the road to visit friends. thinking about what i wanted to do with my last hours before leaving (besides pack), i decided to do some stenciling on fabric flags i made a while ago -- guerilla art for the road, you know. they're on my art table here, waiting to have the ties run through the top. this stenciling, i'm tellin' ya, is so practical!!
happy week to you!
XO
has a week passed by already?! i'm gonna show you my new journal before it gets paint and glue all over it...
i used corrugated cardboard for the covers again, putting masking tape over the edges and eyelets in the holes before i started painting. after i got the paint the way i wanted, i glued a PaPaYa card on that i'd been saving for a couple of years... i ripped off a couple of strips of unbleached muslin, attached them to the back cover, and then wrapped them around a button sewn to the front for a closure (after the covers are done i use an awl to poke the holes for the button and muslin, that way i can see what placement looks best).
i'm a coptic stitch binding addict... the pages lay open in a wonderful way, and there's a sturdiness and flexibility about signatures bound with coptic stitch that i love...
the pages are half 140# arches cold press, and half 140# st. armand watercolor paper. the arches does crack a little at the fold, but it doesn't go all the way through and i've never had a problem with the pages tearing at the fold, even when the journal has been through months of use. i tear the pages out using a deckle edge ruler which is way easier than cutting, and you get a nice, soft edge.
a poor picture of the second page... i covered up the whole page with a piece of muslin (you can see the frayed edges around the page) because i had so much paint on the page that i didn't like and it seemed like a good solution to the problem.
this is what layer 5 (or was it 15? :) looked like -- much better than layer 4, but i couldn't see anywhere to go with it, so down went the muslin...
some of the pages are narrower than others, and this is one of them. this figure was the first stencil that i cut... it was drawn by karin and was on a piece of tissue paper, so i glued it to a sheet of printer paper and cut the stencil from that. i was so thrilled about cutting my first stencil!
the back side of the page above, and probably something that only a mother could love... it's the paint that i scraped off of the piece of glass that was on my art table. i needed a clean piece of glass for stencil cutting, so i scaped all of the paint off of it and then glued most the paint down here. it's a kind of visual record of the painting i've done at my art table in the last year.
the bird is the second stencil that i cut. can i say too many times that i'm happy about cutting my own stencils?!!
jerry stopped by to sniff everything when i was taking pictures yesterday. this is him telling me that i've missed my best chance for photographing his big cat self...
i spent a lot of time last week on the stencil cutting thing... figuring out which images i wanted to cut and printing them out... i chose karin's figure, a bird, and a tree. this piece is on canvas board (4" x 6"), and i used the bird and the tree, although i wiped most of the tree off... i used caran d'ache crayons, acrylic paint, tim holtz crackle paint, twinkling H2O's... everything!
more experimenting with the bird and tree stencil. this piece is about 6" x 9" on 90# arches hot press, and is going to be a big post card. stenciling just cries out to be used as mail art...
the hearts at the top of the page are from a stamp i carved... in the process of printing out stencil designs i printed out a version that was way too small for a stencil, but perfect for a stamp.
i tried something i've been wanting to try for a while, which is to draw over the design with a pencil and then rub the pencil onto the stamp material. it worked like a charm! the pink arrow is the original heart (you can see where i've put pencil over the black), and the other hearts are tests of my stamp. i kept taking away until i got the one in the upper left. there are lots of images here that can be used for making stamps...
a postcard (about 4" x 9") that i made last week with the stencil i cut from karin's figure.
the graffiti wall has been cut up, and is now in the process of being made into graffiti prayer flags. i added a little paint and rubbed in oil pastels on these pieces, which make up the first set of flags. they have much more artifying to undergo before they're done.
morning light...
and more morning light... these cumulus clouds grew before our eyes as we sat outside having coffee two days ago. within minutes of taking this the blue sky was no longer visible... amazing!
have a beautiful week!
XO
