Life Outside the Fishbowl

My Encaustic Weekend

Well, honestly it was just a class on Saturday. But it was fabulous! When I walked up to building 9 I could smell the beeswax through the open doorway. I just love that smell.

Linda Ray came up from Richmond to teach encaustic painting at the Workhouse on Saturday. You can see some of her class samples here. She brought all sorts of colors, tools, papers, foils, and more. We made many, many panels practicing techniques and experimenting. Including the one below. And I've discovered that I *need* to get a big honkin' Ryobi heat gun.

Then she broke out the paper. I'd never tried wax with paper, but it was so much fun. We used a long strip to make an accordian book. Then we made collages and did image transfers. Her example had images on just one side of the book - but I didn't want to stop and just kept going.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I also used a 8x10 sheet of paper and made a collage. The most challenging part was getting the small paper out of the wax and over to your collage before the wax cooled off.

So now, in addition to the heat gun, I *need* a big fryer-like appliance to melt wax ... and some old maps, napkins...... see where this is going?

 

What I'm Working on...

apart from trying to clean up my area.... is my second pastel painting.

Pastels are funny, in that since you can't really mix colors like paint, you really do *need* to venture to the art store at least once a week to pick up a few more colors. Because, of course, the perfect color for whatever you're working on usually isn't in your box.

And lately I've picked up about every green that Rembrandt has, lots of light blues & purples and some really dark browns.

This is where I stand after a pencil then smaller pastel sketch and several classes...

And on the way I found a really great blog  - a pastel book, actually in blog form by Deborah Secor. It's titled Landscape Painting in Pastels and the blog has been arranged so that you read oldest first (yeah!). She has some great exercises for developing your skill, which I'm going to start working on as soon as this paining is finished (since there's only two more classes in Lynn's spring class, then we're off until the fall).

 

Art Journaling

I got to spend some dedicated time yesterday working on art journal pages. It's hard for me to say something is done, I end up going back and adding things, making changes.

Here's where several pages stand after Monday. You can see their beginnings two weeks ago down near the bottom of the post.

This page started as a way to try out a new stamp set and Distress Markers. I then put a light coat of gesso over the page and added some text image transfers. Next came the outline of the woman, which I used as a mask for some Dylusions spray ink. I've added Pitt Big Brush pens, Neocrayons and a bit of paint to that. And then I found this pack of Cosmo Cricket rub-ons sitting in the drawer and added a phrase. Is it finished? Who knows....

But this one's also changed. It started as random bits of scrap paper on the page. I was thinking that the scraps kinda looked like flowers. Then a coat of yellow, which I really didn't like. So....

more paint, including some Golden airbrush paint. I love the way it drips. And a stamped word that I was going to use on a card. More paint - this time black puff paint. And I set it aside to dry while I thought about what else I wanted to do to the page.

And after that photo was taken I had an idea... grabbed a pen to add some journaling and a white opal Liquid Pearl bottle....

And, finally, a page made with inspriation from Nathalie Kalbach's Uber-Media online class. I started kinda following her directions and then took it in my own direction. I did start with blue paint and use clouds. I didn't use traditional colors for the clouds, and they ended up looking ominous.

I dripped some Lumiere pearl white paint. Silver lining, right? And grabbed that pack of Cosmo Cricket rub ons again - the phrase "get happy" seemed to really fit the mood of the page. Fun! I like the drippy clouds and the text.

Melted Crayon Art

Last week we decided to make some melted crayon canvases. There's some great youtube videos showing the process.  So, the kids were excited and we picked up some canvases and several boxes of 64 count crayolas. After many days, Thomas finally finished arranging his crayons and we got started.

I glued the crayons on the canvas with a glue gun. After getting about 8 glued down I realized I hadn't payed any attention to which direction the labels were facing. And, if you let your kids help you by placing the crayons on the glue, they won't either. I did try to keep them all lined up, although it wasn't perfect.

 

Once the canvas was ready to go we got out a large painting tarp to protect the area around the canvas. Don't skip this!  The wax will drip off the bottom of the canvas and will easily be blown off either side. You can use cardboard, drop clothes, anything that's thick enough for the wax not to go through.

We did this one inside, but I would recommend melting wax outside. I would guess, similiar to encaustics, you don't want to have fumes lingering in your house.

Next, we tried several sources of heat. Thomas wanted to keep the drips more in lines than splattered all over the place. We first tried a Martha Stewart heat gun. I wasn't really happy with how it started, so we grabbed the hairdryer from upstairs. It blows more air than a heat gun, so your drips will be splatters.

The hairdryer was going kinda slow, so we added my Ranger Heat It heat gun. BINGO! The Ranger gun was the best - hands down - and we soon switched off the hairdryer. I think we melted for about 15 - 20 minutes, including switching tools.

What we discovered:

The area of the crayon you're melting makes a difference. We got the best melting by holding the gun pointed at the middle of the crayon. If you hold it too high, then you loose the nice clean top. Too low and the point drips away.

Also, the direction of the heat. If the heat is applied from below, then the drips don't want to go down. By varying the direction of the heat you can cause the paint to flow straight or splatter to either side.

And here's the finished canvas:

 

 

A Sketch a Day....

or maybe several.  I've been sketching off and on, but haven't posted anything.  I've found that if I grab my small sketchbook while watching the news at night I can motivate myself to do some quick sketches.

So.. first a really quick and simple one from last week.. my new phone.  After I broke the last one, I was keeping a good eye on this one.

And the next two came from photos posted on Junelle Jacobsen's blog, Yes and Amen. I was catching up on her blog and was really drawn to her photos - she has such a great eye. So, sitting on the couch I scrolled down through her blog on my ipad and decided to do a couple of sketches, the first one was more "finished." I used a just a HB pencil for both of these.

Work In Progress

It's not quite Monday anymore, but we had a busy weekend with camping for both cub scouts and girl scouts. So, after recovering from the weekend, I'm finally getting around to posting for Scrapscene's WIP Monday.

So, this past weekend Tom took the boys, who ended up staying up in a tent close to midnight (apparently one wouldn't turn out a flashlight) while I had about half of our Brownie troop at encampment all day long (emphasis on the long...)

And here's Rachel in her "yellow" outfit. She's now into dressing in all one color family - not that she matches any better....

The arts and crafts was a bit hit with Rachel. And they thought the "99 Things to do with Bandanas" was fun - so much so that quite a few of them went around with "slings" on their arms the rest of the day.

Sunday Thomas had his first fencing competition. It was a practice one run by VAF to give kids who are interested in competing a taste of what competion is like. He came in fourth in his age group, wasn't happy about not winning more bouts, but hopefully had a good learning experience. And I learned that I should've brought the camera with us.... the iPhone just doens't cut it sometimes.

And after a much needed rest.... I turned my attention to this canvas I'd had laying around. The background was made by layering strips of book paper - all pretty much horizontally. I decided to use this as a my guina pig for testing the image transfer so I added some color to the background, mostly with various Golden fluid acrylics.

Monday I went to Staples to see if they could print out a photo in 12x12 size for me to use on one of the larger canvases. After causing the printing desk staff much consternation, I finally got two copies of my photo.

So here's where I'm at. I just added a bit more paint to my canvas. When it's dry I'm going to do an image transfer with Golden Matte Medium. The paper's quite thin, so we'll see what happens.

Blog Hop Time!

We're having an blog hop!

If you are following the Art of Wild Abandonment Bloghop, you have probably came here from Olga Bassa’s blog. After you have read my post don’t forget to follow the bloghop onto Ingrid Opgenhoff’s blog. If you haven’t yet started the bloghop, why not join in the fun by visiting Claire Smillie's blog and learning all about it.

Here's what I made for the hop. This was inspired by a journal page by Junelle Jacobsen using freezer paper in strips. After prepping for a Brownie meeting the other week I had pile of cut off tops of colored index cards.  Which gave me an idea .....

I first loosely adhered the strips on a torn out piece of book paper, then sewed over the middle several times. After they were firmly attached I painted on a light coat of gesso. I then grabbed some of my Golden liquid acrylic and airbrush paints, including green gold, cobalt teal and bright red-orange (airbrush).

I attached clear buttons, an old Tim Holtz butterfly, a left-over glittery embellishment from my May DT kit (Basic Grey's Plumeria) and a few Tiny Text stickers from Cosmo Cricket (really, one of my favorite things!). And last, a few circles with a Gelly Roll pen.

Thanks so much for stopping by! 

Ready to hop on?  Click on over to Ingrid Opgenhoff’s blog for the next stop.

A Sketch a Day....

Well, this took two days or so.....

Here's a pic from my phone on Wednesday of a 4x6ish sketch in preparation for my second pastel painting. Looks much better than when the class started, that's for sure!

Art of Wild Abandonment -- a Blog Hop!

Stop back tomorrow for a blog hop - we've got over 50 participants!

In the meantime, here's a recent art journal page that I finished since it was posted on Monday. The journaling is a rant on the ridiculous cost of movies - and the snack bar. Nowadays you almost have to take out a home equity loan to take your family to see a film.

 

Stencling on Layouts

This month's DT kit for ScrapbooksPlus is the Plumeria line by Basic Grey.  Coincidentally, it coordinated quite nicely with Rachel's Easter dress... heh heh heh... and since I hadn't scrapped any Easter pics from this year I'll have quite the few coordinated spreads.

My first layout for the month uses stencils from Crafter's Workshop and Adirondack paint dabbers.

On the background paper I added snow cap paint with the reverse chicken-wire stencil. I then brushed some old paper distress ink from the edges, highlighting the stenciling in places. It's  very subtle, but I liked the added texture.

Over the golden strip I used another Crafter's Workshop stencil and purple twilight paint. I used Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's technique of using cheap cosmetic sponges to apply the paint.  I even used the sponge to apply paint to a stamp (Donna Downey - Unity Stamps).