Life Outside the Fishbowl

Pastels

This week was my second pastel class. And apart from my pastel drawer sliding then crashing to the floor making a mess & breaking lot of pastels.... it's been great!

Thought I'd share what I've been working on. These are around 5x7ish and made from a photograph.

First, a pencil sketch --

Next, a black and white sketch of the drawing. I was quite nervous to start using the pastels. It was a big leap for me -- trying something quite new and different. I did a pastel wash for my background. This is on 400 UArt paper.

And on Wednesday during class, a color sketch of the same subject, again using 400 UArt paper. I used primarily Prismacolor NuPastels, with one or two Rembrandt soft pastels. The background layer was again done with a pastel wash.

So... I'm hoping these will count for my Daily Draw! My homework for class is a larger size version of the material. I stopped by Plaza Arts this afternoon to peruse their pastels... amoung other things and very restainedly bought only six more colors to try out. I *really* wanted that Sennelier set... but I think I need a good pastel carrier first. One that one slide to the floor....

Back later with my drawing for today...

What's More Fun than Melted Wax??

I had a ball taking an encaustic workshop at the Workshouse Arts Center in Lorton this past Saturday. A whole day of melted beeswax! Mmmm.. is it weird that I love the smell?

Anyway... Gina Cochran was a fabulous instructor. Her work is so beautiful and I highly recommend taking workshops with her. One of the great things about the Workhouse is getting to wall down the corridor and peek into all the other studios as well as the art in the hallways. It's always very inspiring.

As for the class, we worked on small encausticbord panels just really learning techniques and getting to experiment. We covered things such as masking, embedding objects, and texture.

Here's a sample of what I left with -

And my favorite. This has embedded feathers and natural material.

Monoprinting with the Gelli Plate

I spent most of the day yesterday at the Queen's Ink making tags with gel plates from Gelli Arts. And it was soooo much fun that I didn't want to stop. Seriously, it's quite addictive. If I hadn't had to pick the kids up from camp, I'd likely still be there.

We used acrylic paints, stencils and stamps to make the tags. The plates come in two sizes, 6x6  and 8x10. It's a convenient way to make monoprints, without having to make the gellatin yourself, let it set up overnight, take up half the frigde.....

All you need is a gelli plate, paper, paint, roller and your imagination.

 

 

What I've Been Up To....

The kids are out of school this week for spring break. So far we've seen a movie, got our nails done and went for ice cream.  Oh, and in the process I managed to buy a new arm chair for the living room. Which will arrive in 10 - 14 weeks. Sigh...

I started my pastel painting class this morning. My first big realization was that this is going to be messy. Very messy. Just opening the box of pastels left my hands all black, blue, red and brown before I had even touched a pastel! And it's going to be quite challenging for me - definitely pulling me out of my comfort zone.

Speaking of art, I finally had a chance to get a picture of a few art journal pages. This first one was from Christy Tomlinson's Art of Wild Abandonment. I decided to go ahead and do a page in the style of the class, even though it's not my style at all.

I wanted to try a few things on the background. There's a light coating of gesso over the book pages. I then used Neocrayons and Golden's irredescant pearl fluid acrylic paint. The clouds were made with a Crafter's Workshop stencil. I started with Tim Holtz's new Distress Markers and later added both Neocrayons and Inktense watercolor pencils on top.

The next one is more my style. It's still in progress, but I thought I'd share as I go. I had been wanting to try out this new stencil, part of Christy Tomlinson's new line. And it was inspired by Christy's class in 21 Secrets. I painted the background with Claudine Hellmuth's Studio paints. These can be pretty translucent and I wanted to test how they'd work on my gessoed pages.

I pulled out a random Golden fluid acrylic color and mixed it with light modeling paste. After letting it dry over night I added more paint, spraying it at the top to let it drip down the page.

And, back to shopping .... as I was looking through Arhaus trying to make sure the kids didn't break anything I found some cool things (besides the chair). They have these old batik stamps and metal print blocks. Today when I went back to return some fabric samples I had a chance to really look through them. And brought five home with me....

I can't wait to try them out. I've got plans for these babies.  Probably while I'm listening to Gotye... or watching the Glee video ... again....

 

21 Secrets

starts today! And it's not too late to sign up.

Really excited about this class. I'm still trying to figure out what to do first :)

 

Getting Inky with Tim Holtz

So I signed up for Tim Holtz's Creative Chemistry 101 class, and am still working my way through the videos. Tim's videos are always great - he really does an outstanding job. It's been a nice refresher for techniques and the chemistry part has been wonderful. It got me to get out the handful of Distress Markers and start playing with them. In fact, those are the first tags I decided to do ... then I went back and started at the beginning...

I also broke out Ranger's new Specialy Stamping Paper. Love it. In fact, I've got a new cover for the journal I made in Dyan's class. I used one of her Dylusions stamps on the paper, colored the stamp with Distress Markers, then inked the entire paper with various Distress Inks. Fun!

And here's my version of tags from days 1 and 6. I'm itching to finish my April DT projects so I can get back to making more tags. :)

A Day with Dyan Reaveley

The Monday after getting back from California I was packing a bag and treking up to the Queen's Ink in Maryland for a class with Dyan Reaveley. It was ball. Dyan is as funny as she is knowledgeable. And spending the day with Karen, Lisa and Angela was icing on the top - even with all the shushing going on.

I posted several pics on Facebook at the time, but thought I'd share some here, too. We made journal pages from newspaper and got to play with Adirondack paints, Dyan's new spray inks, Perfect Pearls mists and Dyan's cool stencils. Fun, fun, fun!

I'd never been to the Queen's Ink before. It's mostly a stamping store, with mixed-media worked in. It's in an old brick mill - fabulous walls & windows. And they've got lots of eye-candy all over the store  - it's given me the inspiration to get those unused configuration boxes out.

 

Need Some Inspiration or Just a Push?

I found these great websites this past week, great for providing incentive to just create.

The Sketchbook Challenge. Each month a different focus to explore in a sketchbook. January was doodling. I'm just about finished with a drawing course, so this is perfect to keep me going and growing. Starting this past fall I decided to get back to art - drawing, watercolor, etc. It's been years - really since my art classes in college - and attending Inspired last spring made me realize how much I missed it.

I took one of my mixed media journals and did a bit of journaling this weekend while the kids had their fencing classes. Much more productive than playing Angry Birds ;)

Strathmore is doing their free visual journal classes again. Tracy Bautista has the first class, which started January 1st on doodling. There'll be three different online classes throughout 2012.

 

 

Spooktacular Tag Class

Halloween and Tim Holtz? Yes, please! 

Come join me in making six Halloween tags, chock full of techniques and goodies.  We'll be doing resists, embossing, inking, image transfers and paining and using a variety of materials such as canvas, glossy paper and shrink plastic.

And with a bit of New Moon thrown in (book pages, that is) ... it'll be a howling good time ;)

The class is Tuesday, October 18th from 11 - 2:30. You can get more information and sign up at ScrapbooksPlus.

Learn Something New Every Day - 2011

I'm off to a slow start this year, but that's alright. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday going through my scrap bin, sorting, organizing and purging. One of my goals for this project is to use as many pieces of scraps and older products as I can -- stuff that I had to have, but that's been sitting in my stash since then. And, try to keep it less dimensional this year so that my book will still fit into the binding!

Since it's been raining cats and dogs here, I spent most of the past few days at my desk. I finished the dictionary cover for my Learn Something New Every Day project. I used Jenni Bowlin paint with both a Donna Downey stamp and a new Jenni Bowlin foam stamp (more later!). I layered a bunch of scraps and dug through my alpha sticker bin (and made a bit of a dent!).

Here's the entire cover. I'm thinking right now that I wait until the pages are complete before binding the book - that way it'll be easier to paint and stamp the pages.

Supplies:

Jenni Bowlin: Speckled Egg Paint Daubber, Whimsical Foam Stamps, and Mini Chalkboard alphas, Donna Downey Delicate Flower stamp, dictionary paper, Echo Park For the Record alphas, Studio Calico alphas, Sassafras Lass Script alphas, a Susie Bentz handmade ticket, an old 7gypsies sticker, and a couple other scraps.