Monday, May 30, 2011

Desktop Calendar for June

June desktop calendar
Hello friends :)
I'll be taking a month long computer break during June to work on a few deadlines.
My Etsy shop will be closed during June as well.
If something comes up I'll be posting at my Facebook page.
Add me to your "Likes" if you like :)
I'll leave you with a free desktop calendar for the month of June.
Click on this link or on the image above to download the calendar.
I'll see you back here in July!

Friday, May 27, 2011

Turbo by Daniel

Turbo by Daniel
A beautiful photo of the 'turbinator' that Daniel took with my camera.
Thank you so much for all the kindness and generosity you've shown Daniel.
He was so happy everyone liked his portrait of Carmel kitty.
Have a great weekend friends!

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Carmel

Carmel portrait
Another masterpiece pet portrait by my very talented son Daniel.
He'll be offering his custom pet portraits at my bigcartel shop starting next Monday.

Lime

Lime
When life gives you limes....paint them :)
Top: Watercolor sketch on paper.
Bottom: Mexican lime blossoms from our garden.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Tumbleweed

Look what the wind brought inTumbleweed
Turbo's inspection
The wind brought us this beautiful tumbleweed this week
and of course Turbo had to inspect it :)
Weathered branch
I found this other branch a few months ago and it still sits on top of our cabinet.
Did you know some people even collect them and you can buy them online!?

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Letter Series, and Other Things

I've gone back to my Stacked Journaling Letter Series this week in a letter written to myself titled, "Dear Judi: Tangled"

7 1/2"  x 11"

The substrate for this piece is one of the lovely tag cards I brought home with me from Pennsylvania. I painted multiple washes of Golden fluid acrylics across the glue side of a piece of Pellon double-sided fusable web. When it had dried, I ironed it to the white tag, trimmed the edges, and sealed the whole thing with a layer of matte medium.

I should have taken a photo of it at that point, but I was anxious to dive into journaling, so that didn't happen. However, I used the same technique and mediums on this green piece...


... so you can at least have an idea of what it looked like- in reds and blues- before the letter I was writing took over and covered the surface. I used Sakura opaque white fine-line paint pens to do the Stacked Journaling. The graffiti-esque quality of this technique just never fails to captivate me.

Having these colors out on my desk all weekend meant that a lot of other surfaces got played with, too, in essentially the same color palette (I never work on one piece at a time, I always have multiples going at once!)



Both of these pieces are a little too complex to simply call them "painted" or "collage" papers, but they can't really be considered completed art pieces, either.

I started each piece by first stamping black opaque paint in various designs onto lightweight copy paper. The paper was then torn and reassembled onto deli paper with a little gel medium. Then each piece of deli paper was washed and stamped repeatedly with layers of both transparent and opaque paints.

The fun thing about each piece is that they still maintain a very light weight and hand, so they could easily be torn into still more fragments and reassembled into some other collage work, later on.

In more experimentation with ironing painted fusable web to deli paper, I did some painting and stamping on two more pieces of the web, cut them apart and reassembled them into separate but related collages. Then they got more paint and more texture.



Like the pieces above, these can now either be mounted and called finished, or cut/ripped apart later for a different project.

Hope your weekend was creative!

Feathers

Number 5
Feathers
Feather collection
A little vignette at our blue house & a few of the beautiful feathers
I've received in the mail from friends all over the world.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Random

Random Weekend Captures
Random Weekend Captures
Random Weekend Captures
Random Weekend Captures
A few random photos of this weekend.
My plants are thriving in this heat while I wither...
I struggle during these hot months to keep my creativity
from becoming an amorphous mush.
Are you most creative when it's hot or during the chilly months?
Thank you so much to all of you that registered for the one day
summer workshop at Bookhou in Toronto. I look forward to meeting you :)
There are still a couple of spots available in case you fancy joining us.

Friday, May 20, 2011

O Canada!

Winged Migrations
Common Loon
Winged Migration is a beautiful group show curated by my dear friend Margie.
I am honored to be a part of this group of very talented women:
Abigail Brown, Abby Glassenberg, Arounna Khounnoraj & Margaret Oomen
If you are in the area it would be so nice of you to come visit.
I will be visiting Canada for the first time this summer!
I'll be in Toronto to give a one day workshop
at Arounna's beautiful shop Bookhou the 23rd of July!
To register and read more about it click here. The class is limited to 12 people.
To celebrate my trip I made the provincial bird for Ontario: the common loon

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Drawer No.2

Paper Treasures
Drawer No.2
This is my magic drawer, the one where I keep all the precious paper treasures
I find unbelievably inspiring. Everyone should have such a drawer...

***The beautiful cabinet was designed by my very talented Manolo.
I found the numbered porcelain pulls at the kid's section of the Zara Home store in case you were wondering ;)

I've Been Busy

I've been kind of busy with hand-dyed fabrics and old, painted wallpaper scraps and painted papers. The whole thing is mounted on heavy, double-stick interfacing with lots of Misty Fuse. And no Stacked Journaling. Or angst.



(9 1/2" x 11")

Also, some fun painted paper (mostly off-loaded paint from the piece above!)


Black and White

A paper and paint collage inspired by Anne Bagby's quirky and wonderful work.




Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Ralph & my Left Hand

Ralph on the Rocks
My left hand
Ralph the pelican now lives happily on a rock amongst corals & algae.
It's been seven months since I quit biting my nails.
Bit them really bad for almost 40 years
so I can't believe I have 'normal' hands now :)

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Collecting

Tote Collection
Box collection
Perfect
Some of my treasured collections displayed in the studio.
Canvas tote bags (All of them from Bookhou except for the red bear paw from Small Batch Production), old cardboard boxes I've bought from several Etsy shops
& blue glass mason jars.
I can't wait to get my hands on the new Uppercase book:
Collection A Day by Lisa Congdon.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Pelicans

Pelican Sketch
Pelican squadron
Inspired by these amazing brown pelicans I saw in Zapallar, Chile.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Belated May Calendar

May Calendar
I hadn't had time to whip up a May desktop calendar but I got so many requests
that I squeezed in some time today to design one for you...
Better late than never, right?
Click on the small image below for the high-res file.
***The beautiful strand of hanging 'glowblowls'
is by Diana Fayt

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Micron

Tuesday drawing
A Tuesday drawing with my all time favorite:
Sakura Pigma Micron pen made in Japan.
I buy them by the box full and have been using them for almost 20 years.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Mother's Day Blog Hop!

Collage artist, Claudine Intner, wrote recently asking for participants for her Mother's Day blog hop, so I volunteered. Today is my day!


I've been so focused lately on things having to do with my father that both my mother and my daughter have been left to fend for themselves without me. I can hear both of them now telling me that they're each fully capable of fending for themselves without my input, thankyouverymuch, and boy howdy, are they! But I still miss spending the time with them, and I get the feeling now and then that they may miss it a little, too.

Mother, daughter, daughter, mother, anchor, wings. The relationships are so complex, so mysterious and impossible to quantify. There's good days and bad days, good years and bad ones; subjects you should never discuss together and favorite memories you both revisit often; advice that should be given, withheld or just plain stockpiled until and if the timing is ever right.

And fights! No one can fight with more precision and competence than a mother and daughter. No relationship is capable of more meltdowns, drama moments and door-slamming than a mothers' and daughters'.

And yet there are a million other moments, the ones you remember and that count the most, moments of support, hand-holding and breathtaking generosity.

No one loves quite like a mother and daughter.

Please go and visit the other Mother's Day Blog Hop participants, too!

Half Way There

Big bird is half way there
Big bird is half way there.
The next step is when the painting comes to life: the details!
Happy Monday everyone :)

Sunday, May 8, 2011

New Work

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here that I had dug out two large stretched canvases and Gesso'd them to prepare to make new work with them. One of them is hanging in my living room now, and this one was finished in the studio this morning.


Abstract, 30" x 40", stretched canvas

This is another piece in my exploration of hand prints, almost as an answer to my Dear Dad series. I've been playing with my own hand prints lately, stacking them in the same fashion as the Stacked Journaling featured in the Dear Dad series, and this is another expression of that playfulness.

This piece began with Stacked Journaling applied to the primed canvas with a thick, black Sharpie. The Journaling became almost utterly obscured by subsequent layers which were fashioned by smearing my gloved hands with Golden's fiber paste and pressing them repeatedly onto a primed canvas. After the paste dried, many layers of acrylic paint washes were applied. Buried about halfway in is a second layer of fiber paste hand prints, as well.

While this work may appear to be fairly aggressive because of its color palette and composition, it doesn't feel that way to me. This was a fun, joyful process that felt far more unselfconscious than some of my more recent, genuinely darker stuff.

Happy creating!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day!
To all you beautiful mamacitas out there including my own ♥
*That's my pretty mom & me in the photo :)

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Birds in my Closet

Scarves
Turquoise & Brown
Clothes
Closet
Cuffs
A few birdies came to supervise my spring cleaning ;)