Angelina Vessel

I went online to the Fiber Mixed Media Group and Connie V. had posted a question about making vessels with Angelina. I had never heard of the anyone trying to do this so, of course, needed to try. Here is my first attempt. I thought that using a glass jar as a mold would work best and used this unopened jar of spicy Sicilian spagetti sauce. I cheated a bit and used fantasy film as a base, but after making it, I don't think it was necesary. At first covering it with the parchment paper was tough while holding the iron but after a few attempts, I got the hang of it.

The photo on the left is the semi-finished product! It used an entire bag of angelina! I would like to add more now in different colors and add stamped images???

New little creatures

The butterfly is made using Art glitter on acetate and the other two are angelina.

Foil and Art glitter

On the left is a sample with Art Glitter; it is so much fun. At first I really poo-poo-ed it, but now love the stuff. It is so fine, like fairy dust and can handle the hot temps of irons and heat guns without burning. On the right are samples of using stamps with foils.

Angelina Samples

I am teaching a class this month on all things shiny. Well, I guess not EVERYTHING, but on angelina, foils, art glitter, and hot-fix crystals. I have spent the past couple of days making samples and here are just a fe

Art Academy Live

Okay, for those who know me, I sometimes have trouble focusing on one thing for long. Last night I was thinking that I needed to brush up on my basic drawing skills and searched the Internet for some drawing instruction DVDs. Instead I found the greatest website! It is artacademylive.com. For $10 a month, they have hundreds of small video instructions on areas such as drawing, watercolor, acrylic, oil, and pastel painting. They run the gamut from basic to advanced. It is wonderful. Instead of sitting down to an hour DVD and then not having time to really try anything it covered, the subjects are broken down to around 10 minute segments! Truly, Truly worth investigating!
Sharon

Acrylic Skins

My friend Rebecca and I sat in on some demos on using golden Digital Grounds recently. Patty Brady with the Golden educators program gave the talk and it was great. Although I made a few initial tries using them, I really couldn't "get" it. One of the cool ways that she showed us was making acrylic skins, coating them with the digital ground and sending it through the printer. Unfortunately, my first "great" idea was to try and send the skin through the printer on the freezer paper. I send crazy things through my printer all the time without much trouble; this time the waxiness of the freezer paper and the skin just couldn't seem to move through the printer without jamming. I thought I was saving myself a step but instead my skin just got twisted up; the good news is the image did transfer. I removed the paper and then the skin from the freezer paper. I flipped the image over, retaped the skin to a piece of typing paper and reprinted the image on the reverse side. It worked beautifully. I then fixed the image with Golden spray varnish twice. Here is the piece as printed.

I also turned the image over and using a Q-tip. I cleaned up some of the mucked ink from the jammed paper tries. It cleaned up pretty well. this is a small image from one of my sketchbooks. I will use the image to collage in another piece I am working on. Because it is clear, I assume it will be almost seamless in the final painting.

Here is a third skin I made with tar gel and Golden paints. I haven't a clue where this one will end up!

I took an abstract painting class

I took an abstract painting and collage class this weekend at Binders with Kay Powell. I loved it! This is one of the pictures I painted.

This is another one. I really do like this one but the picture has a lot to be desired. My husband played with the camera and I can't figure out how to get it focus again!!!!!

Quilt Show Classes

I took three classes at the Quilt Show this past weekend. One was with Myrna Ficken and two were with Deloa Jones. I learned so much and came home and played with my Voyager. It is a 17 inch mid-arm quilting machine. I don't think it is that bad for a beginner!

What a face!

Okay, so he is nothing to do with any of my painting or fiber, but he was too cute! This is my son's dog, Peppy.

Encaustic Play day

I had the day off today and after having coffiee with my friend, Rebecca and her mom, I came home and played with my encaustic wax. I still am pretty bad at it but really like the possibilities (if I could just learn how to use it right). As the wax, has a shine to its surface, these pictures came out pretty bad. They are done on small panels that I bought at Michael's in their wood craft department. If I was planning a large piece, I would probably have to go to Home depo and get a good piece of wood, but these small pieces, this thin wood board worked great and was very cheap!

The close-up on the panel on the left is my favorite. I stamped the image of a fern leaf into the wet wax.

Sharon

Monoprinting: a little more successful

Last night I tried using Golden's OPEN acrylics again for monoprinting. I VERY quickly doodled a design (I didn't want to do anything requiring a lot of work as I wasn't sure if it would work out at all.) In the middle is my "design". I placed it under a piece of plexiglass and applied the paint. The example on the right is the first pull. The colors were strong but some areas didn't have great color transfer. I went back over it in areas with a wet brush and as the acrylics were still a little wet, I was able to blend colors a little more.

The image on the left is a second pull. This time I soaked the paper in a water bath as I would if I was monoprinting with inks. I bloated the paper dry between two paper towels and then layed it over the inked plate.

Two other things that I did was I used the back of a wooden spoon to burnish the images and really get a a good transfer of paints and I also used a different paper. The first examples a few days ago were made using a textured, thick watercolor paper. This was much thinner Japapese paper. I used my covered pallette and the paints are still wet and usable this morning.

Torn paper on lutrador

This sample is on lutrador. I used one of the inkAid prints which I tore apart added some dark green and blue tissue paper.


Hopefully the uncovered lutrador will act as highlights in the final image and I will paint it with both black and white gesso.







Here is the painted stage...
I did add some white gesso on parts of the brown fairies. This will give some luminosity to the finished image???



I think I will keep trying the monoprinting with OPEN next. I signed up for some lecture demos at Binders in November with Patti Brady (I think that is her name), the Golden's national educator on using both Open and Digital ground. Hopefully, I can ask her some questions too.

Torn paper on Ricky Tim's stabilizer

This is a thicker paper that I ironed down to some of Ricky Tims' stabilizer sheets. It is a nice thickness for this type of work (I hope). As the paper was white, I didn't bother photographing the paper before I painted it. I threw some brilliant red brusho dye into the gesso and painted a little. It was a little too pink so I added some Arzo Gold.

Playing with torn paper on deco bond

One of the first examples in Maggie's book is creating a textured base. Here are some of my experiments.

This is a piece of deco bond. I added an additional layer of wonder-under as I find deco bond doesn't hold well. I ripped up pieces of green tissue and brown bag and ironed them down.

The second image has been painted with white and black gesso. Some areas of the paper have been left blank, but all uncovered areas have been painted. I will keep building layers with gels, and paint tomorrow.

Organizing my paints

I spent most of my day organizing my painting/mark making "stuff". The my oils, inkAid, and misc large stuff is on the top shelf. Mediums, gels, glues and such are on the second, acrylics, lumiere, textile, dyna-a-flow, and brusho paints are on the second, and on down the line!!! They were spread out over 5 rooms so it was getting hard to stay in the "zone" when I needed to get another type of paint.

Tonight I was too busy watching Ugly Betty to work in my art studio, so instead of talking about what I have been working on, I will write about the book I just bought! It is Maggie Grey's new book, Textile Translations: Mixed Media. You can order it (from the U.K.) at http://www.d4daisy.com/. Take a look it is great!

first try at monoprinting with Open acrylics

As you can see, my first try with using the new Golden OPEN acrylics for monoprinting didn't work. I tried using about the consistancy of printing inks, but almost nothing transfered. Then I wet it and that just bled. I will keep trying.

This is what the package says...

However, when I got home...

I found this cute little sample set in my mailbox from Golden! They are small but they will give me a good idea of how well they will work. Maybe tomorrow? Oh yeah, I still am working on the digital images, too.

I went out today to buy...

This morning I taught a needle-felting class at The Art Place. As soon as class ended, I ran up to Dick Blick to buy Golden's other new product line, Open Acrylics. I really like Acrylics these days because they are so versatile. So far, the biggest drawback has been that they dry too fast to do monoprinting. With this new line, hopefully, I will be able to do this. I have to admit that I am a little scared that they will take TOO long to dry now. Needless to say, I will try to document my experiences.

Golden's Digital Ground Sample Set

inkAid

This is the inkAid products.

Digital ground White Matte

Big difference from the brown background. I wonder what would happen if I added some color to the ground. I might send the question to Golden's. They are usually great about answering technical questions.

Plain Brown bag paper

This sample was not coated with anything, just run through the printer. Tomorrow I thing my samples will be of something more vividly colored.

Sample with Golden's Digital Ground Clear (Gloss)

Shiny - that is both good and bad thing. To anyone who knows me, I like bling; however, sometimes that isn't a good thing. As you can see from the plain paper. This did come out with deeper colors then plain brown paper. Hint: make a small "x" on the side you paint. I couldn't tell which side had been painted on one of my samples.

Santa In Progress

This is another pattern by "Seams like Home". I am teaching him at the quilt store where I work part-time, Tiny Stitches at the end of November and again in December. Isn't he cute! He is completely raw-edge applique.

Paper bags before printing

Here are two of the cut pieces of the plain brown shopping bag. First I cut out the bottom of the bag and ironed it flat. I then cut them to fit on a regular letter size sheet of paper as I thought it would be easier to feed through the printer. I attach each piece to a carrier. I did this by using a glue stick around the edges and attaching them to regular printing paper. I did iron them flat after gluing. Last night, only one of the 5 prints got stuck in the printer. On the right is inkAid's white matte precoat. It seems to be similar to Golden's Digital Ground White matte. The big difference was the InkAid needed to be stirred REALLY REALLY well before using. It has this thick chalk-like substance in the bottom that needed to be remixed. Golden's didn't seem to need it as bad. I just shook the bottle for good measure. Another consideration is both matte products went on clear. The directions say to it will "probably" need a second coat. After the first coat had dried, I had horrible brush strokes. I actually added a third coat to minimize the streaks! Tomorrow I will paint up a few more samples and I will try to remember to take a picture of what just one coat looked like.

Image to Stitch

I received Maggie Grey's book, Image to Stitch, a few weeks ago. Very cool. I only began really playing with it this weekend. Maggie recommends InkAid products to treat surfaces before sending them through the printer. I actually found them locally and at 50% off. The downside of that is the store was not planning on carrying them anymore. I bought up large bottles of most of their products. One of the reasons they weren't going to carry them was that Golden has come out with a similar product line called "Digital Grounds". They only had a sample pack to sell me, but off course I bought it as well. My first experiments are with brown bag paper. Unfortunately, my digital camara is out of "juice". I will post the pictures tomorrow (hopefully).

Isn't she cute? I taught her as a class at Tiny Stitches. What fun we had! She is actually a pattern from "Seams like Home", so I really can't take much credit for her. I have been working on her "partner" Santa. He is darling! I will be teaching him in November and again in December.
For those who know about my "planned" surgery, it was cancelled the day before I was set to go in to the hospital. The surgeon herniated a disk. It has been two weeks without any real answers from the doctor until today. I meet the new surgeon on Friday and hopefully will be scheduled again soon. Truthfully, I am feeling a lot better, but trying to stay close to home and rest.

Log Cabin

This is my Swedish Log Cabin. Don't even ask what Sweden has to do with Log Cabins. I haven't made a log cabin quilt in over 20 years. Although these aren't my "usual" colors, I really like it. I actually posted these three quilts to give my sister, Marian, a choice for her birthday present. Yes, her birthday was over 2 weeks ago and if you notice none of the quilts are even quilted yet.

Mexican Fiesta

This is the International Mystery Quilt for Mexico. It was supposed to be Mexican Fiesta Stars. I can it Margaritas for its Lime and Strawberry look!

Indonesian quilt

I haven't posted for awhile. It isn't that I have been feeling bad; actually the opposite. However, I am not pushing myself to "produce" right now. Instead I have been just playing - learning new skills. I bought a wonderful new toy this summer, a Bernina 730 and have been busy learning all that it will do.

I also have continued to teach. These three quilts are from my International Mystery Quilt Series that I teach on the 3rd Friday of every month at Tiny Stitches. This was for Indonesia.

Jamie is graduating

My son, Jamie (on the right) is graduating from high school this week. I am very proud of him. He is graduating with over a 4 point average and headed to Georgia Tech! With him, on the far left is his friend Jeff, who is going to that other university in Athens, Georgia.. In the middle is his AP Econ teacher,Mr. Ravencroft, who is another wonderful teacher at Wheeler High School!

No Posts

There haven't been a lot of posts lately. There hasn't been a lot of work either. I haven't been feeling well.
Sharon

Upside Down

this is my submission to Stretching Art. It is a lot of surface design. the picture isn't very good.

More stamps with their fabric

Here are two more I did yesterday. The carved stamps on on the left and the stamped fabric is on the right. I really am enjoying them. These blocks are so much easier to carve than a lino block. It is almost like cutting through butter. I did two more a fern and a lotus flower. I will get those up later! I am actually sick again today. I am feeling a little better, but didn't sleep because of the coughing and stuffiness, so I actually took the day off work.

What to do when you aren't feeling well...

I was sick yesterday. It is my usual day off and Tuesdays are my play days so that was a really sad for me, but I just can't lay in bed all day, so I carved stamps. This one I call my swirly one. Great and imaginative name, right? What can I say my head hurts! This one is carved using the crumply ereaser material from Speedball. They have two different types of carving blocks, this one which isn' t the best, and another, which is great (it is pink). I will come back later and give the actual names for reference.