Leaves Page

Continuing to play catch-up (just as well as the weather is awful),  this is the 3rd page (9 x 12") I made as a result of Flora Bowley's class on Life Book 2015.   While some classes like this one catch my attention and make me want to do more of them, others are a bit too prescriptive for me, and that's fine. I'm still hugely enjoying the classes I do do and get some handy tips and techniques from the ones for which I only watch the videos or read the PDFs. Maybe one day in the future I may do them too and the Life Book classes can all be downloaded and kept, which facilitates that possibility.

Flora's class is my favourite thus far and I can see myself going back to her Intuitive Painting technique many times. You can see my two previous pages done after watching her class video here and here. I made all three pages in one sitting in my painting shed. Working on 3 at the same time meant I could keep going while pages dried. And as a result the pages are closely related to each other. 

Circles

It's evidence of how much I enjoyed Flora Bowley's class on Life Book 2015 this week that I did not one but 3 pages and I'm definitely going to do some more in the near future. As I explained in my earlier post about her class, she calls her process Brave Intuitive Painting and it means starting to paint without any pre-conceived ideas about the outcome of the process. In this piece circles emerged eventually (as they tend to do a lot in my work).

While photographing this page and specially when taking pictures of the details I once again thought about how this might work on fabric and in fact a flash of inspiration came my way to tell me what I wanted to do with it.

I'll let it stew for a bit and if I still think I will work I will be getting on with getting this printed out onto fabric yardage. Exciting stuff! And I'm grateful that that spark came to light as inspiration and joy have not been around a lot lately.

 

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The Eyes of the Night

It has been awhile since I last shared a Life Book 2015 lesson with you but here is one I enjoyed doing very much today. It's the lesson by Flora Bowley, called "Letting go" and it's all about Brave Intuitive Painting where you start a piece without any idea of what it's going to look like when done. In fact, this is how I do most of my sketchbook work so it was always going to be a fun lesson. I made 2 other pages (all sized 9 x 12") today in a vain attempt to keep on going while the other pages dried. The Scottish summer weather put a stop to that as it was damp and cold so in the end I still had to use a heat gun on the pages in order to keep up my momentum.

 I had the sense to keep my little camera close by to take pictures of the various stages of the pages and took a picture whenever I had to use the heat gun.

There was a lot of mark making and covering up the various layers just letting small details peek through. I can no longer remember just how many layers I added but am guessing at around 15. The following 2 pictures are details of the finished page which you can see at the very top of this blog post. Sorry about the curling of the paper (which is why the text is looking a bit strange) but I'll sort that out with some heavy books overnight.

 I love the details even better than the whole page and of course I can use these pictures to print  on fabric and start stitching if the fancy takes me.

Play Day

I rewarded myself for those long days of machine quilting with a play day. After transferring all my paints, stencils and gelli plates to the shed for the summer  about a week ago, I spend some time in there today just playing with all those luscious supplies, specially my gelli plate (I only used the 8 x 10" one today) and a wide variety of Stencilgirl stencils.  And here are the results. This is using acrylic paints on paper.

 It's amazing how many papers I ended up with as a result of 2 hours concentrated play.

And finally I decided to also give shaving cream a try. This seems to be cropping up more and more on blogs and YouTube videos but I did this first back in the days (early nineties) when I was studying for my City & Guilds in Embroidery. It involves putting a layer of shaving cream in a tray, then adding inks (I used alcohol inks) and making marbling patterns with a skewer or fork. Lay the fabric gently on top and push it softly with your flat hand. Take it off and remove the shaving cream from the surface of the fabric and what you are left with is a marbled pattern as you can see below. It's messy and unpredictable but lots of fun. I heat set the fabric but I'm not sure just how water resistant this might be. Not that this matters to me as all of my work is meant to go on the wall. And as I can testify alcohol ink is very difficult to remove from both hands and clothing even without heat setting!

I was rather pleased with this piece in particular!

Feel the Moment

Feel the Moment was the title of this week's Life Book 2015 class by Jenny Wentworth in which we painted a face. It's a bit unnerving to see what emerged from my efforts. To say she looks severe is a bit of an understatement. But she appeared from under my hands almost as if I had no control over what she looked liked. She simply wanted to be there. Sometimes that happens in art. You produce a piece be it a painting, art journalling page or textile hanging and it is more than you thought it would be. It came from you but there is also something extra there that you were entirely unaware of. Something from deep inside, from regions where I only very occasionally visit. She is such a one. 

I pretty much followed the lesson for the techniques I used but added stamping to the background and then seemingly at random found an old postage stamp in the courtyard where I was painting, probably a left over from my efforts to organize my stamp collection a bit. It was meant to be so I added it to the page at bottom left.  It toned in perfectly with my feelings at the time.

I also added the written text: "We only have this moment". As I have mentioned before there is always meaning to my art journalling, very often much more meaning than the eye can see. I know what it is and that is enough. I don't often feel the need to spell it all out and I'm also careful about not invading my own privacy, let alone anyone else's. I like sharing the art but not my emotions. They are for my eyes only, and her's, of course.

I liked her better before I added her hair but of course it was too late to take a picture at that stage so here is an approximation. I felt I learned so much from this class and expect I will try more portraits in future in the hope a friendlier face will come to light.

For reasons about which I will enlighten you soon, it's so ironic that she looks so troubled because the person who brought her to life is having a super fantastic, wonderful and amazing day! One phone call was all it took to chase those dark clouds away!

She Shareth her Joys

This week's class for Life Book 2015 was by Juliette Crane and was titled: Painting from the Heart. I thoroughly enjoyed it and specially the first part of her video which demonstrated how with a few simple marks you could make a character come to life.

I followed along with her and then started to invent some characters of my own of which the one above was my favourite. She sort of encapsulates some greyhound traits such as the ears and the tail but unlike the greyhound also has wings. Juliette then went on to paint an owl but I used my little character. I also loved painting with my fingers as the class suggested but then again this is something I do quite a lot already, specially if there are no brushes nearby. After all our hands are our tools!

 So the entire background is hand painted and I also used quite a bit of glitter dropped into the wet paint which sadly is lost on camera. The texture you see is from bleeding tissue paper as well as scratching into the wet paint with the back of a brush.

I wish in hindsight that I had tilted the face a bit more like in my original drawing but it is what it is and I had a joyful time making this page, which is what it is all about as far as I'm concerned. I love looking at all the pages I have already made for the Life Book 2015 classes and that will all be put together into one large book at the end of the year.

Gelli Paper Prints

While painting fabric on the gelli plate (see yesterday's post) I always have some paper on standby to mop up the paint with, as it seems a shame to waste what is quite a pricey commodity. So I roll off my brayer on paper and put paint covered stencils on top. I usually find that eventually I try and design those papers too, once they are well on the way to be completely covered! I just love those much more random results and am particularly pleased with the paper on the far right above. I will probably scan that one into the computer and print it out onto fabric to use. When I posted the fabrics from yesterday many people remarked on my circle prolifiration and yes, circles are "my thing".  Above you see one side of all the papers.

And here are the backs. Usually I made them double sided so that I can use them in journal and book making. I'm blogging and blipping early today and with these papers, as I will be spending a considerable amount of time in the car and I'm finding that trying to find a blip while driving is not that conducive to safe travelling. So although I will have my camera with me (as always!) and will try and grab pictures when I see something worthwhile, I'm taking the pressure of myself, to come up with at least one great picture for my blip, which will enable me to enjoy both the drive and the talk I'm going to attend.

Life is oft so like a dream

I have become more and more fascinated by bookmaking. Not so much the traditional way of making hand bound books but all the different fun methods used nowadays. Many of these are readily available online, either entirely for free on YouTube or in on line classes. However none of these methods are new. Whenever I find something I didn't know about on line I usually then also discover it in the one of the many bookbinding books I posses and which I have read. Somehow seeing it in action on the computer screen makes much more of an impression although for following step by step instructions I'm still one for the written word. All this to explain why I eagerly await Kiala Givehand's monthly Book-in-a-Day 2014 series of videos. In 2013 she made a book once a week (also in a day) and I'm still working my way through all those videos, but this year it is a much more manageable (for her too, I imagine!) monthly event.

I fell in love with the book for March instantly. It's a dainty looking model, ending up in a 3.5 x 3" book. I already had a load of painted pages so used a selection of them for the book. I love the binding method which traps thread (stranded cotton in my case) and then knots these to bind.

Kiala's book had no content but I wanted to add a poem made from sentences cut from a vintage book and for some reason I felt it necessary to make my task harder by producing a poem that could read from front to back of the book but also from back to front.

 Here it is from front to back:

life is oft so like a dream

having not beginning nor end of days

infinite in grand outline

the enigma of all things

live in love

life is a constant force

all things work in circles

I live and die

who shall grasp that thrilling thought

life is oft so like a dream

 And this is the back to front version:

life is oft so like a dream

who shall grasp that thrilling thought

I live and die

all things work in circles

life is a constant force

live in love

the enigma of all things

infinite in grand outline

having not beginning nor end of days

life is oft so like a dream

To accompany the text I used little stickers made from my own Instagram pictures. This is done by a company called Social Print Studio (based in the US),the same company that also produces the buttons I showed you in a previous blog post some time ago.

I love these little stickers as well as most of their other print products and regularly have them printed for me to use in all kinds of ways, including for The Documented Life Project planner this year. It's an excellent way to re-use your own art.

Envelope Prompt

At the beginning of each week this year you will be seeing what I did for The Documented Life Project prompt. I'm adding these pages to my Moleskine planner as I'm going along, mainly so that it's easier to take the piece to the sewing machine before I attach it into the planner with washi tape.

Our prompt this week was to utilize an old envelope. As some of you know I used to host many swaps before the postal costs became a bit too much, and as I never throw out anything I have many lovely decorated envelopes left from that time. I used one that was mailed to me from Singapore and the only thing I added to the envelope was a sticker to obscure my address. The envelope was then stitched onto a piece of hand painted paper. I added the purple postage stamp at bottom right as well as the stamped text. I also inked the edges of the envelope and layered it with painted black fabric before stitching it down on 3 sides.

The fourth side was left open so that I could add a little tag (also a gift) and an old order form on which I have written my To Do list for this week. It will be interesting to see just when all the items on the list will be finished.

I have promised myself not to spend hours doing these prompts as specially at the moment I simply don't have much time. But it's amazing how much can be achieved in very little time. It helps that I have put all kinds of items that I think will be helpful doing these challenges in a large plastic box in my studio so that I can just dip in there and grab some goodies. And the fact that it is very satisfying to see the new week already adorned with a tip-in page is a real encouragement.

The Gate of the Year

Following the completion of the diary cover made for The Documented Life Project (link also in the side bar) I also finished our first weekly assignment. It was to take a photograph of our front door and use that as inspiration. Our front door is not very inspiring and is also hardly ever used except by delivery companies so instead I went with the photograph of the gate in our garden that leads into the part of the garden (about 1/4 of an acre) that is fenced off for the chickens to use. It has weathered beautifully (although John tells me the colour is an indication of rotten wood!) and I used it for my first blip of 2014, so it seemed a natural progression to also use it for this first assignment. For the background I finally managed to persuade myself to use a painted page I did quite some time ago. I was getting way too attached to it and I'm determined to start using some of such treasured pieces. It formed a great background with the shining yellow light.

So here it is: the gate of the year!

Gelli Plate Printing

I've recently done a gelli plate printing class online, run by Carla Sonheim, and have already blipped at least one sample of this class previously. But today I thought I would write a bit more about it here on this blog. What is a gelli plate, you may ask (although I know that some of you are quite familiar with it already). Well in the past people used gelatine to make a smooth surface from which to take monoprints. But the gelli (think of pudding) always was a bit fragile and easily damaged and also you had to make it before you could do anything, which took time, and after use it had to been thrown out and couldn't be preserved. So some smart cookie conceived the idea of making a commercial gelli plate which is for long term use and is ready for action whenever you want. Specially this last aspect made it very attractive to me as I like to follow up on my bright ideas as soon as they pop up in my head.

I've done several online gelli classes already. There are many free on YouTube, and Julie Fei-Fan Balzer ran a monthly one not long ago which you can still buy. I've also done lots of experimentation on my own. But there is always more to learn and so I signed up for the gelli plate printing class by Carla Sonheim. Like her I did my first batch on watercolour paper and you can see some of the results here.

Sometimes I'm showing you the entire watercolour sheet and other pictures show just a detail of one of the papers that I particularly liked. Of course fabric is never far from my mind and I'm always looking at my painted papers with the eye of a textile artist and considering how to get it onto fabric. One of the easiest ways is to either photograph the paper or scan it, transfer it to the computer and print it out onto fabric sheets using my own inkjet printer. And that works very well.

However for the best results I upload my pictures to Spoonflower and let them print it out. Yes, it's not exactly cheap (specially as they are located in the US) but the results are superb. I've used them for quite some time and have never been disappointed. In fact I'm sometimes amazed by how impressive the resulting fabrics look. There are also more and more places here in the UK who aim to provide the same sort of service such as Design Matters run by Laura and Linda Kemshall. I haven't used them yet but watch this space!

But of course there is also another alternative and that is to use your gelli plate to print directly onto fabric. I was recently asked what paint I use and I use a mixture of acrylics and fabric paint. I'm not really bothered about wash-ability as my quilts are all meant to go on the wall so that isn't an issue for me. I'm also not disturbed that ordinary acrylics change the handle of the fabric somewhat. Again this might be an issue if you're going to use the item but not for wall hangings. If you want to wash your pieces you really should use dedicated fabric paints only and make sure to heat set them properly. As for me I concentrate on the colour of my paints and I mix all the different paints to my heart's content. What you see just above and below are all prints made using the gelli plate on cotton, with sequin waste in different sizes as a stencil.

I've printed these sheets, all around the A4 size, this morning and have now left them to dry. I might add more to each of them but it's always a good idea to let them dry and come back to them in a few days time with a fresh eye to see if they need any further work. In the meantime I've photographed my favourite bits so that I can reprint them at this exact stage.

I also try to keep in mind that these fabrics are not meant to be finished pieces like the paper sheets but are instead intended to be used in my quilts so that they will cut up into the required sizes. Therefore there is no need to be over fussy about each individual sheet. I can select the exact bits I want when I need them.

Finally I've had a question about the colours I used on the fabrics. I only used 5 different tubes of paint, one turquoise, one magenta and one lemon yellow, all to be mixed with white or black. If you stick to a limited colour palette the chances of getting good results are much higher. In fabric painting as well as dying less truly is more. It's all too easy to end up with mucky brown or slushy grey although of course you might like that. I don't!

Collage, Construct and Affirm Journal

Now that it is October (and how did that happen?!) it's time to put all my summer painting projects up on this blog as I have more or less finished them. I will continue to paint in the shed while weather permits and there are still classes whose projects I want to make again but I have managed to learn so much this summer and it's time to share it with you. 

Probably my most favourite project was making this portfolio art journal in the Collage, Construct and Affirm class by Roben Marie Smith. All her classes are an absolute blast and the great thing is that not only are the classes a delight to follow but the end products are all so delectable. After you've finished them you end up with journals that you can then work in some more and put your own stamp on, both literally and figuratively speaking. 

I won't be telling you anything about techniques here. For that you can sign up and do the class yourself following this link. The project uses canvas pad pages which were a new thing to me but I can already think of lots of uses for it which is just as well as in a fit of enthousiasm I bought not just one but 2 pads so I have approx. 30 pages of canvas pad to practise with. I showed you some of the pages in a previous blog post here.

 I love the portfolio shape, the way the painting feels (it's finished with clear gesso) and the closure is a pure delight. The portfolio has a secret pocket (closed with velcro) and Roben Marie made 5 affirmation cards with the remnants of the collage sheets left over after making the portfolio. I preferred to look for text in my favourite vintage book to add to the pages, searching for appropriate sentences. The cards will live in the pocket and I imagine I will get them out regularly to look at how I made them. Here are all 5.

I know that I will do the entire class again (and I can, because access to it is unending) probably putting a bit more of my own spin onto it. But this one will always take me back to that fabulous summer of 2013 which itself will also long linger on in my memory.

Finally I was very honoured to feature on a blog post by Gillian Cooper where this blog was featured as 1 of 10 great blogs to follow! You can read more about it here.