Bellevue Arts Museum ArtsFair

Hello all, sorry for the radio silence over here.  I've been working on some new pieces to go with the new series and applying for some art fairs for this summer!

I'll be at the Bellevue Arts Museum ArtsFair July 25, 26, and 27 at booth L-02.  All the info about the fair is right here. I'm on a wait list for another fair so I may or may not be there, we'll see!

I've got a new drawing that is finished, too and I wanted to try an encaustic that had a drawing transferred on top to see if it would work.

For unknown reasons the only files that are uploading correctly today are my images that are formatted for the art show application website??  Thanks Blogger! :P  So try to ignore the borders here:

It's a bit terrifying trying to melt in the drawing on the encaustic without messing any of it up…the little triangles are much easier to do.  It worked and I like the result though, so I think I'll do more like this.

new minis

That's a lot of images for some very tiny art!  

These are 4x4" minis I made to test out the addition of image transfers on fabric and embroidery thread to attach the fabric bits.

The more opaque pieces of fabric are cotton with image transfers and the sheer pieces are silk.  The silk didn't take the image transfer for some reason but if I decide I just have to have it I could always try those printable silk organza sheets.  I assume the effect would be the same.

I like how this is working on the small scale so next up will be to add it onto a larger piece.

more encaustics and show prep

Three more encaustics, because I wanted a few more to bring with me to Crafty Wonderland.  These are 8x8", 9x12", and 8x10".

I've got most everything put together for the show...it's coming up soon now!  I'm in the midst of printing up some scarves and pillow covers.  I'll have some process photos to post here at some point but so far I was having so much fun printing that I forgot to stop and take photos!  I'll try to remember.

green encaustic collage and a tattoo! (but not on me)

Here's another little encaustic collage...having so much fun making these.  I still feel like I'm getting the hang of the medium somewhat but I love the possibilities with depth and layering.  I do kind of like it not to be too smooth - I think you're supposed to be striving towards smoothness but I like some variation.

I got an email last month from Jesika who wanted to incorporate some of my hellebore drawings into a tattoo.  She designed this herself and very kindly sent me photos because I was very keen to see what she came up with!  And then I promptly forgot they were in my inbox, ha ha.  Jesika does some pretty amazing work of her own and I'm very pleased to have been involved in this amazing tattoo!  Thanks Jesika!

lilac encaustic

These shiny encaustic pieces are turning out to be difficult to scan - the glossy surface seems to confuse the scanner and parts of it get blown out.  But I can't get the level of detail I want with photos.  So here's a combination of both...hopefully that gives an idea of what this actually looks like between the two.

I'm trying to get the layers of papers and lines and image transfers to be a little more transparent so you can see through and under them.  Making the lines onto the gesso a bit darker seems to be helping, and I printed out some image transfer bits that are essentially clear with a floating image (in this case the handwriting) on them.  I think that's giving it a feel that's closer to my digital collages where all the layers are working together.

I also decided to start blogging some of my sewing projects but I wanted to keep this space just for art.  I mean, why neglect one blog when you could neglect two??!?  So here's the sewing blog, if you're curious.

more waxing

Two more encaustic pieces, 8x8".

These turned out oddly much warmer in tone than the last two.  The only thing I did different (I think anyway) was melting the encaustic medium in a different container.  And the medium is a bit thicker although I put on fewer layers.  I guess I wanted to try encaustics to introduce a bit more unpredictability into my work so...success :)

I like that using the TAP transfer paper in and on the wax instead of on paper is that the transfers tend not to dominate the piece so much.  The photos I included in these pieces would have ironed on about 5 times darker than they look here.

mad scientist-ing!

Hey there!  I've been busy since I last posted - did some art walks at a couple places and I did my first outdoor art fair.  And then I picked up something new and was just doing test pieces and experiments but at long last I have something done that I'm happy with.

I've wanted to try encaustic for ages but I was always concerned about how fragile the finished pieces are.  I happened to pick up a book on a 50% off table at the local craft store and it reminded me how much I love the look of it.  So sheer yearning won out over practicality and I got the book.  I had to get a few supplies like an electric griddle and so on but it's not too terribly difficult to get started.

It took a while to figure out how to incorporate the collage bits and the image transfers.  I came up with a few things I liked - there's lines drawn straight onto the panel in colored pencil because regular pencil smudged when I put the first layer of wax on.  Guess how I found out...  You can see a bit of the smudges still on the top piece.  I picked up all the graphite on the second one and redrew in colored pencil and it stayed put.

There's watercolored and colored-penciled pieces of cut paper and then obviously image transfers.  Surprisingly I can use the same transfer paper as before - just burnish it on and then apply heat once it's down.  It's iron-on for everything else but it comes off without heat onto the wax and then smooths out nicely under the heat gun.

The triangles are graphite pencil transfers onto the top of the wax.  They burnish on nicely and then set with a little zap from the heat gun.  The top piece is 8x10" and the bottom is 8x8".

It's super fun and so far I'm pretty excited about having collages that are flat but with lots of depth.  And I'm glad to have something finished finally that I can post here!  I definitely feel like a mad scientist :)

"growing" collages

Digital collages, 6x8".

So the past few weeks have involved a lot of driving around meeting horses that are for sale. I'm desperate for a new therapist (the horse, in case that wasn't obvious).

I've found the right one, though, and she'll be arriving next week! Eeee! I'm sure I'll have lots of photos to show you when she gets here...sorry :)

Anyway, the other project this week was getting a building put up to store hay. Miss Boo was on bagged hay pellets instead of baled hay so we didn't really need much space to store them and now we need a place to keep a couple tons of hay. While the guys were here working on the shed I was working on collages since they're easier to set aside if I needed to pop outside when there's a question about something.

Incidentally, I titled them "Growing 1, 2, and 3" because it seemed appropriate for both springtime and a time when our family is growing. :)

mauve-y? lavender?

More digital collages, 9x12".

I don't know what you call that color there but I'm completely fixated on it lately :) I used to never wear purple or lavender and now all of a sudden I love it. How does that happen?

snow and moss

Digital collages, 9x9".

These are from some pictures I took over the last couple days - one set of pics of snow falling at night, taken with a flash. That's what all the spotty spots are. The other pics were the next day in the snow of some mossy trees.

I took a kitty out in the snow to look around and this is what she did when I actually set her down in the snow. Those little toes all spread out with claws extended mean she was not too sure about all this :)

collages

I scanned these little paper collages before I put them in their frames last week and forgot to post them so you could actually see what they look like :) And obviously I had the digital ones at the top finished before I printed and framed them, too. I've been fighting a cold and I'm not quite on top of things yet, I guess.

The two digital collages are 4x4" which is, let's face it, really tiny. I tried to keep them sort of simple compared to the big pieces so they wouldn't look too cluttered. Trying to keep some white space when there's only four inches to work in is kind of hard :P The purple is derived from photos I took of my hellebores which are just starting to bloom. The sort of scroll-y patterns are out of a 1920s or so copy of Pride & Prejudice. I've been re-reading (and re-watching) Jane Austen lately...very soothing, much like knitting and such to me.

new pieces

Here's what the studio table has looked like the past couple of days.

I have an opportunity to show some tiny wee little pieces in a small Seattle gallery and I only had a few things that were within the size guidelines. I put together some more oil paintings on a few panels that I already had and some little collages. I ended up having to order some frames online because I couldn't find any small enough that would let me put in a mat to keep the pieces off the glass. So I cut some really, really tiny mats - apparently I can cut a mat that's half an inch wide which I did not know before! Good to know :)

You've seen a few of these before...

...and these are new. These are 4x6" and 4x4".

Incidentally, these photos were taken during daylight hours. You'd never know it though...so gloomy today :P

new collages

More photos, more scans, more textures. The colors on these digital pieces are all derived from the photos and scans instead of picking a color that's pretty like I usually do when I'm painting. I'm making the colors more or less saturated and replacing some with other colors from the same piece but it's all there to start with.

The non-photo bits here are from a gardening book of my grandma's. She had cut out articles in the paper with gardening advice and stuck them into the book, so I've used a little of both here. I think I'm gravitating toward the gardening themes again as we get closer to spring.

more layers

Digital collages, 5x7".

Making these is a good excuse to try taking more random pictures and I'm liking my new camera. I haven't had a camera that had a manual focus option in several years so I'm taking a bunch of odd blurry and light-spot-y pictures to use as textures for these collages.

The auto-focus setting is great, too, though. It focuses so much faster than the old camera. I'm taking lots of cute kitty pictures because it will actually focus while the cat is still doing the cute thing! With my old camera, I got lots of pictures 3 seconds after the cat did something cute :P I don't think I (or anyone else) wants this to turn into a cat blog, so I'll try to restrain myself from posting all cat photos.

In believe-it-or-not news, the sun actually was out today.

layering = best in winter

I haven't really been back in the studio since Boo got sick. Something about mustering the concentration I need to work is really hard when things are weird in some way.

This last week or so I've been feeling the itch again a little. Working digitally feels like an easier way to get started again because if it isn't working I can undo what I've done or just delete the file altogether.

So this is what I've been working on the past few days. I've got a better camera now so I thought it would be interesting to incorporate photos (instead of only scans) into digital collage. I'm taking pictures of random things that I wouldn't normally bother to photograph with the idea that they document my days and function as interesting textures in the collage. You probably can't see for sure what they are but I know they're there and what I was doing when I took the photo. So it's sort of like a diary process but less literal. It's interesting to me, anyway :)

The other thing I've been thinking about is how I feel a lot differently about the creativity/crafty pieces now. I liked them before, but I seriously think knitting and sewing and doing simple, repetitive things helped me get through this tough time. And the idea that making these kinds of things might have helped my grandmothers and the women in my family to cope with difficult periods in their lives, too. I've inherited a number of crocheted and embroidered items from both sides of my family and looking at these things makes me think about what else was going on at the time they were made. I'm not sure how these ideas will be reflected differently (if at all) in the drawings I'll make but it's added a whole new layer of meaning to them for me.

I hope that all made some sense...I love reading about other blog-friends' processes and inspirations so I wanted to let you know what's going on with these.

collaging

Three little collages this week - the first two are 5x7" and the last one is 8x10". I had an idea to put some kind of texture in the background of a collage, so I did some watercolor washes with a big flat brush. It's one of my grandma's watercolor brushes so I feel like it fits with my themes even though all you can see on the paper is an abstract wash :)

It's good to use the things I inherited from her - makes me remember her but not in a sad way.

Cut and paste

A couple collages today. I printed out the pink scanned images a while back and hadn't got around to actually putting anything together. The weather has been sunny and hot until yesterday so I thought I would go in the studio for a change :)

I like mixing it up a bit and incorporating that certain vintage magazine pink. I like the blues and greens and all, but I need variety, too.