Grounded in Springtime initial composition finally done

I've been reworking how I work in my studio to accommodate my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the damage to my left eye's retina over the last few months and I finally got my new dancer piece to the stage where I can share a picture.  Yippee!

This is a big milestone which also marks several accomplishments in creating a new workflow and learning new tools.  And I'm sure I'll talk more about that later but for now, I'm just going to enjoy the visuals.  Here's the foreground composition.

This is a new thing for me, doing a piece on a plain white background.  Because when I was an art quilter, I'd piece the background first and then create the foreground on top of it.  Now, I'm doing it on white paper with the intent to try out various backgrounds in Photoshop before I glue everything down and finish the final piece.    This will not be the final dancer as I'm not liking the blue spirals on the yellow body.  I think they should be green for that whole green spring effect I'm aiming for.  This also means the spiral galaxy on the right needs to be lighter so there's more tonal contrast with the dancer.  And I'm going to do some variations along these lines along with using marbled fabric for that circle on the right. 

Here's some of the background fabrics I'm thinking of using.  It will be interesting to see how they work with the final foreground I develop over the next week.

Spiral galaxies

My theme for the dancer series work is "Dancing Through Space & Time" so I'm using astronomical images in a variety of ways.  I'm looking forward to playing with this one as a background, maybe with some color shifting.  

starry night sendoff

This one has lots of color and will give me a less structured background while still having the feel I'd like to achieve.  Also color shifting in the future for this one too altho it's likely to go a different direction.

More pictures will be shared as I finally get some new stuff produced. 

Female fiber artist who influenced me: Robbi Eklow

It's March again and that means women's history month.  I'm solidly in the fiber art field now, growing from the art quilt field, so I'm focusing on artists who have influenced me.  This year, I'm picking Robbi Eklow, in part because I'm starting my own Bellingham School of Digital Collage (with a nod of acknowledgement to the Chicago School of Fusing) and in part because she's been posting on FB about her latest major life transition and I can definitely relate to that magnitude of change.

So, who is Robbi?  Her webpage gives this succinct bio.  "Robbi Joy Eklow has an Engineering degree from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In college she married her husband Brian, they have two children. Robbi lectures and teaches internationally, and has shown quilts and won ribbons in major quilt shows across the United States. She wrote a bi-monthly column "Goddess of the Last Minute" for Quilting Arts Magazine. She has designed quilts and written articles for many quilting publications and written two books about quilting."  See her quilt gallery here.

Her column in Quilting Arts magazine helped me free myself from all the rules of the quilt police.   The quilting shows originally started out of state fairs and the judging of quilts was primarily based on technique and how well that technique stuck to the traditions of the field.  Robbi's writing was a wonderful breath of humor and she introduced me to the concept of fusibles.  Since I now do collage rather than piecing, it's clear that fusibles opened a doorway for me to a brand new world.

On of her earlier quilts showed how to use the fusing with hand dyed fabric with her signature repetition of shape within the quilt (The picture above is a newer version of that).  I was still doing traditional pieced quilts when her work (among others) inspired me to step outside traditional patterns, cut those shapes however I wanted and fuse away.  I'm still doing that now, a couple of decades later, but mixing in paper and paint too. 

resin experiment #2

Despite a horrible sinus/ear infection, I got some resin testing done this week.  I made up a board with different fabrics and used 3 different sprays I had on hand to see if any of them worked to block the darkening that happened with the first trial.  Here's the before fabric board.

I have a UV protective spray, a non VOC fixative (milk based), and fabric stiffening spray.  I left one column with no protection so I could see the difference.  I also glued the fabric down thoroughly using the purple Elmer's acid free glue sticks.    Then I used packing tape around the edges to stop the dripping that happened with the first board use.

Here's the results with some of the original fabric next to the board to show the darkening that happened.

The sprays don't seem to have made any difference but the darkening only happened with the darker fabrics.  I'm not sure what caused this completely different result altho I suspect just the glue itself helped lessen the darkening since I was very thorough about gluing the fabric down.  The lighter and medium fabrics didn't darken much if any so I'm going to work with a lighter palette for now and do some further experimentation.  

The bonus I got from this experiment is I discovered the fabric stiffening spray is reported as being very effective for use with the Scan N Cut.  I'll be testing that out myself later this week.  And I learned how to use my little torch to get rid of bubbles in the resin. Oh, and the packing tape was an epic fail.  It contained the dripping to one big spot but bulged out so it was still off the board.   All in all, a good bit of progress in understanding my new material.

New birding board game has me so excited!!!!!!!

I'm on a couple of FB birding lists and I got completely inundated with news about a new board game, Wingspan.  It also got covered by the NYT so no surprise to find out it's already out of stock.  I'm signed up to get notified when they get more printed since there's no way I'm paying triple the price to buy one right now.    But isn't this just the coolest birdy thing ever?

The pic is from the publisher's website as is this description of the game. 

"You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats (actions). These habitats focus on several key aspects of growth:

Gain food tokens via custom dice in a birdfeeder dice tower
Lay eggs using egg miniatures in a variety of colors
Draw from hundreds of unique bird cards and play them
The winner is the player with the most points after 4 rounds.

If you enjoy Terraforming Mars and Gizmos, we think this game will take flight at your table."

Besides my natural excitement at something that is so forthrightly birdy, the reviews are good on the game & the mechanics so I'm really looking forward to this.  I know what I'm getting myself for an early birthday present!

Resin experiments begin

As I continue my studio experimentation, I turned to resin for sealing prints and as a possible top coat for fabric collage.  I also have seen some interesting marbling done with resin so that was also on my list.  So, I created 3 pieces to try out with a resin top:  a small dancer collage that I had in my to be finished up drawer, a piece with a photo of Audubon's Great Blue Heron with some various tested fabrics, and a board covered with gold ground that I would marble on.  Various searches on the internet told me that fabric may or may not darken when resin is poured on top and one way to test is to dip the fabric in water.  If it doesn't darken, the resin shouldn't darken it either.  So I tested a variety of green fabrics and put scraps of them on the piece with the photo.

The results were informative.  All of the fabric darkened.  I suspect this is because I prewash my fabrics so I removed the sizing that is on them when they are bought.  Clearly, first thing to test in the next batch of tests is whether a sealant on the fabric will keep them from darkening.  Here's the fabric collage piece, 6" square, and it's almost impossible to see the color of the L shaped cloud piece the dancer is on.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the entire piece before putting the resin on but I do have photos of the background fabric and the dancer element separately so you can see how much darkening has occurred.

As is obvious, the background fabric is seriously darker and greener which totally ruins the look of the piece.  And then there's the dancer element which loses all the subtle color variations.  Totally unhappy artist with this piece.

The heron photo with the green fabric scraps did somewhat better.  The photo and the marbled fabric along the bottom retained their colors and clarity.  So big win on using the resin for photos and a more work required result for the marbled fabric.  It's not obvious in the photo but the fabric scraps and the marbled fabric on this one floated up a bit in the resin and some stick out the top.  This can be dealt with by better glueing them down to begin with or by putting a second coat of resin on top.

        The green fabric scraps scattered around all passed the water test but darkened considerably so definitely a sealant test on fabric in my future.

And then the most successful of the 3 initial tests:  marbling on a board.  The colors worked well, the resin lost a tiny bit of marbling detail over time and except for the massive dripping off the bottom right corner, things were generally better than I expected.  I'll be doing much more of this type of thing in the future along with a couple of tests of taping the edges to stop the dripping off the sides.

I'm looking forward to working with the resin and I am absolutely happy with it as an alternative to acrylics for a topcoat on prints.  We'll see with the next round of experiments how many other places I can use it in my studio.