Staying with a series

Given my time and energy limitations, I'm experimenting with sticking with a series.  This has been an interesting challenge but once I made it clear to my brain that we were doing snails, nothing but snails, and all other ideas were not going to be acted on, I started getting tons of ideas about snails.  (I used to have 2-3 different projects going at once so I could switch between them when I needed to think about something on one.)  So now, I have 2 snails going at once.

The first pair used the painted snail on watercolor paper with a marbled background.  I found two different ways to use the background and one of those used the onpoint orientation that I like a lot.

Snail #1: Persist!  started with an idea based on a photo I took of a yellow snail crawling across tiny gray gravel.  I mentally added big grass stalks behind the snail and started to do that idea.  During the process, I remembered I wanted to use marbling so I pulled a marbled fabric for the background and then put stone fabric against it.  No way.  Not a good visual.  So I dropped the stones for later and went with the marbling.

Snail #2: Go With the Flow continued the use of the marbling with the hand painted snail.  I liked the change in the flow of the background.

With the next pair, I went back to the grass & gravel idea.  Snail #3: Journey of a 1000 Slithers (title still in flux since snails don't actually step) got the gravel added back in but while I was selecting the background fabric, I was captivated by one of the spiral pieces I've got in my stash.  So no grass yet.  That's coming in #4.

I'm learning things with each piece and getting more and more ideas so right now I have at least 4 snails jockeying for position to be piece #5.    Right now, I'm feeling good about the whole process.  My energy is up, I'm finishing pieces fairly quickly and the ideas are surging.  I am in the zone!

visual decision making using a phone camera

I've been making slow progress on the snail series due to life throwing some troublesome things my way but I finally finished up the first two snails this week.

I started with a memory of a picture I took of a small yellow snail on the greenbelt gravel.  The color contrast was amazing and the tiny snail was crawling over relatively huge rocks but still making noticeable progress over the length of my daily walk.  But I also wanted to bring in some color using my marbled fabrics so I finished painting the first snail, picked out a good color of fabric and laid it all out with some stone-like fabric as the path.  And wow, the stones just didn't go with all the swirls so I ended up just using the marbled fabric.

So snail #1 is done.  Unfortunately, it's an odd size since I trimmed the background piece assuming there would be rocks on the bottom so it's 6 3/8" tall and 10.25 wide.  This will require some effort to frame it, if I decide to do that before posting it on etsy.

Thinking about the framing problem reminded me to make these design decisions before cutting.  (Plan twice, cut once.)  So for snail #2, I cut the background in a square after trying out the second, slightly darker snail against the background.  But which way to put the square? 

This is where the phone camera came in very useful.  I grabbed my phone and snapped shots of the snail against the 4 possible rotations of the background and then was able to look at them side by side.  This is much better than trying to visually remember the different orientations.  I tossed 2 out immediately and was left with these 2 possible layouts.

Final choice

The runner up orientation is below but sideways.  I apparently rotated the phone while taking the shot. 

As my year of experimentation continues, it's interesting to see how many ways I can simplify things with the right tool.  Now all I need to do is add the resin topcoat to #2 and post them to etsy. 

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. 

Developing new dancer piece

We had a lovely vacation in Canada the week before Thanksgiving and then went to our daughter's house for a small Thanksgiving dinner and amidst all of that, I have neglected the blogging.  Part of that is feeling like I didn't really have anything concrete to write about.  Vacation was a very relaxing time with lots of short walks along the bay and talk about books we're reading but I left my camera battery plugged in at home so my usual vacation blog about birds would have had no photos.  Altho I did take some interesting textural ones with my phone but talk about those will probably happen when I actually do something with them.

And Thanksgiving week was all about recovering from vacation and downtime with the family.  No big events there either.

So I almost did a book report this week.  Fortunately for all of you, I did start work on a new dancer piece using my new poseable figurine to give me some shots to work from.  I actually posed her on vacation and was very happy with how easy it was to photograph her with my phone.  That was the whole point of getting the gray rather than the flesh tone figure since it would give me an almost black & white silhouette to start with.

Once I got home and had uploaded my camera photos via Dropbox, I popped the picture into Photoshop for cropping and color shifting a bit.  Then printed it out and did a tracing with my trusty brush tip marker giving me this nice silhouette.

But wait, there's more.  This gives me the first silkscreen I need so I can lay down the background color for the dancer.  Next, I need the dancer silhouette with the body art so I pulled out some of my spiral screens & stencils and played around and got this. 

Unlike my earlier dancers, I stopped the tattoos below the arms.  When I tried them on paper in b&w I really didn't like the loss of detail for the face and arms so I went with this look.  Now, I've printed this out in multiple sizes and am ready to make my silkscreens to try out my new composition.  I should have some colored versions on paper by next week.  I am really happy at how quickly this process went as this makes it much easier to do composition changes and variations. And that means I get to focus my time & energy on the color play which is my fun place. 

Robinson Crusoe Island, or where the firecrown lives

I've decided to pursue the endangered hummingbirds as my first art work for my new studio.  I'm going to start with a classic hummingbird at a flower design.  Obviously, first step is to research the flowers found on the Juan Fernandez islands.  Since I have never been to the Juan Fernandez islands and have no photos of my own, I am forced to rely on using photos from the web as references.

A little research told me that Robinson Crusoe Island is one of the islands in the cluster and that led me to a wonderful webpage,  https://www.cascada.travel/en/News/Robinson-Crusoe-Island-Wildlife-Guide.

This page has all kinds of info about the islands such as it being a National Park since 1935.  Here is where I found the name of 2 of the flowers that the Firecrown uses for food.  The Cabbage Tree (dendroseris litoralis) has large yellow flowers which will go perfectly with the teal & cobalt colors of the female Firecrown.  The first photo shows the foliage well and the drape of the flowers.

From http://www.strangewonderfulthings.com/

And here's a closeup of the flower from the same webpage.

This will be a fun flower to do because of the long skinny petals which will fit perfectly with some traditional methods of piecing.

The other flowering bush that feeds the Firecrown is the Juan Bueno (rhaphithamnus venustus) tree.  It is at a much higher altitude, and has much smaller leaves than the cabbage tree which will give me some variety in the textures of the foliage which I plan to use for the background.

I've picked these 2 flowers because the colors set off the 2 colors of the Firecrown hummingbirds.  Complementary colors cause the feel of the piece to be more energetic rather than soothing and this is exactly what I want for the feisty hummingbirds.  Next step, doing the design sketches so I know what poses I like for the hummers and what the overall composition will be.

Laughing Dragon: make it work!

This week I had too many projects going at once so I took some time to finish off the filing and slowed down a bit on the dragon.  Today I tried out some ideas for what I'm now calling the Laughing Dragon.  I wanted to add some color to the spirals being breathed out by the dragon and the earlier one with a color wash just was not at all what I had in mind.  Wanting to keep it airy and leave lots of the open space in the spirals, I tried out some color bubbles.  Nope.  So, time to leave it alone.  Next one I show here will be a finished piece instead of an experiment or a dead end.

Laughing dragon with color bubbles

On to the sewing phase of the projects.  And that means picking fabric for the back of the pillows.  Looking in my drawer of larger pieces, I didn't see the sorts of batik with spirals I wanted and thought I had.  Oops.  Must be in the sole remaining bag of fabric left to put away, I thought.  And yes, I was right.  So the rest of the studio time for the weekend will be in selecting fabric and putting away the last of the fabric clutter.

The last fabric to put away

Somewhere in this pile of fabric is some nice batik spirals in the right shades of blue and orange.  And fondling my fabric is always fun.  By the end of this next week, I plan to have 2 dragon pillows and at least one laughing dragon fabric collage finished.  

3 different color variations for dragons

On Monday, I painted.  I did 4 different dragons with 3 different color combinations.  I painted the first 3 on paper:  the red & blue combos that I want to do for gifts (and need to finish this week, eep!) and a purple/teal/silver combo for a FB friend who did one of those quizzes that said her fantasy creature was a dragon.  I asked what color of a dragon would she be and voila! got my third color combo to try.

Lesley's dragon

I'll probably do this one again with a bluer and lighter purple for the body.  This is just too much like grape juice for me.  The silver is actually a metallic paint which really doesn't photograph well.

Here are the two paper versions of the red & blue combos. The reddish one came out fine.  Not so for the blue one.  The blue one was done with transparent paint on the body and front of the wing and opaque teal for the feathery edge in the middle of the wing.  I messed up the color on the right wing, and wanted to try my transparent teal instead of the opaque one to increase the contrast.  

So next I did the blue one again on fabric.  Here's both of them in one shot to show the differences.

fabric one at top of photo

I like the changes in the paint colors on the fabric one but ended up overworking it by trying to fix some unevenness in the body with a water wash after I finished painting.  Let this be a lesson in the dangers of overworking...  I will probably attempt to save it by adding paler blue sky background and see if I can blend the bleeding into that.

Good colors but bleeding resulted from overworking

Overall I'm liking the results and enjoying the process.  The artistic sweet spot would be totally achieved except I started having back spasms this morning.  More painting will have to wait until tomorrow when I will use my posture alert tool to see if I can keep from stressing my back.

October Fiber Art show in Redmond

I'm pleased to be one of the featured artists with this show and regret that I will be unable to attend the opening reception but I hope you will if you are in the neighborhood.   I will be at the Oct 11 meet the artist event so if you have questions about how I do what I do,  come and chat.

Making Artistic Lemonade

Here in the Seattle area, we had a torrential rain last week.  Normally our rain is a soft misty thing but this was a gully washer.  (Yes, I lived in Austin, Texas for several years and I know what I'm talking about here.)  One result of this rain was a leak in the roof over my home studio last Thursday night.  This has meant basically shutting down my wet studio where I do marbling and dye painting.  Since I had decided to spend this month creating fabric to use in making a new series, I was at first hugely disappointed and dismayed.

Then, my glass half-full self came roaring back and I decided to make lemonade, artistically speaking.  I have just finished the piece below titled "Keep Swimming" and doesn't that just seem fitting somehow.

So, instead of making the fabric to work on my big piece idea right now, I am shifting my to-do list around a bit, and going with the fishes.

This piece brought some serious stitching back into my work.  My Dancer series was mostly collage with little stitching.  This piece has satin stitched lines around the different sections of fabric on the fish and some light stitching on the kelp.  I find I'm enjoying working this way again.  Since my big piece idea also includes some fish, well that's what I'll be working on next.  To totally mangle the cliche, I'm making fish lemonade!

Marbling magic continues

Having survived back surgery and the resulting months of recovery, I started marbling on silk scarves in the last month.  I am really excited about the marbling.  It took a period of experimentation to work out the right combination of marbling surface, paints and fabric process and I now feel like it has all fallen into place.

Here's a shot of my latest batch of marbled scarves, which are now at my newest shop, the Gift Shop at the Columbia City Gallery in Seattle.  And of course, some are also available at The Gallery at Town Center in Lake Forest Park where I have been selling my work for almost 2 years now.

I used the same palette of paints for all of the scarves which gave me a useful guide to my transparent paints.  I particularly liked the results on the light yellow scarf and have put a closeup view of it below. I used 4 different shades of blue and one opaque yellow.  The yellow is the stronger yellow swirl in the lower left corner.

I've ordered some opaque fabric paints and will be experimenting with them in the near future.  And I am still searching for a red that won't fade to pink or fuchsia when it spreads on top of the marbling surface.   

Spirals and surface texture

I am really excited about my newest work which grew out of an exercise to try out some variegated thread in a different way.  This is now turning into a whole new series where I explore spirals and surface texture and do a lot of work with my sewing machine.  I had to stop using my machine for most of the last year due to back problems but those have been resolved enough that I am now stitching away again.  And, WOW!, is it fun.

Here's the first of the small samples I did.  I liked the layering of the batik with the sheer with the stitched spiral quite a lot and have done several more of these which should show up on my webpage over the weekend.  This piece is 6 inches square so the spiral stitched part is about 4 inches.  A lot going on for such a small space, eh?

The little spirals came out of trying out samples of stitching for this larger piece which is 14 inches square.  I handcarved the yin-yang stamp and printed it on a piece of hand dyed organza.  Then added the stitching to emphasize the texture.  This piece will probably be framed with a mahogany wood frame which will pick up some of the darker tones in the smallest spirals.  It too was an experiment in simplifying my focus and working with one element in differing ways.  

With both of these pieces, I had a lot of fun varying the width of the stitch to change the color of the variegated threads.  Not to mention the joy of painting with thread again....  I am excited about the work and really happy to be hitting that sweet spot where I'm full of joy and playing in the studio.  

Fun with Sumi, taught by Karen Dedrickson

Two weeks ago, I participated in Karen Dedrickson's dress rehearsal of her new class in exploring contemporary sumi painting.  I adore her birds, (see them here), and we are good friends, so I was thrilled to help her out and get to play with her techniques all at the same time.  We had a blast and I learned some things that I think will transfer well to dye painting on fabric.  Sumi painting is traditionally done with just black ink on rice paper and a particular style of brush.  These technical limitations mean that it's easy to focus on subtle variations in flow, brush use and shading with the ink by diluting it.

In keeping with that type of limitation, we used one of her owls as a starting point for our exercises and did 6 quick pieces varying one major thing per piece.  I was really pleased with the class and here are some of the owls I did.  (My daughter has already asked for one for her bird art wall.  What a compliment!)  Along with some comments about what I learned from doing them.

Here's the first bird.  My brush was loaded with lots of undiluted ink, so there's that really dark first stroke.  That led to my going with some darker imagery with the head/eyes.  Not one of my favorites but others like it best.  (Taste varies.  Really.)

This was the third of six.  I was trying out dry brush strokes with this one so it seems more energetic and almost frenzied to me.  Still going all the way to the edges which doesn't work so well when framing something.  (Karen has figured out how to help students with this earlier in the class.  Go, Karen!)
I like the feet on this one.

And my personal fave, the Buddha Belly Owl.    I went much smaller and was trying out prewetting the paper with dirty water.  Then adding more ink using dots over the earlier ones.  I'm not sure why the paper has wrinkled so much but that does add some interesting highlights to the belly area.

All in all, it was a great class.  Karen is knowledgeable and articulate and did a stunning job explaining things one on one with all the different people in the class.  I learned more about how hard it is to do the work she does and I learned some techniques I will be playing with on fabric.  In color, of course, since that's what I do but I can see new ways to approach my own work and that's a big thing to take home from a class.

New accessories go to a new store

Having gotten tired of deciding whether to keep tryout samples and where to put them, I've been using scarves and pillows as ways to try out new dyes and new screens.   When I heard the question "Where are you selling these?" from a friend for the third time, I realized they were right.  So, this last week, I dropped off several different silk scarves in coral, teal and a lovely silvery gray at The Gallery at Town Center in Lake Forest Park, a part of north Seattle.

Here's the coral scarf, screened with a design of cascading laceleaf maple leaves.  I *adore* this leaf for some reason and it's a very popular landscaping tree here in the Seattle area so I've been thinking of using it in my art for years.  I'm really glad to finally have done something with it.  I started out trying to work it into an artquilt but never quite got that going.  Now, of course, having put it on some samples and played with it, the art ideas are flourishing.  This only confirms that doing these accessories is a really productive way to try out some of my design ideas.

The art ideas will probably use this color combination below, the silvery gray with burgundy leaves.  To me, that's classic Seattle fall colors.  All the Japanese maples that turn that lovely color just stand out as the cloud cover comes in and starts us toward our winter grayness.  This particular scarf will probably not be repeated as the dots were an accident.  I was screening too fast on the leaves and the thickened dye mix splattered onto the scarf.  Oops.  Okay, we're going with dots!  So, I added more.  Of course, two people have said they love it so I may be speaking too soon to say I won't do it again.  There was a certain wonderful playfulness in making all the dots since I did it very quickly and without analyzing where they should go.  Just started dabbing away and I like the result even if it's nowhere near the subtle dramatic effect I was going for.

The teal scarf below was done using a discharge agent rather than a thickened dye.  It went almost completely white which is somewhat starker than I was wanting but really creates a dramatic contrast with the lovely teal.  I will be using this teal again, and I'll be experimenting with different methods of creating the leaves.

I'll also be putting future scarves, and the accent pillows I'll be doing later this month, on my newly reopened etsy store, LizCopeland.etsy.com.  I wasn't expecting the store manager to take all of the scarves I'd done so far but apparently silk scarves, especially in the $45-65 price range, sell quickly and she was very glad to have them.  I'm glad I've found a way to try out new dyes and screens without drowning my studio in samples!  

Summer art shows: Lessons learned

Well, my first summer art show season is now over and I learned a lot.  The first thing is that I need smaller pieces so there's more price choices for people.  So, I've spent most of this last month working out how to do some of my pieces in a smaller size.  Here's a shot of some of what I've come up with.

The larger piece, Springtime Spirals,  is 12x12 and is a fabric collage in a floating frame.  The two smaller pieces to the sides are 8x8 collages mounted on gallery wrapped canvas.  I haven't put them on my webpage yet, that will happen over the weekend, and my working title is some variation of Dance Like Nobody's Watching.    The 2 pieces at the top are 4x6 and unmounted as yet and I'm not sure whether they'll be framed or mounted on the canvas.  The protective coating on the canvases means that the hand-dyed silks I use lose their shimmer and the two smallest pieces are both silks so I may end up framing them.  I'm also adding some wearables to my work.  Those are hand-dyed silk scarves at the lower left of the picture.  I'm using some of the same images on the scarves that I use in my collages so the two lines are related, yet each stands alone.

My other big lesson is my own personal limits for multiple day shows.  I just don't have the physical stamina to do a 4 day show and be at the show, interacting with people, everyday.  So, next year, I'll focus on shows that are 1 or 2 days in duration.  Or work out sharing the schedule with another artist for the longer shows.

While I didn't sell as much as I had hoped, I learned much, gave out many of my business cards and got great feedback on my work.  All in all, a very good start at doing art fairs.

Discharge experiment grows up & New Gallery for Liz

It's been a very busy couple of weeks, what with two shows opening and applying to and being accepted into Gallery North in Edmonds, Washington.  It's a lovely co-op gallery and I look forward to working with this group of artists and learning much about running a gallery.  More news as it happens!


One of the pieces in the EDGE show started as the discharge experiment I did a couple of weeks ago and posted about here.  The final piece is part of my Dancers series, and is pictured below.

The title is "To Infinity and Beyond" and I am really happy with it.  Several techniques that I've been playing with all came together and now I have a process that has no tiresome phases in it.  I go from one fun way to work with the fabric to another.  Oh, okay, cutting out the little dancers with my teeny tiny scissors is time consuming and too much at once could be tiresome, but other than that, it's a fairly joyful way to make lovely pictures.  I'm looking forward to doing more in this series in the next few weeks, maybe even months.  The ideas are flowing and my energy is up.  Good times ahead!

This year's shows

I picked up my piece, The Big Bang: A Bird's Eye View, from the Connecting Threads Exhibit in Seattle this last Friday and realized that I had neglected to mention that show and my current solo show on my blog. (Bad Artist! No cookie!) The Connecting Threads show was for the graduates of the Fiber Arts Certificate program at UW and we had 55 artists participating. I think I didn't mention it because I was physically unable to do all the stitching that I wanted to on the piece and I was therefore unhappy with it. Having it come home after almost 3 months has given me a different perspective. So here it is.


I feel it still needs some work to highlight the splitting/openings in the background but I'm not sure exactly how I'll be doing that. We shall see...

My current show is at the Northlake Unitarian Universalist Church in Kirkland, WA. The gallery is in the sanctuary so my work can be seen when the sanctuary is open for functions and during church office hours (Mon-Fri, 9:30 - 1:30pm). I learned a lot about picking work for a show and hanging my pieces so this has already been a fabulous experience. I hope to have an artist reception sometime before the show comes down in early November.

canvas mounting small collage, or what to do if I can't sew

The herniated disk is taking more time and therapy to heal, altho the shot in the spine helped a whole lot, so I still can't sew. Who knew that sewing was such a physically demanding thing to do? So, instead, I've been playing with paints and working on redoing my website. Putting some of the collages I did during my Fiber Arts class onto canvas lets me do both of these things at once. I'm having fun playing with the paints, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how well my color mixing skills have transferred from dyes to paints. So, here's some pictures of what I've been doing.

First, here's the collage I started with. I started with my favorite one. Normally, that would be a decision that would cause me problems since I'd not want to mess it up. However, since I didn't actually do anything to the paper collage until the last step of mounting it on the canvas, I decided to be brave and do the one I wanted done the most rather than one I was willing to lose if I messed up because it was the first time.


I did 2 canvases. The first one, I used the green, gold and purple from the collage, and I put a lot of movement into the colors. My daughter pointed out that there was so much movement going on in the collage itself that maybe it would show better with a calmer background. Once I put the collage on the canvas to see what I thought, I agreed with her.


So the second canvas was much calmer, and pretty much just the gold with some metallic highlights to pick up the metallic flecks in some of the papers. I think this is more successful and I went ahead and attached it to the canvas using gel medium. The picture is before the collage was trimmed and attached so it's an approximation altho a good one.


This is actually a mixed media painting at this point as there's no fabric on it anywhere and it's a canvas with paint and other stuff on it. A departure from my usual work, but really just a change in medium. The techniques I'm using can be transferred to working with fabric as this is also a good way to show a small fabric piece and sneak it into an art show rather than a quilt show. And I'm feeling really good about still getting work done while I deal with the medical issues. So, life is good in my house right now!

UW Fiber Arts program - final piece, and some thoughts

Our show (by-hand.org) opened last week at the UW Towers, and I missed the opening because of continuing knee and back issues. While I am saddened at missing the party, I did enjoy the pictures posted on facebook by some of the other class members. I'm also looking forward to going to see the exhibit during the month of June sometime, as soon as my back and knee will allow. This is even more important as I didn't get a final picture taken of my piece and need to go take a picture, if only so I can add it to the webpage. Here's a shot of the piece in progress. James, my son, is holding it up, so it's a terribly traditional quilt picture complete with fingers at the edges and lots of background clutter.



I forgot to load my piece into the car when taking off for class, so Jeff and James did a quick photo and emailed it so I could present my piece that day. We were all showing our pieces so we collectively knew enough to answer questions and talk knowledgeably at the opening.

And now it's time for the big sigh of relief and accomplishment, and taking inventory of what I've learned. This was a fabulous class. I learned so much it's difficult to list it all. Most importantly, I learned to take myself seriously. I learned how to think about my art, the materials I use, and how to think about creating a piece to maximize its effectiveness. I'll be processing these lessons for quite some time to come but I look forward to my progress as I now feel confident I can deal with issues as they arise rather than feeling overwhelmed. It's a wonderful, exhilarating change that's coming and next up on my to-do list is redoing my webpage to reflect the changes I've already internalized. I'll keep blogging about this whole process as one of the things I've learned is how much I, and others, need the community of other artists to learn from. So, in a way, this blog is a way of paying it forward.

50 Collages, lessons learned

Class on Tuesday was very interesting. Few of the others in the class did all 50 of the collages, so I felt pretty good about my having "only" done 30. The other interesting thing I noticed is that my 50 were not as tightly related as most of the others. My theme, spiritual journey, is kind of a large one and I did a couple of different sub-themes. I also didn't have a particular palette. Obviously, my word for 201o (Focus) comes into play here too.

So, for the next class assignment, I've narrowed my theme significantly. For now, it's hummingbirds, but while I like the sketches I've done, I'm wanting the spiritual aspect to be there too, so I'm going to have to think about how to bring that back in. And I sorted through my fabric stash in my studio. I'm moving some of it downstairs, as it's not the right visual texture for my current work. If it's not in the studio, I won't be tempted to use it, and can more easily develop my own palette.

Our next assignment is to do a diptych on the theme as we're developing it. I've picked the phrase "Joy & Comport" as a working title. I wanted a vague background, impressionistic in style, so I did my preliminary sketches (size 9"x12") using watercolor pencils and then did some experimenting with adding a wash to blend them. I like the effect, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with the pencils on fabric in the future. For now, I'm working with the hand-dyed silk I have on hand, except for the piece I need for the sky which I will be painting today.

The class assignment is for at least 14" on each side in size. I've set myself a personal goal of producing 6 sq. ft. of art per week. So, in line with that goal, my fabric version of the sketches will each be 18"x24". We'll see if I can actually finish them in a week. I'll just keep telling myself my new mantras: Focus, Use what you have, experiment. ( These are the things I've gotten from the class so far.)

At the very least, I should have the fabric tops done by class but I really believe I stand a good chance of having the complete pieces, or at least 75% of them, finished by next Tuesday. Whatever happens, it will be a grand experiment!

50 Collages, day 4

I took Sunday off, how traditional. I was back to work on the collages yesterday, and got 7 done. I also had a couple of epiphanies about my work process, and I'm mulling over how to change things. I'll be talking about the changes when they're done, I expect. I find I have a hard time doing more than 5 - 7 collages in a day, given the restriction on each of them being different. When I did fabric postcards for an exchange, I did small collage like things, but did variations on a theme in sets of 5. That I could do really fast! This has been a very fruitful and productive assignment, in both work produced and insights achieved. I'll be talking about what I learned tomorrow when I wrap up with things I produce today.

Yesterday's work yielded these 2 among others.

Number 24 came about because I was reflecting on how literal I can be in my thinking. Then I looked down at my work table, saw the remaining pile of dancer figures already cut out, and the image just popped into my head. This one was almost instantaneous which was a nice break from the slogging I felt I'd been doing all afternoon. I was good until the fifth one for the day, then I started slowing down, overthinking, and generally having to push to keep going.



This one, #25, is the visual sketch for a piece I'm doing for an online challenge. I wanted to try out the TAP paper (Transfer Artist Paper) which worked great on transferring the hummingbird images from my computer to the fabric background. I also wanted to try the composition which has been sitting in my head for a bit. I find I really like doing the visual sketch. I had tried doing a pencil sketch, but I need the color and the texture that comes from the fabrics I use to really evaluate the idea. The word theme for the challenge is Comfort.




In addition, I want to share #14 which was the one I used ExtravOrganza on for the first time. Given that I'm sharing the experiment with TAP, I thought I'd include my other experiment.
I like the transparency of the globe that I printed using Extravorganza and I expect I'll be using it in the future, unless I actually get around to the image transfer experimentation I have on my want-to-try list.