Another Project

I joined another workshop group at Artful Gathering in something completely unrelated to what I've been doing, just to keep the "little grey cells" (as Poiroit calls them) from becoming stuck in a rut. The workshop is only for 6 weeks and it's another one of those that I can take at my own pace since it is already on video. I have been working with clay, and the instructor  is well known (in the art world) for her clay work, especially in whimsical Santos. So that's what we started off with. She also has instructions for whimsical animals, but because I have not been doing very well this past week, I am not sure how many I will get done. But! On to my Granny Santos! (Warning - a lot of pictures today!)

Here's all the supplies. Doesn't it look like fun?

And first off, I found I do not have the requisite doll head (it looks like a bad Barbie imitation), so I scrounged around in my "toy box" and found the eyepatch I had when I had eye surgery. Soooo, pop off the blue rubber rim, attach a small cork for the neck and a small Styrofoam ball for the head and voila! (So, yes it pays to be a pack rat!

The clay has been added, I decided I'd add beads to the wire halo, and a filigree piece to the neck. The white beads are only on there to make indentations as it dries.

another shot of the head

Now the lampshade for the body; the instructor uses the kind that has wire "ribs" and tears the shade fabric off. I had these lampshades left over from the closing of my antique store and I could not let them go to waste, even though they have no "ribs", so mine is going to look different. Well, it already does since I decided to use beads!

Using dry floral foam to give my torso a way to top the shade. We also used a product which dries hard like plaster casting.

upside down view

So now she is on the shade! With extra girth, I might add.

She now has some hands, and some stamping in the torso and everything has been covered with gesso and then dry brushed with paint. The trim was removed from the shade.

side view

back view

Sari ribbon. The instructor uses white sari ribbon (strips made from making saris) but mine came in a bundle of color which lit my heart up because I prefer color to white!

Before the beeswax is applied

The finished Granny Santos! (my name for her)

Finished - side view

Finished - back view

So that was a new adventure and I enjoyed it very much -3D art! - it was great fun and I will probably make some more, if only to use up my supplies; but it will still be great fun! My instructor loved it!

What do you think?

Click on any photo you would like to see closer!

Come see my latest postcards I've received on Postcards Buffet!

Coming Up For Air

What a tumultuous past three weeks! On May 29, 2 days after I wrote the last blog, our precious friend, our dog Taylor, died during the night unexpectedly. She was 11, but we thought we had a few more years with her. Our other dog Abby was with her when she passed, and I think that has helped her deal with it, but we have all been grieving.

I had an appointment in Charlotte with the specialist, an appointment a couple of days later with my GP for a routine checkup and also in the same week, an appointment with the acupuncturist. It's taken me some time to recover from the trip to Charlotte, and while there, he diagnosed me with another issue to add to my long list - heart problems. However, they are being dealt with quite well with another medicine.

I have been trying to paint some more in a class I have been taking which includes a new product I am finding great fun to use, but I have not felt very much like painting till recently. More on that another day, with pictures.

I have been trying to market my art, and that has taken effort to look at the options and figure out the best direction to go. And with a tired mind, it's been slow, since I have spent a good bit of time resting.

I also started a 6 week workshop doing something completely different for me - playing with clay! I will share more with you about that in the upcoming days, again with pictures. Both this workshop and the other class are more or less up to me to schedule - the videos have all been done and I can view them and work according to my energy level.

I have also had some neat experiences with the birds in the area, especially with the Sharp Shinned Hawk, who likes to pluck birds from our feeders. He's come very close to the house, in fact in one instance he was sitting on the porch eyeing a small bird in the shrubbery, right outside the dining room window as I was eating lunch. I was able to enjoy an up close examination of him, and he (or she) is so beautiful. Thankfully he did not get the bird or that may have ruined my lunch!

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that I have not skipped out on my blog, and I will bring more details to you in the coming days!

Come see my latest postcards I've received on Postcards Buffet!

More Texture!

Today I made some reference cards for paint and texture, to refer to as I continue in this workshop. Last evening I cut small "canvases" of about 5 x 7 out of mat board, added some heavy matte gel and torn book pages to each one. I left it to dry over night. This morning I worked with a group of acrylic paint colors for each board to create my reference library. Oh, did I have fun!!

(click for details)

Rust Attack!

(click for details)

Post No Bills 

(I think it looks like implied decaying paper!)

(click for details)

What's Hiding Under The Paint?

I used a stencil in a couple of places on this one when I applied the matte medium.

This was surely great fun to do! As much as I like texture and have used it in the past, I can feel my artist engine revving up now with all of the new possibilities!! :D

Come see my latest postcards I've received on Postcards Buffet!

Birth of An Art Piece; and the Tuesday Story: Hawk Sighting

I am very brave, as I show you the beginning of a painting:

It is part of the latest workshop I'm taking called Color, Beyond the Basics and this is a monochromatic background done with acrylic paint.  I am currently adding to it so you will have to stay tuned to see the finished piece. But don't you think it's brave to show it unfinished?? :) haha

Hawk Sighting
36th in the Tuesday Story Series

One of our favorite pastimes as a family has always been camping. That means that we took a pull behind camper, as I outgrew on-the-ground sleeping a long time ago! As our daughter grew older, we often took along one or two of her friends, and they would sleep in a tent, so they could chat all night if they wanted to, and we could sleep. After one such trip with two of Tabitha's friends, we had a surprise waiting for us when we came home. 

We always brought the camper in the back yard and circled around, so we could park it right inside the gate. This time we let the kids out in the yard before we turned around, and after a few minutes I heard "Mom!! Papa!! Look at the porch!! It's all busted!". I stopped the car, and we turned to look where they were pointing and were appalled at what we saw.

Our back porch in Charleston was room size and all screened in, with a ceiling fan to keep the air moving. Now as we looked at it, screen was hanging everywhere, there was not a section of intact screen on the whole porch except at the bottom. Some of it was ripped into shreds, but all of it was hanging. 

"What in the world!?!" we thought as we stood there for a moment, and then we all moved slowly towards what was left of the porch. "What happened Mom? What happened?" the girls were all chattering at once, "We don't know!" we answered in a daze and then suddenly we saw something sort of jump about six or eight inches and we all froze. 

John and I told the girls to stay back, and we slowly walked up to the porch. There in a huddle was a red tailed hawk, staring at us as though warning us to stay away but obviously too exhausted to do anything but gives us dirty-hawk looks. At the house door, we could see our two cats sitting there, very wide eyed and not moving as they stared through the glass. I suddenly got the feeling they had been watching this hawk for some time!

We hesitated for a few minutes, because the talons of any bird of prey are formidable, whether they are injured or not, in fact it might even be worse if they are injured because they would be striking out of fear. As we stood there watching it watch us, I suddenly thought "Camera! NO! Darn, no film left!!!" which annoyed me more than the shredded screens hanging around us. Studying the scene we figured that the hawk had been chasing a bird and went straight through the screen, and then could not escape. The hanging screen prevented it from flying out but it was obvious that it had been trying for some time, hence all the torn screening.

John and I talked it over, both of us realizing that the hawk was seemingly too exhausted to even fly at us. So I went around to the front of the house and let myself in, then going to the linen closet I grabbed the largest towel I could find. I walked to the back, shooed the cats away from the porch door and carefully opened it. The hawk turned just a bit to look at me as John hushed the children who were very excited about the whole thing. I stretched the towel between my hands and slowly walked over to the hawk, dropped the towel over it and picked it up gingerly. I was able to swaddle the hawk so that it could not flair up, and as I picked it up, it offered no resistance. It didn't even struggle, the poor thing was so exhausted. I kept away from the hawk's bill, and held it up for everyone to see. It was so beautiful!! I carried it outside and put it down on the ground, and after a few minutes, it gave a tentative flap, then rose up and soared off to a nearby tree where it sat for a while.

Of course, though we had been gone for a week, the end of the camping trip was the most talked about part of the whole vacation!

Come see my latest postcards I've received on Postcards Buffet!

A Long Hiatus

But not one I have taken purposefully! I have just been too drained to do much and have been enduring a long relapse. Today, just for today, I have a bit of energy. I will be honest and say that I have been struggling with the coming of winter and the cold, colorless months. I was surprised that I would have that much of an adjustment after moving here from Charleston, but I think having this illness makes it worse. I do not miss the Charleston summers, and the Autumn hues in this area are much more brilliant, but there was color in Charleston in January, and you could get out of doors and walk and play and garden and just sit. I have promised myself that I would try to do as much art as I can, nothing serious necessarily, but anything with COLOR! And we need to paint the rooms of the house, because they are still that flat grayish white builder paint, because we had no time to repaint before my illness struck, and in the worst months of that I could not have stood having that kind of commotion going on. But I think I could handle it better now and my husband agrees and so I will be looking into having something done there.

Meanwhile, I have been finishing up part of a class I have been taking; the early lessons are to get a foundation on the colorways, and I know I have shown some of these before, but here they are again, complete this time.

(click for details)

These are what I did with the paint left over after mixing different colors to make the squares in the last picture. Now I can use them for collages and altered art!

(click for details)

Color blocks on transparencies.

(click for details)

Colors hues and shades made by blending two different colors - quite a color range from a small group of paints!

Come see my latest postcards I've received on Postcards Buffet!

Chaos and Calm

And.........here we have yet another painting, I'm not sure what to call it, so, umm, right now we'll say, "Untitled Mixed Media".  :)

(click for detail)

It's not a great photograph, but it's hard to get the colors without the glare. The colors are deeper and more vibrant than what you see. It's the culmination of a process I learned in the Chaos and Calm, Over the Edge Painting Techniques workshop. First we created chaos and then we calmed it down, by painting in the shapes we saw. Here's the chaos part:

(click for details)

And then, in the next picture, I flipped it upside down and took the final painting from those shapes. Or what I saw, anyway.

(click for details)

I had a bit of trouble doing the second part, because I didn't want to cover anything up! But once I got started, it took a life of its own.

I'm going to group the 3 paintings together and take a shot of them on the wall, and post that later.

Oh, I do love color!

Jump for Joy

Another painting for the Chaos and Calm, Over the Edge Painting Techniques workshop. I know I'm slow, but my health has been up and down lately, with more bad times than good. However, I finished it today! I was going to call it Kangaroos In The Outback, but I think I like this title better! It's on 12x12 canvas.

Jump For Joy

(click for details)

Another Painting - Study of Shapes

Having finished another lesson in the  Chaos and Calm, Over the Edge Painting Techniques workshop, I share it now with you.


We have been doing a study of shapes in what we see, rather than just the object themselves. For my inspiration, I liked the flow in the following simple illustration which came from an early Old Mother Goose book:

Mother And Children

(click for detail)

The above one was scanned, here's another view, taken outside:

(click for detail)

It shows a bit more color. Anyway, I'm pleased with it!

Asteroids in Red Space

As I have the energy, I am continuing with my art classes/workshops and I am currently still in the Chaos and Calm, Over the Edge Painting Techniques. I don't think I really knew how much fear I have about painting till I took this class. Most of my art has been mixed media, which I still love the best, but I am seeing growth with these classes.

Halfway there........

(click for details)

Asteroids in Red Space

(click for details)

It was hard to photograph, I think because of the glazing I did on it. It's done with acrylic on canvas panel and I am pleased with how it turned out, for a novice like me!

Not what I wanted

A few days ago, I posted some painted canvases at their beginning stages. I worked on one and it morphed into something I now classify as a "lessons" painting.

 (click for detail)

Before painting with blue tape masking areas

Cosmic Blossom

 (click for detail)

After

I'm not that thrilled over the transformation, but I learned a lot and see it as teaching me several valuable lessons about what works, how it works and why. It's a bit overcrowded and some of the red in the upper left corner needs to be on the right somewhere to balance it.  But I'm OK with that and look forward to growing with the next painting.