painting of champions

Cereal is the perfect food.  I will gladly eat it any time of day or night.  (For those of you keeping score at home, this is the 3rd of the 29 exciting things you need to know about me.) As a kid there was no greater treat than being allowed to have cereal for dinner. A friend recently told me how guilty she felt when she was so tired one night she couldn't cook and gave her kids cereal.  Are you kidding me?  I assured her she was not a deadbeat, and in fact was the BEST MOM EVER.

I'm equal opportunity when it comes to my cereal.  I equally enjoy a bowl of high-fiber twigs-and-sticks type cereal and those technicolor sugar bombs disguised as food.  When my son was small and I was obsessing over the nutritional quality of every morsel of food that passed his lips, I would wait until he went to bed to take the junk cereal out of hiding.  Now that my mother-of-the-year award has been revoked, we bond over which box has the most marshmallows and which makes the milk turn colors.

My idea of heaven is not unlike my college dining hall - a dozen kinds of cereal lined up in giant plastic dispensers and permission to eat as much as you like.  *sigh*

One of the many good things about going through boxes of cereal the way some people go through glasses of water is that we always have empty cereal boxes in the recycling.  And if cereal is the perfect food, then cereal boxes are the perfect substrate.  They've been essential to my recent postcard making spree.  Last week, as I was cutting the little flappy parts off the front and back of the box, I decided to put them to use as collage elements.

So here's how my painting started: 

(oh thank god she's going to get to the point at last!)

After half a jar of gel medium and a few days pressed under a stack of heavy books, I was ready to slather it in gesso and get started.  I painted it a bright yellow green and rubbed dark oil pastels around all the edges:

Then I brayered on another few layers of gesso:

And then I stopped taking pictures.  

I do that all the time - I get so excited about what I'm working on that I forget my good intentions of documenting the steps along the way.

You'll have to take my word for it when I tell you I added a bazillion more layers of paint, and some big loopy black handwriting and some more paint and some more oil pastels and at some point covered the whole thing in tissue paper and painted all over that and tried some stenciling and hated it and covered THAT with more paint. 

I finally liked the look of the background, so I added some hand-dyed paper and a few charts printed on tissue paper and rubbed the surface with some pan pastels.

Here's where I ended up:

I was kind of liking it until I scanned it and saw it on my computer screen and then I hated it. Does that ever happen to you?  When I looked at this digitally, I didn't like that all that black and was especially peeved that the graphics weren't straight.  I'm usually pretty slap-dash, good-enough when it comes to life in general, but I couldn't get over this crooked bit.  I decided to cover that whole middle part with gesso with the intention of printing a new copy of the chart and putting it on straight this time.  As I was adding layers of paint on top of the gesso, the tissue paper underneath started to bubble up.  I though about stopping and letting it dry, but instead I tried to peel it up.   I figured I'd just add more gesso and more paint, but I ended up really liking the effect of the peeled area and leaving it alone.

so HERE is my very very layered cereal box painting which I gleefully link to the Butterfly Effect (whose theme this week was making layers) and to Paint Party Friday because it's been a long long time since I visited that talented group.

Thing #2

I know the words to a lot of songs.

A LOT of songs.

Regardless of whether I learned the words 40 years ago or 40 minutes ago.

I don’t even have to like the song.

I can’t help it.

Sometimes it’s a good thing.  When you know a lot of songs you can pretty much always find something to sing along to, and we all know how much I like to sing.

But then I think of all the things I’ve forgotten, while still being able to sing all the words to a Betty Crocker frosting commercial from the 70s and I start to worry.  

Just how much premium brain real estate is being taken up with song lyrics?

Thanks to advanced modern imaging, I was able to find out

First Thing

Two things are dominating my thoughts today.  First, I started reading Jill Berry’s  book “Personal Geographies” and I can’t stop thinking about all the maps I want to make.  Second, Tammy has been musing about photo organization over on Daisy Yellow and encouraged us to doodle our photo path from camera to blog.

Computer organization is easy for me.   I’m a linear thinker.  I love lists and outlines.  My computer is full of folders and sub folders that are clearly labeled in ways that make sense to me.  I can find just about any document, photo, or scanned artwork in seconds.

If only the rest of my life was like that.  I have so many ideas in my head that I’m trying to pin down right now.  I wish I could say it looked like this:

 Instead, this is the sad reality – no less than SIX little notebooks scattered about, and a purse full of crumpled post-it notes.

But if you look back at that neatly organized bulletin board, you can see I was contemplating the “29 faces challenge” over at AyalaArt.  (one face for every day in February).  I still might do it for the sake of practice, but the thing is – my faces suck and don’t make for very good blogging.  My best posts were when I was being interviewed by Amy back in October.

So in February, I’m going to tell you 29 things about me that you may not already know – complete with illustrations, and maybe even maps.  Today I leave you with these sketchbook pages I made a few years ago, when my life was in chaos and I had both a desperate need and some time to try and tame it through visual journals.

devil kitty

Came home from work today to find a mason jar full of turquoise dye spilled all over my work table, chair, and floor.

whose fault?

this guy:

paper eating evil beast

dumper of buckets

spiller of liquids

_______________________________________________

He knows I'm pissed at him so he's being ingratiatingly cute:

In the basket with the stuffed studio mink

In the scrap box under my work table

PLEASE don't be mad at me!
(I love that he's laying in the middle of Cameron's black kitty paintings)
(and no, Cam, your paintings are not still laying on the couch after all these months  - this is just an old picture)

Like most of us, he's a study in contrasts.

I've been messing around with my new Inktense pencils (LOVE!!!!)

and altering a creepy black and white picture of myself.

Here's one of my own contrasting sides:

Here's another:

I think I like this view best:

Linking up to the "Opposites" theme over at the Butterfly Effect, where we are ALL pretty ALL the time.

Go see for yourself.

Journal pages and el-cheap-o pen storage system

I could stay up all night trying to write insightful or pithy remarks for this blog post, or I could just show you my damn journal pages.

Here's what I've been working on -  one finished, one in progress:

Oh, how I love me some circles.

But really, you came here for the brilliant and FREE pen storage system I rigged up over the weekend.

Here's my old pen storage system:

It was problematic, to say the least.

Here's my new pen storage system:

Why yes, yes it IS toilet paper tubes hot glued into a shoe box.

I don't know about you, but I am glue gun IMPAIRED.  I love hot glue and all you can do with it, but I always make a huge mess, and ALWAYS burn my fingers a thousand times.  You'd think after the 6th or 7th time (in a row) that I burn myself I'd figure out a different strategy.  but no.

Which reminds me of a little guy at camp last summer.

He was only 5, and really really wanted to help build this:

But you have to be in 4th grade to use the glue guns.  Everyone else gets tacky glue.

And we try to keep the glue guns at a safe distance, really we do.

 and we kept warning him that the glue gun was really really hot and he shouldn't touch it.

 he touched it.

and as he cried, he wailed "You told me not to touch it and I touched it"

that's me and glue guns in a nut shell

BUT, did you know that you can get rid of all those stringy spider-webby bits of glue without painstakingly picking them off one by one all the while swearing under your breath?

You probably already know this, but I was so excited to learn this from the resident craft queen at work.

HAIR DRYER.

or better yet, heat gun.

a quick blast melts them all away and makes them disappear.

Now if only she can teach me NOT TO TOUCH IT.

homemade alcohol ink with Sharpies

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I made some homemade alcohol inks.  I THOUGHT these were going to be amazing, and then I did a bunch of testing and thought they were a  complete failure, but then I did some more testing and decided maybe I have a place for them in my art after all.  And since living with a 5th grade boy makes me think and speak like a 5th grade boy, I sum up the experiment this way:

I first heard mention of this in a facebook group a few weeks ago and put it on my list of things I should look into.  Then I read about it again on TJ's blog and decided to actually do it. So I found this video on You-Tube (which I watched just enough of to get the basic idea of how to do it and then turned it off.  given my mixed results, maybe I should have watched the whole video and followed it up with her part 2 instructions)

The bullet points:

• break open a sharpie and soak the inky insert in some rubbing alcohol.  
• done

I bought cheap travel sized spray bottles and a big bottle of rubbing alcohol and raided my abundant stash of sharpies (many of which were inherited when my office closed a few years ago so I didn't pay anything for them)

It was quick and easy (and smelly and a little messy) and the colors were VIBRANT!

So then I set about testing them on a bunch of different surfaces.  I took a file folder and attached various papers and tapes and started spraying.  TOTAL DISAPPOINTMENT.  The colors were muted - some almost non-existent.  And the SMELL.  Man-oh-man it smelled like a hospital ward.  For hours. (Oddly the cat was fascinated by this and hovered near the smelly papers all afternoon).

Here are the results of my experiments:

Clockwise from upper left:  water color paper, cereal box covered in gesso, plain cereal box, book page, copy paper, card stock

 Clockwise from upper left: Tyvek (which has been ironed), masking tape, aluminum tape, clear packing tape.

I called it a day at this point and nearly dumped them down the drain in disappointment.
But I took up the cause again this morning and had better results.  I noticed that the colors were most vibrant on bright white, smooth, not-too-absorbant paper, so I started there.

Here's a test palette on some mixed media paper (with the corresponding sharpie color for comparison)

I tried it with some stencils on cheap copy paper.  Not bad:

Then I tried yellow, orange and red in a cheap sketchbook and filled it up with notes on what I'd learned.

Advantages: 

cheap

dries quickly

transparent

easy to write over it

permanent - doesn't smudge when reworked

overlapping colors blend well

gives a nice effect with stencils

Disadvantages:

smelly

colors are muted 

bleeds through to the other side of most papers

beads up on plastic and metal surfaces.  it dries and leaves the color in little droplets

did I mention smelly?

Final assessment:  not what I'd hoped for, but if I can tolerate the smell I will use it to create some interesting background effects.

If any of you have experience with homemade inks leave me a comment.

book-altering, literature-quoting, weekend-loving geek

How cool is this?  Just one of the fabulous things I've learned in the altered book class is how to make alternating doors in a book.  Seriously - Natasha and Amy have some really great FREE video tutorials over there on Flutterbye.  I've got lots of other book-related things to show, but tonight I'm showing my  doors because this is what I used for my QUOTE (another last-minute link up to the weekly butterfly effect theme).

What's behind door #1?

Art is the only thing

that can go on mattering

Once it has stopped

Hurting

"Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting" - Elizabeth Bowen

Look how nice and flappy that is.  I've been geeking out over this for days.

 (Plus look how ORANGE it actually is.  My scanner made it look much more red)

And speaking of quotes - I'll leave you with the best Friday quote ever, courtesy of my son Max, age 10, as he got home from school today.

“There’s a new movie coming out and it’s called Max’s Free Weekend and the best part is it takes two days to watch and the even better part is there are no homework scenes”

love that kid.