Overhaul

My friend Lynn is cleaning out her basement and attic and gave me some great storage things for my studio.  The problem was there was no way to get them in the studio to start using them without doing a major overhaul of my space.  So I spent the majority of the weekend re-organizing, and very little time actually making art.  And once I start  organizing, it's hard to stop.

Here's what I've been up to:

The major "free thing" is this tower of clear drawers - now filled with nicely organized inks, paints, pens, etc. - all within arms reach of my table and no longer jumbled into huge tubs.  I also moved the file cabinet out of the closet, but more on that later.

The other significant "free thing" is this paper storage shelf.  I know, right?

The addition of these items required a total closet overhaul (even though I'm not keeping them in the closet).  I don't have a "before" picture, but you can visualize precarious piles upon piles.  I took EVERYTHING out of the closet, went out and bought cheap plastic shelving and started putting things back in better order.

I stole this next idea from Lee - I hung one of those fabric sweater racks next to my shelf.  It still needs some work - 2 1/2 of the spaces are filled with bubble wrap.  Might be time to let some of it go...

I had this old rack in the basement - it once hung in the kitchen of an apartment I haven't lived in for a decade, but heaven forbid I throw anything away.  You see?  it came in handy on the inside of the art closet door.

Lynn also gave me this vertical file, which now neatly holds folders full of stencils, my small cutting mat, some plastic mats I use as paint palettes, and other flat things that no longer tip over when I pull one out.

The vertical file sits on my primary shelving unit - which is no longer impossibly jumbled and crammed. (no really, it's not) 

 So here's my happy little workspace:

 The printer/scanner sits on this old coffee table from IKEA that has great storage space below

 The 1000 year old futon attracts visitors, both human and feline, and can be folded down into a bed in the rare event we have a house guest.

 When my sister was visiting in December she installed this wire/clip system along the top of one wall - it's a great place to hang stuff I want to see for a little while.

 She also installed these two little "floating" shelves above the couch. I often use them to prop works in progress so that I can look at them and decide what else they need.  (the face painting just came in the mail from Amy!)

Two boring-but-helpful changes:  mounted the power strip on the wall so I don't keep kicking it:

 Mounted the dustbuster on the wall so that it wasn't taking up premium shelf real estate

This is the ancient bookcase we found by the dumpster when I moved to Seattle in 1992.  It's a total piece of junk, yet I moved it 3000 miles when I came back to Massachusetts in 1998.  It's been sawed in half and bolted back together.  I did paint it once, though you wouldn't know it to look at it.   The black spot in the lower left of the picture is Jake crawling out of bed to say hello.

 Here's the little beast in his favorite spot.

 All of THAT work was done yesterday.  Today, the organization bug wouldn't die.  I tackled the daunting baskets of paper.  I sorted all my collage images into categories and made folders and put them in the file cabinet.  After this picture was taken I alphabetized them!

 FINALLY - I tackled the 3 overflowing baskets of painted papers.  I took over the dining room floor and sorted them by color category.  Jake is laying on the purple pile.

 Then I made hanging folders for each color (and within each file is an envelope-style folder with the small scraps in the same color family.  There were so many they all wouldn't fit in the file cabinet, so here is the overflow in a plastic file box under my table.  (not alphabetized) (yet)

I'm exhausted, but feeling VERY accomplished.

Now somebody stop me before I start alphabetizing my paints...

duck

Outgoing

That refers to the mail, not my personality.

I've learned to fake it really well, but my true self is socially backward, fearful of everyone, and quite content to be alone, thank you very much.  If I don't know you, I'd really rather not talk to you.

As a kid I would sooner pee my pants than ask where a bathroom was.  Literally.  I'm not kidding.

And this hatred of talking to strangers is not limited to face-to-face interactions.  I also hate talking on the phone to people I don't know. It took me until I was 35 to get up the nerve to call for pizza.  Thank goodness I've always lived with someone who's willing to do it.

But I digress.  Today I remembered to scan my mail before dropping at the post office, and here are a few things going out to folks from the "good mail day" list:

This next one is for a swap-bot trade that involved using a file folder as an envelope, and restricting your collage images to a single book:

Happy Friday.  I'm going to crawl into my cozy cave and make more art!

Epic mail day

You know how you start using a word to be ironic, and then you say it so often you lose the irony and it just becomes part of your vocabulary?  Being surrounded by 10 and 11 year old boys all the time made me start saying EPIC as a joke.  But you see where this is heading...

It's like in high school when my friend Holly and I started making fun of the deadbeats who used the F-word all the time.  (keep in mind this was the early 80s and it was slightly more shocking to say fuck).  We mocked them by peppering our conversations with the word so often it became a habit and now I swear like a truck driver.

But it's the MAIL I came to write about.  It was an amazing mail day.  (a fucking amazing mail day)  I headed to the post office with 11 post cards for an international post card swap.  I totally forgot to scan them and took quick pictures on the way out the door, but the pictures totally suck and the mail is gone so I can't go back and retake them.  So here's a blurry montage of them.  I think if you squint they look better.

 But then LOOK at the bounty that was waiting for me in my box!  Three letters and four postcards.  One of the letters came in an envelope made from a Tim Horton's bag.  How cool is that?  And a post card from MadMadge always makes my day.

My postcard making spree is paying off!  To get good mail you've got to send good mail.
And my mail is about to get a lot cooler, because LOOK:

I went to college just slightly before the computer era.  We had computer labs on campus, but nobody owned one.  I made all my spending money by typing people's papers on a typewriter for $1 per page.  If I really liked you, and you weren't a very good writer, I would correct your grammar and spelling as I typed for no extra charge.  My friend Alison had a 3 page paper due every Thursday at 2:00.  She would still be WRITING it at 1:30, and I'd be typing the first page or two while she was frantically finishing.  I did a lot of on-the-spot editing for Alison.  I'm especially glad I did, because, as it turns out, she's the person who introduced me to Ric in a round about way.  We've lost touch.  She doesn't know I married him, but I'm grateful to her.

And that's fun fact #something or other.

Alcohol Inks revisited

Remember my epic fail with home-made alcohol inks and the wussy colors they made?
I decided to have another crack at it.  Janet, who actually WATCHED the video on you tube, left me a comment saying the "recipe" called for one sharpie per ounce of alcohol. And I had 3 ounce bottles with just one lonely Sharpie per bottle.
Since I was already this far into it, I decided to completely pillage my sharpie collection and add 2 more busted sharpies to each bottle.  And this time I wouldn't just squeeze the inserts impatiently for a few seconds, I'd let them soak.  In fact, I forgot all about them for a few weeks and yesterday took them out, and fished all the floating dead sharpie bits out of the bottles, and made a colossal mess, but LOOK:

The colors are WAY brighter.  These are sprayed on card stock, bristol paper and gessoed cardboard.  They dried really fast and since they're made from permanent markers they don't smear or bleed when you add other material.

The pages below were just regular copy paper used to blot up the excess from the top of the plastic stencils.

Since a lot of people use alcohol inks for non-porous surfaces, I tested it on the plastic alcohol bottle:

and on some aluminum duct tape:

and on some little metal wings (un-stained ones pictured for comparison).

This shot also shows the plastic stencil as another example of staining plastic.

So it works pretty well - but is it worth it?  If you pay full price for a multi-pack of Sharpies, the pens end up being about $.80 each.  I bought the spray bottles for a dollar each.  The alcohol was only a few bucks for a giant bottle (enough to fill ten 3-oz bottles).  All told, each little spray bottle would cost about $3.75 if you bought everything new.  Informal browsing shows me the average retail cost of spray inks and alcohol inks is about $4 per ounce.  Are these as totally vibrant and yummy as those?  Probably not, but since I had SOOOO many old and inherited permanent markers laying around, my out-of-pocket expenses were $12 for 10 colors, 3 ounces each.  (and a lot of elbow grease scrubbing the ink stains out of the kitchen sink).  Totally worth it.

So here's what I did with one of the pieces of paper while I was waiting for my insomniac son to fall asleep last night.  I sprayed a few colors of ink over various stencils.  Put down different stencils and sprayed different colors.  Covered it all with a light layer of gesso and then sprayed another layer of ink over another stencil

And since I'm still obsessed with my "posterized" image of myself, I painted a larger version of the stamp on top of a background that was layered with inks, then gesso, then more ink.

In all of my self-portraits I have the chin and jaw of Jay Leno.  I mean, I do have a pretty well-defined jaw area, and a hugely wide mouth, but I don't look as much like a mutant as this image would make you think.

on the other hand, I CAN put my whole fist in my mouth.

and it's not a particularly small fist.

And that's the 5th (or 15th) thing you've learned about me this month.

Betcha can't wait for more!

Center of the Universe

In 1973, my family moved to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.  I was in first grade.  I lived there until I went off to college in 1985.  It was a pretty idyllic childhood, with a fantastic family in a safe suburban community. Kids, in general, were considered a lot more competent than they are today, and so we had a great deal of freedom and independence.  

Here's my Jill Berry-inspired map of the key features of my town.

 (according to my childhood self)

I used a variety of my own paste papers as backgrounds. 

Each of those little squares is actually a door.

(oooh! flappy!)

If you've got really good eyesight (and the inclination) you could read what I wrote under each flap.

But if you don't have good eyesight, here's a key:

1. House: I lived here from 1973 to 1985 and for as long as my parents continue to live here it will be home.
2. State Route 140:  Be careful of the curve. (Yes, mom)
3. Spring Street School, Grades 1-6: The first person I met in this building, in 1973, is still my good friend today. (She calls me Bitch every time I talk to her.)
4. Mountain View Cemetery:  We smoked our cigarettes here. (see Pizzeria)
5. Hale's Drug Store:  This would have been a better place to buy candy if the lady wasn't so mean.
6. Shrewsbury Public Library: my first job was shelving books here for $3.12 an hour.  I secretly wish I still worked here.
7. Shrewsbury Pizzeria: They had a cigarette vending machine.  In 6th grade we pooled our change and made Christine go in and buy some. (see cemetery)
8. Center Dairy Bar:  best place to buy candy and chips. (green apple flavored Bubs Daddy bubble gum!)
9. Maple Ave Sidewalk: Got asked out by a boy for the first time ever.  He carried my books.  We broke up 20 minutes later.
10. Shrewsbury Jr. High:  7th and 8th grade.  Enough said.

__________________________________________

P.S.  Even though I've since lived in New Hampshire, Western Mass, Seattle and Greater Boston, the lure of "home" was too strong to resist.  I moved back to Shrewsbury in 2004 and live 3 miles from my parents.  Max is having an idyllic childhood, though I hope to god his map doesn't include cigarettes in the cemetery.  

P.P.S. I both started and ended my smoking career in 6th grade.

P.P.P.S.  good old spell check has informed me that ONCE AGAIN, I have spelled cemetery wrong, as well as pizzeria.  I could go fix the map, and rescan it, and repost it here, but instead we'll pretend I did it on purpose for the sake of childhood authenticity

P.P.P.P.S.  Does this count as one thing or ten things?

I made this stamp tonight

I was planning on making a map, but something I saw today made me think of something else and one thing lead to another and the next thing you know I'm rushing home from work to make a face stamp.

I started with this picture:

I imported it into Picnik and used the "posterize" effect:

I printed it out, taped it to some transfer paper, placed it on top of my my pink rubbery block and traced around the black parts to transfer the image to the carving block:

And after carving away all the pink bits, I was left with this stamp:

I can't even tell you how happy this makes me.  I'm going to go stamp it all over everything I own and then think about all the other face stamps I want to make.

maybe tomorrow I'll make my map.