Wishing Everyone A Joy Filled Holiday

 

Wishing blessings to everyone this Season and looking forward to a very bright and creative 2013!

My Focus for December

Finish a book.  Not the novels I read or my daily devotional reading, I finish those with no trouble.  It’s the many books I buy with techniques to try and exercises to do that go unfinished. 

I start, get sidetracked with something else like another new technique or medium or whatever and the book goes in a pile, or back on the shelf and there it sits until I happen upon it again while looking for something else.

One that I happened on that way recently is “Nine Modern Day Muses and a Body Guard” by Jill Badonsky.  I know I read parts of it, there are highlights.  I didn’t do the exercises.  Rereading I can see that doing them would be valuable, especially since my muse seems to be hiding somewhere. 

The first exercise had me go back and think about what it was that I liked doing as a child.  Make things, draw and color.  I so wanted that big box of crayons, the one with sooooo many wonderful colors!  Now I wonder, why there isn’t more color in my art.  My paintings are peaceful rather than vibrant.  sometimes they are very bright and colorful like this small one title Mardi Gras. (it’s brighter in real life)

More often they’re quiet muted color like this Street In Greece. I like the quiet but what happened to the girl who longed for color?  She is either still there, buried inside me or she left.  I don’t know that I’ll find out doing the exercise in the Nine Muses book but I might.  Who knows, what I may learn about me if I stay focused long enough.

I need containers

I was fortunate to win a give-away on the Cloth, Paper, Scissors blog. It was like Christmas when they arrived ….  encaustic materials including two instructional DVDs, ExtravOrganza (printable silk sheets,) 12 colors of Jacquard’s PearlEx powdered pigments, some encaustic medium and a book, The Encaustic Studio by Daniella Woolf.

The package arrived late afternoon so that evening I sat down and watched the first one instead of the news. Not much good news anyway. 

I’d done a couple encaustics previously at my friend Annie Morgan’s  studio. This is one I did there with a lot of direction from Annie.

The DVD and the rest of the treasures inspired me. The next day I spent the day playing with encaustics and here are the results…

That night I watched the second DVD and now there are even more ideas floating around in my head which brings me to needing containers. This morning I started reading Daniella's book and it struck a chord. She responds to so many things and ideas come at her at such a pace that she is sometimes paralyzed so she has to set parameters, containers she calls them. She was talking about me but I haven’t learned to set those parameters and find myself going in circles way too often.

Am I too old? I taught myself to become a morning person after we won’t say how many years of being a night person. An aside, when I was first forcing myself to get up early my neighbor was over for dessert and we were talking about it. She said she noticed I was up very early one night when she got up about 4 in the morning and I was in my studio already. She didn’t realize it but she was talking about a time when I was still a night person. I’m not in my studio at 4 in the morning anymore but I might be there by 5:30.

So my task… determine some parameters and stick with them for a month. I’m going to give myself some time to think about it. Ideas are already floating around in my head… color and subject keep popping up. One thought is green. I’m a blue person, if it’s blue I’m gonna love it and if there is one color I don’t like, it’s green. Maybe I need to spend a month getting to know green a bit better. Who knows, I may learn to like it.

Another Wall Hanging

This one is a quilted wall hanging and it’s done from instructions in a book. 

Well, that’s not totally accurate, there were instructions in a book that I looked at and I really liked the quilted wall hanging that was pictured, but the book had to go back to the library before I was able to write down instructions. 

The result, it sort of resembles the one I saw and it was done by guess and by gosh because I’ve never done a quilted wall hanging like this.  My “Walks of Life” piece doesn’t count because it was small quilts put together.

The project has some flaws but that doesn’t bother me.  It’s a first, I had fun, it’s hanging on a wall in my house and I plan on doing more – of my own design.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been an active blogger; however, I still have managed to read other blogs and I learn a lot from them.  You may be interested in some of them.

One is Desiree, her blog is The Clothesline.  I started following her because I love her wonderful watercolors but she also does pastels, multi-media and fiber art.  She’s got a couple of fun collage tutorials on her site too.  Pop over and have a look.

A Beautiful Plein Air Day

I sketch when I’m painting en plein air and this is what I did this week.  A group of us get together every Tuesday morning and head out somewhere to paint.  This week we went to Hemlock Crossing. 

They have a wonderful warm room with huge windows overlooking the area and since it was a cold morning we made use of the space.  We’re thinking this will be a good place to paint in the winter.

Before settling in to paint we took a short walk to see the color and my photos don’t really show it…

the start of our walk   a view standing on a bridge

a view of the river

and again from another spot

Next week we’re hoping to go south to Saugatuck and paint on the Felt Mansion Grounds. 

Making use of fabric scraps

Awhile back I did some stitch and slash projects using several black and white fabrics and one black and white with color.  I loved the combination and didn’t want to waste it so I gathered up all of the scraps and ironed them to a fusible interfacing. 

That gave me enough fabric to make a small bag and these four change purses.  The bag isn’t done yet.  I hope to get it done sometime this week.

Three of the change purses along with a few others will be going to the Holland Area Arts Council’s Holiday Boutique.  The purse and one change purse will be going to the Gallery Uptown where there will be lots of gift items for holiday shoppers.

More about stitching

Yes, I’m still stitching and finding that I can get just as lost in a sewing project as I do in a painting project.

I’m hearing my grandmother:  “Jack of all trades, master of none.”  I guess I’m a master of being a jack of all trades because I love every one of the different media I work in, paper, fabric, yarn and metal or a combination of all of them.  A wall hanging I recently finished is based on paintings I had done.

The photo isn’t very good because I don’t have the space to photograph something that’s 5 1/2 ft long and I didn’t finish it until the night before it had to be delivered for an exhibit. 

Once that was delivered I went back to stitching purses getting ready for the holidays.

I’m still painting too but nothing major.  A group of friends get together every Tuesday to paint en plein air.  I sketch but my scanner is currently not working so I can’t post any of those.  Once it’s fixed (or I’ve been forced to buy a new one) I’ll be back to posting weekly.