ArtiphyTheHeart

Announcing:  ArtiPhybers

A companion blog to ArtiphyTheHeart which will house all things related to fibers and fiber arts.  Click HERE to be directed to ArtiPhybers, where you will also find my posts for Take A Stitch Tuesday

Little Pages

Most of my time is taken up with painting.  I work around a painting in layers, section by section.   While one section dries I work on another, then I go back and add more layers, fleshing it out.  This is slow, satisfying work.  I spend a lot of time thinking about it while I paint, and I take breaks often.  I love this slow work that takes a days, weeks, or months to complete.  But I also have a real need to finish something in a day for the pat-on-the-back that a sense of completion brings.  

This isn't the reason I work in a tiny collaged book that will morph into an art journal.  I do it because I love it, and because it provides a home for some very luscious snippets that really shouldn't end up in the dust bin.  But working in a tiny book does have the added benefit of quick accomplishment, especially when it's broken up into tasks, such as collage and paint today, embellish and journal on another day.  

Here are a couple of 2 page spreads from my tiny collage book.  They have a very unfinished look partly because they are unfinished, and partly because they haven't yet been sewn into book form.  Working this small, it's much easier for me to collage and embellish the pages, then sew and journal later.  If you click HERE, you can see a post that puts the size of these tiny pages into perspective.  The pages are 3" X 4-1/2".  The book is the one I'm holding in my hand in the first photo when you click the link, and also in the last photo when you scroll down. 

I've also been spending a lot of time reading.  I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami, and I'm finding that his book1Q84 is unputdownable.  I work more smoothly when I'm in the middle of really good fiction.

And last but not least, there's a new post up on ArtiPhybers.  Click HERE and take a look.

More Raw and Simple Collage

Two more pieces done for Revel In The Moment.  These are great warm ups for the painting I'm currently working on, and nothing at all like it.  I do a couple of these collaged pages, then a little of the painting, a couple more of these, then a little more of that.  Two quick, followed by one slow and smooth.  Great way to work.  Quick quick slow.  Very rhythmic.  Just like dancing.

These are freely worked using templates by Kelly Kilmer as a starting point.  In the end, they will have been added to and subtracted from, but this is how I begin, with a raw collage.  

I hadn't thought about Chinese New Year, but I'm sure it was there, ready to come forward when I began this.  I just recently learned that I'm a Dragon, after thinking all these years that I was born in the year of the Snake.  A Chinese expert told me that it isn't the dates of the western calendar that determine the year, it's the beginning to the end of the Chinese New Year in the year one was born.  Both New Years are usually about a month apart, so Chinese horiscope calendars go with the western year because it's so easy.  But for those of us born on one side or the other of the actual starting date, it makes a difference.  That makes sense.  I never could identify with the Snake Year description, but the Dragon is spot on.

Shorts Book

Here's another first book for those who are learning bookbinding.  Once again, even though I've made these in the past, I'm so glad to have the refresher course because there's so much I'd forgotten.  I had to ask for clarification that my page-turning was in the correct order, but it turns out that I got it right.

This is another book constructed from a single sheet of paper.  I used 98# Canson mixed-media paper, a heavier weight for this book than the last because there were fewer folds, and I didn't want the watercolor and ink to bleed through the pages.  It worked. I prepared the paper by spraying a light solution of gouache over a few of stencils on both sides.  I ground some ink and used the wet side of a sheet of sumi-é paper to make a few brush sketches.  When I realized that I had done nine cats, I got the idea for Nine Lives.

The cats were randomly sketched all over the paper, so I tore them out and added some gouache to the edges.  Pages three and four open up and down.  There are four folds and two sides, so eight pages in all.  I decided to use these up and down pages to add the ninth cat.

The chop I used says "long life".  It's a traditional chop carved from soap stone and I inked it with the traditional toxic red chop ink that takes forever to dry.  I zapped it with a hairdryer to speed things up, but I think it will take the full few weeks before it sets, regardless.  In the meantime, I blotted it a bit, then separated the pages with waxed paper.

This book is part of a project that some members of Artists Of The Round Table are working on.  We plan to make 100 books using Alisa Golden's bookMaking Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms as our guide.  

If you'd like to see all posts of the books I'm making for this project, scroll up to the top of this page, click on "Archives", then click on "Making Handmade Books Workshop" from the category menu.  

X-Book

One of the first books you make when you study bookbinding is the X-Book.  It's simple, but its folding has a purpose that repeats with other more complicated bindings.  It's what I used to call a root book, since its construction is the basis for so many books.

Some of us in Artists Of the Round Table are working our way through Alicia Golden's bookMaking Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms.  We'll be making 100 books beginning with the X-Book.  Here are some pictures of mine:

It's made from a single sheet of paper that is cut and folded so that the middle puffs out.

It's easier to get the picture from the top.  Each fold is a page, and when the two end pages are pushed together toward the middle, it forms an X, which gives the book its name.

Then the outside folds of the X wrap around the inside folds to create the cover and the back.

Even if you made a gazillion of these in grade school, you make them still when you learn to bind books.  And it's amazing how easy it is to forget the simple stuff!

I decorated the pages with a combination of lettering, drawing, and clear stamps from Layers Of Colors, Close To My Heart, and Character Constructions.  

India ink and a Rapidograph coordinate perfectly with black VersaFine ink.  I added some of my own lines and quirks to the some of the stamped images, and it was impossible to tell where their lines left off and mine began.

 Click Here

Tools: A DIY Tabletop Easel

I'm sure that there are things we all share and don't share on our blogs and on the web.  I choose to share my collage and bookbinding on this blog, but don't share my paintings, even though painting is what I do primarily.  I have a large floor easel that makes it easy to work standing, and I prefer to stand when I work.   If I had a studio of 14' walls, I'd work against them with a ladder.  The bigger, the better.

But in December I got the flu which seemed to settle in one knee, and I can't work standing on crutches.  One very famous artist said, "The size of our spaces determines the size of our work".  The size of my space is temporarily my table top.  But when I'm painting a subject, I like my substrate standing vertically, not laying flat on the table.  I've looked at table top easels in art stores with only slight interest, but now that I could really use one, I don't want to walk through the long, narrow isles on crutches to pick one out.  

We were always encouraged to make our tools in art school, so I thought I could probably come up with something functional if I put my mind and hands to work.  I found these plans on the web, but I didn't have the necessary wood or hardware at hand, and it was a trip to the store -- any store -- that I was trying to avoid.  So, I grabbed a small box with all of its six sides intact:  A shipping box from amazon.com which was perfect, since I needed something about the size of a large book. Fortunately, it came with a separate piece of notched corrugated cardboard inside, the perfect size to support a small piece of canvas, then I assembled the "tools" that I thought I'd need.

I cut the yellow tape covered riser from a box flap, notched it, and cut a slot in the middle of the back of the box to accomodate it.  It promptly flopped over.  So I removed the middle portion of the yellow tape, and inserted a wooden chopstick through it vertically, then replaced the tape.  Now it stands upright and holds itself perfectly.  I did go inside the box and tape the inserted portion of the riser to the back of the box to hold it steady, then I taped the box shut.  And, you can see that I taped the box to the countertop.  This is really important because it is so light weight that you could move it just by pushing with a paintbrush.  Taping it down is all that's needed to take care of this problem.

I was lucky that this piece of notched corrugated cardboard was inside the box, but I could have cut one just like it from another box if I had needed to.  I cut two slots on either side of the box to hold the notches.  Disregard the slot in the middle.  It was a mistake I made when I originally thought that was a good place for the back riser.  

Not such a good idea to paint with wet media with only the corrugated cardboard behind the substrate.  It might get soaked, and the bumps would transfer.  I had a piece of 10" X 10" plexiglass, so I taped it in place.  It works perfectly.  You could substitue any number of things, such as a small cookie sheet or other piece of flat metal.  I had thought to laminate several pieces of museum board to each other, then seal them with multiple coats of acrylic, sanded smooth.  But then I remembered the plexiglass and realized I didn't have to go to all that work.

I do lay a piece of waxed paper over the top of the box to catch spills and keep the box dry when I paint.  It's only an issue when I purposely go for drippy effects.  

Works beautifully for my purposes, and I didn't have to shop for anything.  Once the brain work was done, I think it took me about 20 minutes to assemble.

A Handbound Book, Start To Finish

Here's a pic of my latest book:

My friend and art partner Rita loves Canson mixed-media paper and in watching her work with it, I've noticed how well it takes wet media and glue without buckling.  It's also smooth and bright white which I like for most drawing and illustration work.  It holds its fibers and keeps them out of my Rapidograph, so it's the paper I chose for the signatures in this book.  

I wanted the spine to harmonize seamlessly with my painted canvas covers.  I found patterned paper that worked well for this purpose, cut 1" wide strips and glued them to the spine of the outside folio of each signature.  More than just aesthetic, this adds bulk to the spine so the book will close flat even after media is added.  And because I glued the outside signature of each folio to the next outside signature as each was sewn, the decorative spines are present only on the outside of the book, not the inside, providing me with a book of pure white pages.

Cover:

I cut museum board to size and painted the canvas to cover the boards with multiple layers of thinned, transparent acrylics.  This was my first time using commercial modeling (or molding, depending on the brand you use) paste.  I tinted it first, then spackled it over a stencil of squares using a palette knife, lifted the stencil and left it to dry for a couple of days.  I liked the texture, so I left it as-is instead of sanding it to a smooth finish, then I adjusted the color.  

Spine:

A more detailed view of the spine shows the book with the back cover, and a closer view of the tapes.  I haven't decided whether or not I'll go back in with a little walnut ink to cover the exposed white edges of the holes for the stitching.

 

Tapes:

 The tapes began as end strips of upholstery fabric which  
were chosen for their color alone, as pictured (right).  But after prepping the strips for book tapes, I realized that the color was a bit off.  The left strip in the picture is the fabric before sewing. To correct this, I randomly and haphazardly machine stitched over the tape with a copper brown thread.  The middle tape in the picture illustrates the tapes at this stage.  To coordinate with the color of the covers and the spine, I added a powdery teal thread, and kept adding copper and teal threads alternatively until I felt that the fibers gave the fabric the color it needed to harmonize effectively.  The end product is the third tape on the right. 

Construction:

I constructed the book as part of a project in the Affair With Art group I belong to.  Nancy wrote a set of beautiful instructions for us and posted them to her blog HERE. Her instructions called for leather tapes and a closure, but I preferred to use what I had on hand.  I also tweaked the instructions a bit and bound the book per the specs for book #1 of Full Tilt Boogie, a perpetual online workshop, which I highly recommend, given by Mary Ann Moss.  The end product looks similar to the AAWA book, but differs just a bit in the way it was put together and the materials used. 

Inside Cover:

I really wanted to use the same paper I cut for the spine, as endpapers inside the book.  But with more than one signature, I had to come up with a way to attach a single sheet of paper to the front of the first signature and to the back of the last.  It worked because of the strips I attached to the spines of those signatures.  I simply glued these pages to the inside of the strip in such a way that the wrong side of the paper faced outward.  The signature then had one additional piece of paper, which after the book was sewn, was glued wrong-side-down to the inside cover as an endpaper.  When the book is opened, it looks like this:

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'll be binding 100 books in 2012 with the Artists Of The Round Table.  Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms by Alisa Golden, is the book we are using.   If you are interested in hand binding books, you'll want to add this to your library!

Reveling In Moments

I'm two pages away from finished with the collage templates from Kelly Kilmer's Revel In The Moment workshop.  You probably think that means I'm almost finished, right?  Ha!  Wrong!  There are so many ways to use these templates, it boggles the mind!  You think I'll just use them the right way round?  Really?  And you say you know me?  Ha again!  Besides, this is just naked collage.  No journaling, no drawing, no penwork, no text, no paint, nothing added, nothing painted out....

But here are the next two pieces of collage in the series.  They could stand on their own, but they won't have to.  Sooner or later, I'll be adding more, subtracting some, etc.  You get the picture!

If you could see what the others are doing with the same templates I'm using, you'd be in an extended state of disbelief.  You'd say, "No.  Can't be.  Nothing the same.  Not even similar".   But you'd be wrong.  The possibilities are infinite.  Too bad we've over-used that word: Inifinite.  Because the possibilities truly are!

Toys

Even when I was a child, I loved vintage toys.  I always preferred a vintage rag doll, a porcelain beauty, or a hand-carved pull-toy to most of the newest and most popular toys on the market.  I loved paper dolls, puppets with strings, and everything with simple to complex mechanical moving parts.  And if there was a way to make my own, even better!  I had my favorites. I was over the moon with Steiff originals, and I still am.

When our Affair With Art group challenged us to create something with movable parts, I was all over it in a flash!  I thought of all the wind-up toys I had, and fondly remembered my clockwork Organ Grinder and his Monkey.  Combining my love of paper dolls and the movement of the arms and legs of the fabulous Steiff animals, I used StampFrancisco's "Cymbal Monkey" stamp from Bartholomew's Ink to craft the trio pictured above.  

The assembly, in case you want to make one:  For each monkey made, three stamps must be printed.  The orignal stamp shows only a fraction of one leg, so it must be "built" from a scrap of the fully pictured leg, then glued into place.  This leaves only a partial torso from the leg which was cut.  Another of the same leg must be cut and hinged with a brad to a torso with the upper part of that leg still intact, thus the need for three prints.  Then it's just cut and glue, color, and assemble.

Some resources:  If you're interested in making toys that move, I've listed a few of my favorites.  I've seen them all and own a couple of them.  It always amazes me how easy it can be to make things that seem so complex once you have a good set of directions.  And after making a few things, you inevitably start to use that knowledge to design things of your own.  

Karakuri: How to Make Mechanical Paper Models That Move is a great book for making whimsical moving toys with paper and card stock.

Paper Puppet Palooza: Techniques for Making Moveable Art Figures and Paper Dolls is in my library, and I've used it as a resource for more than one project.

Making Shadow Puppets (Kids Can Do It) isn't just for kids.  There's a lot of basic information in this book that will translate into tons of your own original projects.

If you'd like to try your hand a making vintage toys out of wood, Turning Vintage Toys by Chris Reid is a great book with beautiful pictures and step-by-step instructions.  Even if you're not into wood, the photos in this book make it a great addition to any home or studio library.

Mug Shots

One of the art groups I belong to (An Affair With Art) has asked us if we're tea drinkers, and if so, what we prefer to drink from.  Easy questions for me.  I drink tea all day long!  Twinings English Breakfast keeps me going, and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf's Swedish Berries makes me calm and sleepy.  Here's my cup of choice:

Last mother's day, my daughter Amy took me to Anthropologie and told me to pick out a tea cup.  So many beauties to choose from, but the minute I set my eyes on this pretty orange mug, embossed, scalloped, and paint spattered, I knew it was the one for me.  Orange is the color of creativity, and paint spatters, well, every artist needs a paint-spattered mug!

Here's an inside view.  Pre-tea, of course.  I love this!  Usually when I spatter paint in my tea, I have to throw it out.  I love that I can drink out of this!

Mug Shots:

In the meantime, why not join me and have a cup of tea or coffee, too?  And while you're at it, why not share a pic of your favorite cup or mug?  Just leave a comment in this post with a link to a pic of your favorite cup, and we'll all stop by and take a look!  If you post about your favorite tea cup/coffee mug/ or other drinking recepticle of choice, please link back to this post so others will know where to share their links if they want to play along, too! 

Right now I'm busy-busy-busy.  Trying to finish hold-overs from 2011, and beginning some new projects in 2012.  There's a lot on my plate, but at least I love everything I have to do!

My Current List Of Stuff and Stuff To Do:

Here's a partial list:

• Three books ready to bind and stitch -- I thought there were five, but I can't find the other two... Oh well.  If they're around, they'll show up eventually!
• Take a Stitch Tuesday.  LOVE this.  If you want to know all about it, click the TAST badge on my sidebar.
• Setting up ArtiPhybers.  You can go there now, but I haven't yet made a first post, and I'm slow at getting links and photo albums uploaded.  Eventually -- sooner, rather than later, I hope -- it will be home for all my fiber art (including TAST), and I'll add to it regularly.  You can get there from the link in my side bar.
• Journaling, of course.  Three collage journals and a sketchbook/notes journal are active at the moment.  There are others too, but right now I'm concentrating on these.
• Kelly Kilmer's Revel In the Moment workshop.  I'm working without stopping in this one.  Can't get enough of it!  My friend and art partner Rita and I spent hours with this last Thursday, and will have a repeat performance next week.  In the meantime, we're both collaging our little hearts out every chance we get (which is one of the reasons I'm behind on everything else...)
• An Artsits Of The Round Table workshop.  Beginning tomorrow, we'll be binding 100 books in 2012.
• A printing project, which I'm defining and refining as I go.  More about that as things progress...
• A crocheted throw-WISP
• Three quilt tops-WISPS
• A really gorgeous (if I may say so myself) mixed fiber illustration--more on that later...
• Painting!  Lots of painting!  A semi-new direction in paint and collage for me, and I'm loving every minute!  It takes me back to my childhood art loves.  More to come on that, also.
• Oh, and reading.  LOTS!  But that's not unusual.  Right now the books on my nightstand are: Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison, and Nuns and Soldiers (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Iris Murdoch.  Neither of them new; both are favorites of mine.  And this is the book I'll be working my way through as my 100 bindings in 2012 progress: Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms  

But now I have to get busy on these things so I'll have something to photograph, and you'll have something more to see!

More Collage

I love knowing what people are up to and reading status updates, but I hate whining, so I hope you won't think I'm whining when I tell you that from the 18th of December until just a few hours ago, I had the flu.  It affected a knee joint.  Flu + trouble walking was not a fun combo.  The knee is somewhat better but it still bothers me, and the flu is pretty much gone except for the residual tiredness.  Still, I managed to get some things done, and also to teach myself to use iPhoto for the slide presentation I uploaded to Vimeo.*  Sitting at the counter in my fuzzy slippers, cutting and glueing was really good medicine.

 

 

Here are the 13 pages I created during flu fog for Kelly Kilmer's Revel In The Moment workshop.  Much fun!  I didn't realize just how much a person could create when even too foggy to read a book or watch a movie.  This was the perfect thing.  I could work, drink tea, then rest.  I've been doing this for so many years that I've found I can collage on auto pilot, which is something I wouldn't have guessed if I hadn't been placed in the situation.  Although, I vaguely remember being sick in bed as a child and my mother bringing me a tray with magazines to cut out, scissors, and paper to glue things on.  So maybe collage is my comfort food.  

Now that so many pages have been done I've decided  to collage the entire book before working the pages with with the good stuff--paint, mark making, lettering, and journaling.  Not the way I usually do it, but hey, nothing wrong with being pushed into a different way of working in order to adjust to the situation at hand.   Who knows?  I just might find I like this well enough to do it another time.

 

* A head's up for those of you who have ever used slide.com:  Slide will be leaving the web in early March of 2012.  You have only a month or so to get your photos moved, or lose them forever.  Just saying, just in case...

Sorting Collage Elements: Size Matters

I've been asked a lot of questions lately about collage.  Most center around what to use and how to decide.  It's a big subject and there were a lot of questions that I eventually answered in an ArtiPhacts page that you can read by clicking HERE.  But here and now, I'd like to show you some pictures of how I work and what seems to work best for me.  It boils down to sorting, and when it comes to sorting, I've found that size matters most. 

I work in more than one journal at a time.  There are usually more than three, but there are always at least three.  One small, one medium, and one large.  The largest journal on top measures 7" X 9-3/4" when closed, so a two-page spread is 14" X 9-3/4".  The medium journal is 6"X 6" with a spread of 12" X 6", and the smallest measures 3" X 4-1/2".  With two pages open, that's still only 6" X 4-1/2".

I start with the large.  Always.  The bottom piece in the pile is a 12" X 12" piece of scrapbooking paper.  The image on top is cut from a magazne ad, and measures approx. 10" X 7-1/2".  The scraps cut from these large pieces make up the lion's share of what ends up in the stash for my medium size journal.   The bottom part of the page which was cut away from these two faces was saved for a couple of elements that fell into the "small" category.  The rest was tossed into the recyling bin.  

To give you a better idea of scale, here's the image from the picture directly above, placed on top of the largest journal from the first picture on top.  

This is a pile of papers and an image suitable to be used or cut for my medium size journal.  After use, the scraps from this pile can be used again, or if very small, will be saved with other items appropriate for the smaller size journal.  There is far less waste.  More items are used for collage, and fewer end up in the bin.

Here's the image from the pic directly above set on top of a page in my medium size journal.  Refer back to the first pic, if necessary, for a better idea of scale.

Above are examples of pages that I might use for my smallest journal.  The yellow square in the center is a post-it-note, and will give you a better idea of scale and help you to visualize just how tiny some of those snippets are.  Now take a good look at the clothing in the magazine pages.  Farming these for pattern, not for image, will yield a lot of interesting background material for a tiny journal.  The size of the heads are a good size for the tiny journal also.

Be sure to go back to the top so you'll have a better idea of just how small these pages are.  You can see that I've laid one of the heads from the pic directly above on top of the right hand page of this spread, and you can see how the size fits.  It's even larger than the heads of Diego Rivera and his son as they appear in the photo that I used, and the bottom snippet of pattern is smaller than some of the pattern I could cut from the pages in the pic directly above.

Now expand on this concept.  There are pages and pages of pattern in magazines, some of them large.  There are pages and pages of solid color and gradients.  All make good collage material.  The scraps from the big pages can be used in medium size and smaller journals.  What doesn't work gets tossed into a recycling bin.

I like to use a combination of pattern from a wide variety of sources on each page.  There's more interest this way.  The face on the left hand page of the spread above was cut from a stamped image.  So many possibilities, so many combinations.  Limitless.

The pic below suggests a method for finding images.

Here I've cut squares from the middle of two pieces of red paper.  Both sizes are good for zeroing in on parts of an image, and to get an instant idea of how the image will look if it's cut from different parts of a whole.  Image finders like these are commonly used in art and photography, and you can make your own in any size or shape that suits you.

By sorting images and papers by size first, I save the largest pieces for the largest journals, use them first, then move on to smaller, then smaller still.  My stash of papers and images is large enough that I can rotate papers and images so that I'm not using cuts from the same pages in the smaller journals on the same days.  I've collected it all over time.  Most of the patterned papers and scrapbooking paper were given to me by manufacturers when I was on a design team.  Some of it I've swapped with other artists, and lots and lots are found pattern, stripes and solids cut from magazines and junk mail.  

For those who have asked, I hope this gives you an idea of what I cut, how I sort, and how I use the elements I've saved.  The sorting is methodical, but in the end, the choices are very random, and I always pick what I think works together visually, rather than concentrating on subject or story matter.  Personally, I'm not building stories, I'm combining elements in a manner that appeals to me.  It would be fine to do it another way, but this is just how I choose to work, and it works for me.

 

Dreams Of Adventure

Still drawing, still glad that Traci challenged us with her 30 Days of Drawing.  But I must admit that while I'd love to post daily, even more than once a day, it doesn't always happen that way.  But drawing always happens.  

There isn't time to shoot and post pics of the last few days of drawing, but I do have time for one and I'll share what I did in case it might be helpful.  I was out when I drew this, and I discovered that I had no plain paper of any kind with me at the time, so I used what I had.  I cut a square of patterned cardstock, flipped it to the white side and drew on that.

My idea was to imagine what this young boy might be dreaming and quickly sketch it in ink.  I know that if I was curled up on a comfy piece of fur (which looks like a flokati, only softer...) with a silky animal plushie for my pillow, asleep on top of my toy box, I'd be dreaming about riding through the skies on a mythical stuffed animal come to life.  

So that's what I drew, and the paper worked wonderfully with my Rapidosketch.  So did the watercolor.  Even somewhat saturated, the paper fibers held their place.  The water dried quickly without buckling, so puddling wasn't an issue, making it easy to apply layers of color quickly.  

If you don't have what you need, use what you have.  I'm so glad that I don't view patterned papers as precious or special.  I still have stacks and stacks of them left over from design team days, sent by vendors to sample and demo.  Even when they're beautiful, if you need the other side, use it! 

Place Your Orders At The Coffee Bar

Exhausted, exhausted, exhausted...so I'm taking it easy today.  I decided to just draw what was in front of me, which happened to be my mug of tea and the insulated pot.  It needed silver, so I used the duller side of aluminum kitchen foil, cut it to size and shape, glued it in place, and photographed it with my phone since a scan wouldn't caputre the shine.

Day 11 of Tracy Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing.  Still having fun!