ArtiphyTheHeart

Finished

The first ten minutes of this page can be seen HERE.  I finished it with multiple layers of collage and warmed it with an overstain of tinted walnut.  

I keep a lot of different types of art journals, but I use my collage journals primarily as a means of exploring color, pattern, and composition.  I have no problem combining unrelated materials, and I consciously try to mix whimsical mass-produced commercial elements and magazine pages with my own artwork and lettering.  It's a playful, experimental dialogue between things from my hands with things from the hands of others.  I work with these and other types of art journaling pages as a daily exercise, and they are for the most part, what I choose to share on this blog.  

I plan to begin sharing more of my other work, maybe as soon as tomorrow.  Not finished pieces of art.  I don't put those on the web, and have no plan to ever do so.  But I keep lots and lots of sketchbooks, and I have some favorite subjects that I revisit so frequently that they each have their own books.  From time to time I think I'll pull pages from these sketchbooks and let you have a look. 

But for now, today's page is enough.  Feel free to click on the image and enlarge it so you can read what I've written.  One of my favorite artists, Katherine Dunn, posted a quote from one of my favorite books yesterday on Facebook, and it fits the theme of this page so serindipitously.  The quote is from Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez:

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over to give birth to themselves."

How appropriate, since the theme of my journaling deals with discarding childish ways, embracing adulthood, and growing ourselves as an on-going process that is not an angst-ridden death to play, but is instead, a liberating process of gaining new insights, refining abilities, developing talents, discovering endless new avenues of productive pleasures, and enjoying the increasing freedom that is earned when we choose to take adult responsibility as opposed to chaining ourselves to youthful pranks and displays of power.  

To grow ourselves, we are indeed obiliged to give birth to ourselves over and over . 

Cutting Edges

One of the things I quickly discovered while cutting this stencil/mask: When cutting your own stencils by hand with an Xacto knife, the edges are really important.  You have to pay careful attention to the intersection of horizontal and vertical cuts.  It isn't enough for them to just meet each other because you risk frayed corners if the edges don't intersect.

Cutting text is good practice.  It helps prepare you for the combined straight and curved lines in artwork.  I could have used purchased stencils, but I wanted the practice.  And I like that I can control the look when I do it myself. In an Art for Elementary School class I took in college, we were told to emphasize to students how much their drawing would improve if they practiced improving printing, script, and penmanship in general.  I think this extends to cutting letters with an Xacto.  If you practice cutting letters, your stencil cutting skills in general will improve by leaps and bounds.

Do you recognize this page?  I started it a while back and posted about it HERE.

The first decision I made when designing the stencil for this page was where I wanted to put it.  This art journal very conveniently has 8-1/2" X 11" pages.  That means that if I cut the area which will receive the paint from a separate piece of printer paper and I position the cuts carefully, the stencil I cut will also successfully mask out the rest of the page.  Once I decided where I wanted the letters, I  drew the letters in a type style that I thought would look good on the page.  Cutting out the letters proved to be quite easy.  

Here are some notes I took to ensure the success of future projects:

• Make sure cuts intersect at corners
• On some curves it's easier to turn the paper than the knife
• Fresh, new blades.  Always.
• Clean, unblemished cutting mat
• No day dreaming!  This is not the time to lapse into the zone!
• Remember, you're pulling the knife, not pushing it.  All cuts are on the pull.

This is page 23 for Marvel: Your Precious Life, an online art journal workshop offered by Kelly Kilmer.  The stenciling exercise is for Stencilry, an online workshop for designing, cutting, and using  stencils.  It's offered by Mary Ann Moss.

I used Liquitex low odor acrylic spray paint in medium magenta for this stencil.  The layer of acrylic spray on top of the printer paper reinforces and strengthens it with a light coating of acrylic polymer.  You end up with the best of both worlds:  A very easy to cut sheet of paper which becomes more durable after it has been sprayed.  

I think the top pic of the stencil cut from the paper is actually pretty cool looking.  I'm sure it will find it's way into another journal page soon.

The First Rule...

...in everything is knowing what to keep and what to throw away.  That includes knowing what to say "yes" to and what to say "no" to.  And what to focus on when you read and which words are just there to hold the others together.  And what to eat all of and what to leave on your plate.  And who to hold hands with and who to run away from.  

They all--everything, that is--begin with an idea, and that idea can be distilled into a "this or that" format.  Once it's this or that, the wisdom is in knowing which to keep and which to throw away.  

A hint:  Never, ever, throw away your freedom to decide.  Always keep that, no matter the cost.

MYPL page 21.

The Everyday Things

The page above is from one of my "Everyday" journals.

I keep several visual journals for different types of things.  A couple of them, like the pages I posted yesterday and the day before, are introspective and deal with thoughts and issues.  This page is more fun/utilitarian.  It's pretty much a chronology of what-happened-when, so it's on the lighter side.  Every once in a while a particularly heavy day will creep into the book and I'll let loose.  But for the most part, it's just a who, what, where, when, why.  

If you're interested, you can see the covers and the binding by clicking HERE.

Here's one more page from this book.  

A card in a magazine I was flipping through inspired my St. Lucy, so I had to draw her.  I was on an art date with my friend Rita and the only plain paper I had with me was a sketchbook that was not meant for water media, as you might be able to tell from the scratched up fibers in the background.  Once I figured this out, I decided to collage St. Lucy and outline her with my Rapidosketch.  This worked much better.  

All the pages in this book were pieced together from various papers and images before the signatures were sewn into the book.  The duck and cranberries (they're really jelly candies, but let's pretend they're cranberries...) on the page at the top were already there when the book was bound months ago.  So were the papers and the red bench in the second picture.  It happens so often that what's already on the page lends itself perfectly to the theme of the day.  It isn't planned.  It just happens that way.  

Adding Stitches

 

Just playing.  I wanted to see how hard it would be to add some hand stitching to something in a spiral sketchbook without ripping out the page.  Not difficult at all.  

Doodling The Clock

This evening was the final teleconference for the Creating Time Mega Event launching the book Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis.  I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in.  

In each of the three events, we've doodled clocks.  Instructions were to take moments instead of taking notes.  So I recorded the pregnant pauses as well as the salient points while I looked for the metaphors.  I listened intently, watched a video, composed a group poem, and adjourned to small groups twice for discussions.  All this over a period of an hour and a half, all the while doodling my clock and taking notes moments.  

At the end of the webinar, I was surprised.  I really hadn't looked at the paper I was doodling on in the process.  I was on autopilot, expanding time by layering my activity, my attention heightened and present for listening, moment taking, doodling, and coloring, all at once and equally present, all happing at once within the same moment in time.  

Who says time isn't pliable as putty?  Here's what I discovered I had done by the end of the evening: Not a piece of art, but a cohesive collection of ideas, colors, pattern, and metaphor.  A surprising outcome for someone who was present in so many places at the time the drawing was taking place.  

Quite different from multi-tasking, this was a free act of letting the hand do it's work while the brain watched and listened.  The words "Creating Time" and the date were added afterward.  Everything else was done while participating in the event.  

So I wanted to take the time to share this with you, and let you know that I highly recommend the book, Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. It's filled with insights, activities and wisdom from the more than 80 artists, creatives, authors and other luminaries who contributed to this effort.  Yesterday was its release date on amazon.com and it hit #1 in sales in numerous categories.  I'm not surprised.  

If you're interested -- and who wouldn't be? -- in celebration of the book's overwhelming success on it's first day of release, the special offer I mentioned in yesterday's post has been extended until April 24. You can find out more by clicking HERE to read yesterday's blog post, or by clicking HERE to sign up for the offer itself.  There are more than $125 worth of fabulous and absolutely free items and perks, just for buying a book you'd want to own anyway.  I know, because I took advantage of it and spent hours downloading all the fabulous morsels and tidbits, which include e-books, online courses, audio recordings and more.  Really.  What are you waiting for?  This isn't a sales pitch, it's my own personal opinion.  As they say, you snooze, you loose, so go for it!

SDC-36

It has been ages since I answered a challenge, but today when I saw my friend Willy's beautiful page, and she mentioned the Stampotique Designers Challenge to alter a book page using Stampotique Stamps, I couldn't resist.  

I won't go into tons of boring detail, but suffice it to say that my relationship with Stampotique goes back a bit.  I made my first handbound book at a Stampotique workshop, and I've been making books ever since.  

For her 12th birthday, my daughter asked me if she and a handful of her more serious arty friends could do make 'n takes at Stampotique.  I was amazed, and so happy when Carol said "Yes".  Thanks to Carol and artist Amy Wilson Wellenstien, those kids seriously worked for an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon when the shop was usually closed, and came home with some wonderful completed projects.   The girls are 20 now, and still talk about how much fun they had!

So here's my altered page.  It's from a book on Bavaria, and I decided that Head, Bob, and their balloons needed to be in this picture.

If you're a fan of Stampotique Stamps, I'm sure you'll recognize the two Daniel Torrente stamps: "Head", and "Bob's In Time Out", as well as "Star Balloon" by artist Susan Mahoney.  

Toxic Air

A couple of inches are missing from the bottom of these pages, and there's quite a bit of information there.  But you can still get a fairly good idea of what the spread looks like from this scan.  It's a fairly large book and the lighting just isn't good enough to photograph indoors.  I fit what I could onto the scanner.

This type of page satisfies me more than any other.  Many layers of seemingly unrelated images and words coming together out of nowhere, then resolved to the point where it all makes sense.   Well, maybe not sense to you, but perfect sense to me.  

The third or fourth layer consists of brown doodles.  Another example of raw art.  I mentioned Quinn McDonald's Raw Art Journaling workshop in yesterday's post, HERE.  Go take a look for more information, then join us!

Over The Weekend. Day 10

Fooled around with the smaller, inside pages in the middle of the first signature of my HandBook for FTB, and Traci Bunkers 30 Days Of Get Your Art On.  

So this is cute, and kind of silly.  Sometimes when you need a break, it's fun and relaxing just to color.  I did, so I did.  And I feel much better now.

The HandBook is too large to fit on my scanner, but because these were inside pages, they fit.  You can't see a lot of what's around and behind it, but that's OK.  

I've decided that I'm not shooting with indoor light ever again.  Ha!  I said ever, which is the same as never, and means that I probably will.  But seriously, if it wont scan, I've got to shoot it in the late morning shade where the shadows are almost non-existent.  Otherwise the grain is horrible.  Sorry camera.  I just don't understand you, but PhotoShop, you're my friend.  

Eyes On Tuesday

A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with someone I've known since high school.  Both of us studied art in college, and we've kept in touch, but only off-and-on.  She saw some of the art journals I've kept over the past year or two, and after a long period of silence she said, "It looks like you've been having fun.  So when are you planning to get back to yourself?"

I was a bit taken aback.  After all, I'm "myself" every day, and nothing I do is inauthentic, and I told her so.  She agreed with me, but said, "I was referring to YOUR work, the stuff you did before you started looking at what everyone else is doing."  

This took me a step or two farther back, because I'm a hugh advocate of developing myself out of boxes by looking around me.  A minute later, I got it.  A few years ago, I was in a rut.  Not a serious rut, because I wasn't blocked and there was no lack of subject matter I wanted to tackle.  My rut was that I was using one or two mediums almost exclusively, and I wanted to stretch myself as far as I could, out of the box, so I started playing with blog challenges and developed a huge repertoire of media and techniques.  Then I began some serious play!  And I haven't stopped.  Nor do I intend to.  But for all my playing, mixing and doodling, I stopped drawing from life.  And this is the difference between my art journals of today, and my sketchbooks of yesteryear.

Late edit:  These are two separate pages in a two page spread, and eyes from two entirely different people.  With the eyes facing, the scan makes this look like a mis-matched pair, but it makes sense on the actual journal pages.

Make no mistake!  I plan to keep on keeping on with every technique and group of collage elements that I've fallen in love with!  But I'm feeling the need to round things out a bit, so today begins my sketch journal.  Nothing fancy, just a kraft cover lined moleskine notebook, some pencils, a rapidograph and some gouache.   My friend was right.  Somehow, after today's pages, I feel so much more grounded than I have in months, and before today, I hadn't really noticed that anything was missing...except that I was a bit more restless than usual...and now that's gone!

I decided to scan these pages before they're journaled so that I'll be sure to include every uncensored word that pops into my head, but before they're truly finished, they'll be worded-up for sure!

 

A Story Of Sovereignty

A passion for stories has accompanied me throughout my life, side by side with drawing and painting.  A friend of mine once said affectionately, "Barbara is like the 4th little pig.  Her house is not made of straw or wood or bricks, her house is built of books."  This two-page journal spread was inspired by the Arthurian story of The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell.  

What is it that women desire above all else?

Had Dame Ragnell not given King Arthur the answer to this question, he would have lost his head to Sir Gromer.  In exchange for the answer, Arthur had to convince Sir Gawain to agree to marry the Dame Ragnell, who was cursed to be the ugliest hag on the face of the earth.  Sir Gawain said that he would do that easily to save his king.  The answer Dame Ragnell gave to Sir Gromer's question was sovereignty. 

 

On their wedding night, Ragnell behaved like a beast, then teased Gawain for a kiss.  Instead of recoiling, he told her that as her husband, he would give her so much more.  Instantly, she became beautiful.  Then she gave him a choice:  She could be beautiful by day, or beautiful by night.  Instead of making the choice, Sir Gawain acknowledged her sovereignty.  He answered, "My lady, the choice is yours."  With her sovereignty affirmed by the one who was loyally bound to her, Dame Ragnell announced that she would be beautiful all the time, that the ugly spell was broken because "A  husband granted me, of his own free will, sovereignty to choose what I wish for myself."  

The lesson:  Ugliness turns to beauty when one's sovereignty is affirmed.

My journal pages quote from an article by Trebbe Johnson in the winter 2010-2011 issue of Parabola magazine.  The article confused the stories of the wedding of Gawain and Ragnell with the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the spirit of the article was entirely true.

And so, myth has far less to do with retelling fictions, with imaginary people, places and things.  It is much more a vessel of the information necessary to a whole, functioning and integrated life, both personal and communal.  In this sense, myth is history, non-fiction, and an accurate portrait of the psyche and mores of the society that gave birth to its stories.  As with any art, myth is at once a portrait of the artist, a snapshot of the zeitgeist in which it was created, and as such, an accurate predictor of things to come, if only one can accurately read its symbols.

The Final Step

In her post on Friday, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer went into delicious detail in text and photos as she composed her spread of journal pages, step by step.  Click HERE to see them.  Something she said in her post struck a chord:

 "One of the things that I so enjoy about art journaling every day is the sense of a project building.  I have a bad tendency to be a "finish it now" person.  I have zero patience.  Doing little bits every day allows ideas to percolate and themes to emerge and forces me to let go of control."

I've been immersed in Strathmore Workshop I, and like everyone else involved, I worked my journal page in steps.  Step 4, the final result, is below.  

 

Like most everyone, I followed the steps and the stages that were outlined in Pam Carriker's workshop.  But it didn't get past me how many people complained about how long it was taking, how many steps were involved, how it wasn't as quick as they were used to or comfortable with.  And it set me thinking about my own habits.  How I work.

It helps to have lots and lots of time, but in my life, it isn't realistic to think it can come in one sitting.  Some things take time to develop.  Precious, glorious time. Regardless of the "make it in a minute"s  that are out there in droves, some things need to be nurtured and coaxed into being.  Deserve to be.

So why does taking time and developing work in stages, strike such fear in the hearts of artists? I encounter it all the time.  People who are afraid of somehow overworking their pieces.  It's true that overworking can occur in sensitive drawings where conservation of line is paramount, but in truth, very few paintings, almost no collage, and certainly no mixed media are ever in danger of overwork.  Most are underworked, with shadow still waiting to be painted in, painted out, or just corrected.  Or color, or composition, or line, shape, detail, or variation developed.  

The truth is, we tend to fall in love with our work in it's unfinished stages and want to call it done.  Like Gollum's ring, it becomes our "Precious", and it holds us in thrall, keeping us from making progress and developing something really wonderful.  Also, we are impatient, and art and impatience are like oil and water.  Except that even oil and water can be emulsified.  Art and impatience are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and never the twain shall meet.

So here's what I do.  I plan it all in stages.  Many unplanned stages.  What?  Planned, unplanned?  Yes.  Go take a look at Julie's pages.  The ones I mentioned at the beginning of my post.  The link is HERE.  You'll get the idea when you see how she divides her pages into sections of time and content. 

The key is not to be clingy-needy with your work.  It's OK to think it's awful in certain stages, and sometimes it's necessary for the piece to get downright ugly before it can develop.  Lots of under-shading is awful looking until the top layers are added, but without that ugliness, there would be no depth.  And if you still don't believe me, take a look at how today's piece developed. What it looked like in its last three stages, some of them really awful, but necessary.      

     

ArtiphyTheSoul

Get ready....it's coming soon.  In the meantime, here's a preview:

Mandala One

 

Step Three: Putting The Color Back

I heard the snickers when I posted step two.  They were expected.  Invited, even.  Whisperings of, "Wow, that got flat," and "Who's got the nerve to tell her how much worse it looks?"  So let me ask this:  have you ever seen anyone just after a freshly cleaned and shining face, and then a minute later, immediately following the initial layer of matte foundation?  Perhaps your own reflection in the mirror?  Or the face of a significant other?  What does it look like -- before the addition of color, contour and tone?  Has the pink yellowed out a bit?  Become slightly chalky?  Lost it's vibrance? Flattened in tone?  Is that not expected and necessary in a base for corrected color?

Here's step three. It isn't finished, just getting there with the addition of texture and corrected color on top of it's neutralizing underpainting of lights and shadow.

To refresh your memory, pics of steps one and two are below, as well as original artwork from my journal page which was photocopied to use as the base.  For more about the process, click HERE for step one, and HERE for step two.

       

Some Things Are Worth Repeating

A couple of days ago, I showed you a page I colored from Tammy Vitale's Wylde Women Coloring Book.  You can click HERE to see the original post, but here's a thumbnail to refresh your memory. 

If you want to see it bigger you can click on it.  But I'm keeping it small because there's another version of this that you just have to see, and see it big!  

Carol, whose blog  Swallowcliff's Art  is full of beautiful and wonderful things, chose to color this page with fabric!  You can click HERE to see her original post, and you really should click to see her pic, and to read about her process, which she so generously shares with her blog readers.  

Carol used reverse applique and some of the yummiest fabrics on the planet to make this piece, which measures about the size of a sheet of paper.   She's given me permission to post about it and to show it to you here, so feast your eyes on this!

Fabulous, isn't it?   Anything this amazing needs to be seen, and commented on.  So get yourself over to Swallowcliff's Art and leave Carol a comment to tell her how wonderful this is!  And while you're there, take a look at her adorable Dotees!  

Also, don't forget to stop by Tammy Vitale's website to get your own pages to color, which she so generously offers as a free download.

Enjoy yourself!