"Artify": To make arty; To imbue and beautify with art. "Heart": The center or inner core of one's being. Thus, to "ArtiphyTheHeart" is to imbue the inner core of one's existance with the beauty of art.
I'm a curious and creative explorer of the world, currently working in book arts, collage, mixed media, fiber arts and acrylics. Each day I try to share a snippet of my life and musings through a piece of artwork, and every once in a while I spice it up with a pinch of practical wisdom.
From time to time throughout history, a discussion about the function of art resurfaces. I personally believe that art is above function. It needs nothing to justify its existence. But there is no denying that art can be used in many ways and can have many functions. Making a statement is one of the ways that art can be used functionally.
This is page five in my Swatches journal, a tiny handbound book made from pieces of discarded library books. This page which I worked on top of had been part of a discarded children's encyclopedia. The entry was "plantation". I had already cut out the red dress and the white flower, grabbed some pieces of shreded washi tape, and was painting out the background when the picture emerged of the plantation owner sitting on a bench smoking a pipe while a slave labored over a barrel. I looked for a Lincoln stamp and found one. Then it all came together fairly quickly.
Sometimes when you least expect it, the pages themselves have a story to tell or a statement to make.
The necklace and heart are dimensional resin stickers, and have been included as part of my plan to use at least one sticker per page in this book.
This is page two in my Swatches journal. None of the pages in this tiny book are the same size or shape. That means that parts of both previous pages and next pages, peek through from behind the smaller pages. This creates a puzzle for photographing them as individual pages because in the book, each page becomes part of the artwork of the greater whole. While they are pages of journaled mixed-media collage in their own right, as a book, they are not separate from one another, but parts of many different pieces.
I decided to scan each page solo, without the surroundings you'd see if you were flipping through the book. Maybe later when the book is complete or when lots of pages have been completed, I'll do a quick flip-through video and post it so you can see each page in its natural habitat. But for now, one page at a time.
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.
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.
I'm so excited to begin each and every day. I look forward to absolutely everything. Life wasn't always like this. There were days upon days that I anticipated with boredom and exhaustion. What changed?
Something tiny. A very tiny thought popped into my head one morning while I was making breakfast. I thought that maybe I would enjoy cooking, eating, and after breakfast clean-up quite a bit more if I did something creative with it. So I did.
That morning I rummaged through the fridge and came up with a small handful of veggies that I washed, chopped and added to a dab of melted butter in a skillet before scrambling my eggs. And a pinch or two of spice. Maybe four extra minutes of my time made all the difference, and I really enjoyed breakfast.
During clean-up, I kept a notepad and pencil handy. I thought about what I might make tomorrow and I wrote it down. I even thought about busy mornings on the fly when a piece of toast and Nutella was all I'd have time for. I resolved that on those mornings, I'd use fine china for my tea and toast. Or spread a cloth and have a floor picnic.
Those thoughts took me through the day and here and there I began to write down things that would easily add pleasure to other routines. I thought about adding a flower--just one--to my table every day. And I thought about places to get flowers and about crocheting doilies and all sorts of other things, too. And I wrote them in my notebook. Some weren't practical, but it was fun thinking them up and writing them down.
I thought about expanding this. Seeing every single piece of monotony in my day in a different light. And I thought about driving, and how I hated it. So I resolved to notice one new thing on each and every drive and to remember to write it in my notebook. Once I noticed a shirt on a man standing at a corner. Another time I noticed that the telephone wire running along the outside of a building I always passed was painted blue. Just tiny things. But life started becoming more exciting. I began to look forward to seeing. And I fell in love with thinking up ways to add something playful to every routine.
Some other tiny things that made a big difference were how I turned book reading and film watching--things I've always savored--into an end of the day ritual, and how I purposely skip some days and just keep them open. How I randomly pick a day each week to sip wine or tea in bed while listening to music. How I invite my family to join me, or ask them let me spend my time privately, and what a huge difference voicing an invitation or a desire to be left alone can make, and how it gives a choice to others.
And then, all of a sudden one day I realized that I looked forward to everything. All of it. And the most beautiful thing happened along the way--I have very a hard time now remembering how it felt to be bored.
Both the title of this post and the journal page above have to do with a sense of human flourishing. It has to do with a deeply abiding healthy spirit, and prospering.
The word εὐδαιμονία is often mistranslated as happiness. It isn't about happiness. It's about flourishing without annoying complexities. Prospering in peace.
εὐδαιμονία. It's a good word. It describes what I wrote. I need to go back and add it into my page.
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.
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.
Here's my newest book. I love the square format because it gives the option of working one square page or working rectangular 2 page spreads. Purple is not a color I automatically run to, but I do love it depending on how it is used and I think it worked very well for the outside of the book. Especially with the upholstery fabric I chose for the tapes.
This is a 14 signature book, and while you might think that the inside pages would be purple by looking at the spine, they aren't. I covered the spine of each signature with a special purple tape prior to construction, and with each signature glued to the next, the signature spines are hidden from the inside of the book. When you open the book and flip through it, you see only pages.
Every bit of this book was designed and constructed by hand. The covers are painted and stenciled canvas, hand stretched over hand cut boards. Even the colors were carefully mixed to produce just the right shades of purple and indigo, further enhanced through multiple layer glazing. Each page (to be shown in a later post) was hand-pieced from a carefully chosen array of papers. The tapes were cut, reinforced and edge-stitched.
All these steps took significantly less time than previous books with fewer steps and less attention to detail. Why? Practice! The more you do, the faster and better you become at procducing work of increasing quality.
It pays to jump around, learning and practicing lots and lots of things. I firmly advocate doing and trying as much as is humanly possible and not harmful. But (there's always a caveat), when you find something you love, do it over, and over, and over, and over! Find every possible pleasing variation. Go for quality. Go for numbers. Go for variety. Tweak it. Then tweak it again.
It's good to practice art vertically, building knowledge on top of knowledge, and technique on top of techniqe. But this should never take the place of, or be done at the expense of working laterally. When you find something that you love and that interests you passionately, you must take that thing you love and work again and again, producing variation upon variation, until you've milked the last drop of ingenuity and variety that your heart and soul has to put into it. Then it's time to move on to something else.
Of course this shouldn't be done at the beginning. A foundation of tools, techniques and experience should always precede any serious attempt at a lateral series, unless you don't mind being mediocre. I personally would hate to taste a variety of souflees made by a chef who didn't own a whisk, had no idea how to properly whip air into eggs, and was content to feed his concoctions only to those who didn't know better. But for me personally, I like knowing better. And I enjoy the study, practice, time, patience and experience it requires. I also enjoy people who think it's a valuable thing to acquire these virtues and are passionate about it. But then I enjoy people and art, so enough said!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
One of the things I like best about working in my current art journal/sketchbook is how the pages interact with each other after they're finished. This isn't planned, and it often produces the most beautiful and unexpected combinations.
I particularly like how today's page is off-set by the layers of other pages peeking through. Sometimes it's difficult working with different page sizes, but in the end, it's always rewarding.
Nothing too complex today. I saw a bird ornament at Anthropologie, sketched it on plain notepaper, and glued it into my art journal. I'm thinking of creating a pattern from my sketch, so I added some notes on how I might like to stitch it. Ten days in, and so far I've sketched every day for Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing.
is unputdownable. I work more smoothly when I'm in the middle of really good fiction.
as our guide. 
by Harlan Ellison, and 
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 
