"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.
Writers often use prompts and time limits to warm-up or unblock. I do much the same thing when I draw. I give myself a time limit. Usually 30 minutes. Then I pick a short story that I have already read, re-read a page or two, and illustrate what I've read. Roughly. Very roughly. I like to use panels, and I like to make the narrative part of each panel.
I rarely illustrate an entire story, but I do use a separate panel for each individual thought without skipping around or editing the text, even if I've chosen only a page or two.
The time limit keeps the sketches as ideas as opposed to artwork. Depicting ideas pictorially without the constraints of correct technique or finishing touches keeps the work clean and abstract. Mistakes are not considered mistakes. They are part of the exercise and stay put (note the two m's in Hemingway).
It's easier to move on to more sophisticated work when you begin with something clean and clear that helps you see instantly what to keep, what to add or replace, and what to throw away.
It's like warming up at the piano before a concert. My daughter plays, and she often warms up with the Goldberg Variations (see video below), playing them excruciatingly slowly at first, no matter how many times she has played them before. For me, this is similar to a piano warm-up, except that I keep it simple and quick by limiting my time and choices.
Yesterday I promised to post a page from one of my sketchbooks, so here you are. One of my watercolor heart milagros. I love milagros and I have sketchbooks filled with them. Especially heart milagros. I keep lots of dedicated sketchbooks, and I have a special sketchbook filled only with milagros del corazon.
I browse all sorts of places looking for special milagros. When I find one that speaks to me personally, I usually make a quick sketch with color notes then finish it in studio. Sometimes I snap a pic--if photographs are allowed. Especially if I'm in a hurry or if there are lots of them I like. Then I work from the pics when I'm with my materials.
I end up with pages and pages of resolved sketches of single items. Charms. Little miracles. A pleasant exercise without the bother of backgrounds or composition.
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.
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!
I'm two pages away from finished with the collage templates from Kelly Kilmer'sRevel 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!
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!
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.
Yesterday I decided to remake a page. Actually, I do this almost every day. It isn't about whether or not I like what's on the page, it's about putting what I happen to want on the page today, and reconciling that with what's already there. I could start with a blank page. In fact, I do that all the time. I've heard people say that blank pages can be intimidating. I've also heard people say that pages with too much stuff on them can be confusing. Since I'm neither intimidated nor confused, it really doesn't matter to me whether the page is blank, or full. Either way, to me it's a just substrate.
Here's the semi-finished product--semi-finished, because it hasn't been written upon yet. The pages are really not wonderful until they've been written on, so this one still has a long way to go.
The page was remade primarily with paint, and a pine tree that I drew and carved into a stamp several years ago. "Road-tested" was clipped from a magazine and used as-is. "High Altitude" was constructed from white rub-on letters on top of a piece of black magazine paper cut to fit the top. The road and date were drawn onto the page with a Rapidograph and Inda ink.
For remade pages, much of the the beauty is simply that what's under the finished product lends so much to the final outcome, both texturally, and in meaning, that the page wouldn't at all have been the same if what's underneath hadn't been there in the first place.
Here's what was underneath the page above when I started:
If you look closely, and maybe squint, you can see some of the dots and part of that smilely face underneath the finshed page. I didn't remove a thing. Even the brown grid tape was laid on top of the pink tape that was already there, which added to the color of the tape layer on top.
I use art journals and sketchbooks to stretch my creative muscles. Sometimes that means sketching out plans. Sometimes it means glueing-in a lot of things that please me. Things which might contain elements I'll want to use in a finished piece later. Sometimes it's all about color, and making notes.
This particular book was made for Mary Ann Moss'sFull Tilt Boogie workshop, and I've been working in it since mid-summer. I'm using it to stretch my conscious creative decision making. I say conscious, because so many of the decisions we make are habitual and shortcut the thought process. This book is full of pages patched together alongside full blank pages, alongside pages with other elements added. If you'd like to see what the book looked like just after it was created and before I started working on the pages, there's a flip-through you can see by clicking HERE and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
Speaking of other elements, I drew some of those today to use later. I've used quite a few frames on other pages of this book, and really like how they can be used to confine and define select words and design elements, so I drew a couple of funky frames with a wide-tipped Sharpie to have on hand for future pages, one on plain paper, and one on patterned.
That takes care of Days 8 and 9 of Traci Bunker's 30 Days of Drawing. A great incentive to keep pencil to paper, and to post about it. It's not too late to join the challenge.
For days six and seven of Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing, I've used the same inspiration piece. The short story is that every Thursday my friend Rita and I try to meet for coffee and drawing, and last Thursday, Rita was drawing an owl that I fell in love with. You can click HERE to see Rita's owl. Her inspiration was an artificial sweetener ad from a magazine. When she finished, and I continued to "Ooooh" and "Ahhhh" over her drawing, she handed me the ad and said, "Take it home with you and do it yourself. Just be sure to bring it back with you next week. It will be fun to see the differences in our drawings." It sounded like a great idea to me, so I started playing around with it on day six, and here's what I came up with:
Techinically, he isn't finished, but I might just leave him as is. I'm really happy with the way he's peeking out from the spine of my art journal/sketchbook.
I decided to take the process a little further today. You can click HERE to see my Day Seven drawing. Since it's a mandala, I posted it to ArtiphyTheSoul. Amazing what all can be done with variations on a theme, and I'm ready to take this even further and use it in other ways, as well. Maybe experiment with the general patterns using other colors, added textures and different subject matter.
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And for those of you who are interested, I posted a commentary on artistic productivity to ArtiPhacts today. You can read it by clicking HERE.
There are more components to making art than most people are aware of. Encapsulated within each component of the process is the entire process itself, in much the same way that the entire plant is contained within the seed.
Drawing is so much more than skill with pen on paper that the skill with pen on paper is often dwarfed in comparison to the rest of the process. The choices to be made are first and foremost. What paper: Plain? painted? patterned? photograph, etc.? What medium: Pencil? ink? paint/type of paint? crayon? pastel, etc.? What will the first mark be? Where will it be made? Will it be from the imagination? Or from a model? How much to add? When to stop? What to take away? Positve space? Negative space? Photorealisim? Realistic? Abstract? Whimsy? Serious? Color? Grayscale? Lighting? Collage/placement? ...the list goes on, and it is endless. Many of these decisions are automatic; some are consciously thought out, sometimes easily, sometimes in agony.
Today's drawing is illustrative of a movie I saw and loved. Nightwatch. It's a Russian horror film, and a youtube video of the trailer follows. If you are disturbed by horror movies, don't watch the video. But if you love great special effects and are a fan of well acted, well scripted, beautifully lit, and beautifully fimed intensity, then this may be for you. I won't tell you anything about it. One person's description is another person's spoiler, and I hate spoilers.
As for my drawing, it's in the art journal/sketchbook that will be finished at the close of 2011. Some of the decisions I made for this drawing were as follows:
grayscale
photographs
deep green background paper
Rapidograph and India ink
Bats as stylized "V"s and other marks drawn around the roof tops of the photo on the left
"Night Watch" as two words in all caps drawn by inking-in the negative space of a rectangle
I'm participating in Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing. There's room for everyone in this challenge, and I can guarantee that whatever you draw, you'll be better for it. Click the link and join us!
Day three of Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing. Rapidograph, sepia Micron, and gray Pitt pens on an ex-library page in my Hand Book. Just by coincidence, the last page in this book will be finished on the 31st of December, and I'll be starting a new book on January first. If that's not serendipity, nothing is!
I have three new books in various stages of binding. Two will be filled with white mixed-media paper, and the third with Full Tilt Boogie style signatures. I'll post pics of all three soon.
For day two of Traci Bunkers 30 Days of Drawing, some smudged little fishie doodles. They look great on paper, but on a computer screen the smudging translates as blurring, so it's best viewed while squinting. Sort of Escheresque...not quite a tesselation, but close.
Smudged India ink on patterned paper in an art journal/sketchbook.
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!
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 
