ArtiphyTheHeart

One Page At A Time, For Now

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.  

A Little More Time, And Some Advice For Your Mojo

Here's MYPL page 28 after a little more work.  To compare, you can see the start of this page by clicking HERE.

In the last few posts, I've talked about working in ten minute segments, which was a challenge Kelly Kilmer posted HERE.  But sometimes, even when you have a couple of hours, for whatever reason, things just don't click.  That's when you have to relax and make up your mind to just be happy doing what you can.  

A couple of urgent matters set me almost two hours behind schedule on Thursday, which for me is a real mojo drain.  When I was finally able to get to it, it took all I had just to decide what would come next on this page.  One thing I was sure I wanted to do was construct a bridge to unify the top stenciled portion of the page with the image of the planetary surface on the bottom.  I let my brain rest with that thought while I chose a neutral colored architectural element that would compliment the scrolling lines of the stencil, and freehand cut another piece to use on the right side for balance.  After that, it was fairly easy for my mind to conjure a border design that would echo parts of the top element and repeat it across the page.  

I penned the negative lettering of the page's theme, and decided to put the date at the top.  Just as I was making the date lines thicker, I was interrupted with news of three--yes three--serious traffic accidents which were backing up traffic with lengthy projected delays, and all of them on the route I would be taking to where I needed to be next.  I had to leave immediately to take another, longer route which would get me where I needed to be.   So the pen stopped moving and things were packed up and put away so I could head out the door.  

Two hours was less than half the time scheduled for artwork on Thursdays.  And usually, after two hours of work I have much more to show for it.  But the time I spent was productive.  In those two hours, decisions were made, problems were solved, and the general direction of the page began to emerge.  

This was the opposite of accomplishing much in ten minutes.  It was accomplishing less than usual in two hours.  But the level of satisfaction and accomplishment were equal.  As I said in this post HERE: 

Feeling accomplished cannot be measured by time or weight.  It's only measure is satisfaction.

With all the curves thrown that I had to catch and pitch back throughout the day, it was just as satisfying as if I'd finished a hundred pages.  So I'll add "number" to my sentence above.  Here's my revised declaration:

Feeling accomplished cannot be measured by time, weight, or number.  It's only measure is satisfaction.  

And here's what I have to say about my day, especially the early hours which kicked my muse out the door and exploded my mojo to smithereens:  

Even when your muse has abandoned you and your mojo is shattered beyond repair; Even when after too much time looking and too much time thinking, you still don't know what to do, there's one answer to heals all artistic wounds.  Touch your materials.  Just that.  Get them onto the table, pick them up, and turn them around.  Draw anything.  Glue anything.  Things can always be glued on top.  Or paint anything.Things can always painted over.  Write anything.  Things can always be glued, painted or written over.  Just touch the things you work with.  Then use them with no outcome in mind.  Your muse will immediately get jealous that you're working without her.  Your mojo will pull itself together instantly because it can't stand to be left out of a creative adventure.  Especially one that starts out without any particular destination in mind.  

Just do it.  It's magic!

 

Another Ten Minute Start

This is the first ten minutes of work on what will become MYPL page 28.  I chose and positioned the images to collage, then chose a couple of my stenciled papers, photocopied them onto the paper I wanted to use in my journal and cut them to size, then glued the pieces in place.  

 

That's all for this ten minute stretch.  If you're interested in learning more about working in ten minute intervals, click HERE.

 

I'm loving the new Liquitex Acrylic spray paints.  I used them for the stenciled papers used on this page.  I've used them with and without stencils, and I'd rather work with them than with any other sprays I've tried.  I've been using Liqutex acrylics since college and they've never disappointed me.  I prefer them the other brands I've tried, and I'm glad for that because the sprays are the same paint as the other Liquitex acrylics so the colors are exact matches.  Liquitex acrylic markers will be in the stores soon.  Cross your fingers for me.  I'm hoping they'll send me some to work with.  

 

In the meantime, I have two 6 to 10 hour days of artwork in a row coming up tomorrow and Friday. This page will get more tomorrow.  I'll post my progress, so visit often and let me know what you think.

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 . 

More Simple Pleasures

From time to time I post about my simple pleasures.  This not-so-simple journal page filled with layers of my stenciled prints contains a list of some of my favorite simple pleasures.  

Tea always heads the list, and the page with it's tie-dye colors reminds me of an old hippie coffee house where good whole leaf teas are stored in air-tight containers and brewed fresh, pot by pot and cup by cup.

Next on the list is birdsong.  I live where the birds spend their winters.  There's nothing more pleasant than waking up in a warm, quiet room with a window cracked open for fresh air, and the first sounds of the day coming from a choir of birds.

Two more of my favorite simple pleasures are tide pools, and just breathing deeply.

This is MYPL page 25.  I've incorporated many stenciled prints using Liquitex acrylic spray paint for Stencilry.  The tea photo is a print of the photograph in yesterday's post which you can see by clicking HERE.

The Truth About Can't

I was blessed to grow up with parents who eschewed limiting ideas and behaviours.  

I remember coming home from kindergarten and complaining to my father that Kathy D. told me I couldn't do something on the playground.  "You can't do that," she said.  

And my father answered very simply and quietly, "That's ignorance.  When someone says you can't do something, they're just showing what they don't know.  There is no can't".  

So I told my father, "Tomorrow I'm going to go back and tell her that you said I can." 

And he answered, "No.  That won't do.  It's about ignorance, so she won't understand.  She'll argue, and that's no good.  Let it always be enough that you know you can.  Just go about your business and ignore the can'ts.  Life is full of them.  You need to let them be and just keep going.  If you pay attention to the cant's, you won't see the cans."

It wasn't about defying authority.  I knew the difference between can't and shouldn't, or may not.  It was about CAN.  And being told that I should quietly go about knowing that I can, made all the difference.  It gave me the motivation to learn new, difficult things and the patience to wait for things.  Why rush just to give up?  Especially when you know that you CAN.  So what if it isn't today?  You CAN.  

I learned a third exercise that many people don't think to do.  People think to stretch their bodies, and people think to stretch their intellect.  But most people don't think to stretch their capabilities.  Even if they don't know it, they're stuck with the question, "Can I?  Will I be able to?  Until you answer that question with a yes, you're a member of the billions club.  You're part of the billions of people that don't try until they're sure that they can.  They don't know if they can, and they're afraid to try until they know.

I learned the answer to that question in kindergarten, but that doesn't make me special.  Anyone can learn it anytime they want to.

(This pic above is page 24 from MYPL.  The stencil is from yesterday's post, HERE)

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.

Stenciled and Sprayed

Last week I received a box in the mail containing 14 colors of the new Liquitex acrylic spray paints.  But I was too sick to rip open the box.  If you know me, you know that I will never let a box sit unopened.  I'll rip and tear until I've found every item.  Finally today I felt well enough to shred the box to get to the paints inside, and I spent several glorious hours familiarizing myself with the contents.

After setting up a make-shift spraying station outside, I took a large sheet of paper and three of the transparent colors:  Quinacridone Crimson, Phthalocyanine Blue (green shade), Yellow Medium Azo, plus Raw Sienna (opaque).  I wanted to see how these would layer, mix, and blend together before moving on to the opaque colors.  

The pic above is most of the left side of a 17" X 11" sheet of practice paper.  Not the good stuff.  Just 68# cover from an office supply.  But it held up remarkably well, and it helped that it was a very bright white.

The pic below is most of the right side of the sheet.  If you look closely, you'll notice that much of this side contains off-load prints from the stencils themselves.  One of the nice things about the acrylic sprays is that the paint remains open long enough to get a good reverse print, unlike enamel sprays which dry permanently almost instantly.  The paint is quick drying, but like all acrylics, it is water soluble while wet, and permanent when dry.

I'm looking forward to becoming more familiar with holding the can, setting my distance from the paper, and learning how to direct the spray to maximize the desired results.  There are a variety of caps available for the cans which produce different effects of spray, and I can't wait to try them out.  But for today, the goal was to watch how the spray hits the paper and pay attention to layering and blends, so I grabbed a handful of stencils and didn't pay too much attention to anything other than how the paint reacted to the paper, and to the other colors.

I think heavy-handedness, and a tendency to hold the can too close to the paper must be a beginner's hurdle.  I had to learn to stand back farther and spray less aggressively.  

This is something I've been wanting to explore for years, but my lungs couldn't take the odor of spray enamels.  When Liquitex introduced their line of low-odor acrylic paint sprays, I was overjoyed!  Presently the sprays are available in 100 hues which are exact matches to the other Liquitex acrylics, and I can't wait to use the sprays together with the heavy bodied and fluid acrylics.

For some guidance in using the sprays and in cutting my own stencils, I've signed on to Mary Ann Moss's "Stencilry" class.  It's an older online class, no longer live, but all the information is available in videos and .pdf format, and several other friends have decided to play along.  It's great to have a group when you're learning something new, and this is really very new to me.  If you'd like to join us, we're learning each at our own pace, but together.  No rush.  For more information, click HERE. The class now comes bundled with a second class: "Stitched and Stenciled", so it's a two-for.  Join us!  The more the merrier, and I think you'll have fun!

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.

Without Limits

I'm working my way back and forth between various journals, taking a short break from the Connections journal that I've been showing in blog posts the past few days.  

This is page 17 in Marvel: Your Precious Life.  It has to do with some of my childhood aspirations for adulthood, and nothing at all to do with fashion models.  More than anything, I aspired to a life without limitations.  Not without reasonable boundaries.  There is a difference.  I was taught from an early age to beware of people who say "can't," and to positively reject those who dare to say, "you can't".  

Page 3

This third page in my Connections journal is my absolute favorite so far.  Like the others, it's unfinished.  Just the bare bones of collage to start the process, along with a bit of photo tinting.  

I'm too tired for words tonight, so I'll leave you with this and share more later.  To see other pages in this book, you can click HERE, HERE and HERE.

Alchemy

This is page one in my Connections journal, but only the barest of beginnings of a page.  If you're interested, you can read a little more about the book and see the inside cover HERE.  

I may or may not show this page again when it's been a little further down the line, but I wanted to show it at this stage to point out how easy it is to turn one thing into something completely different just by making tiny changes here and there.

For instance, the center photo was black and white and glossy.  I removed the gloss and gave it an uneven sepia tint with walnut ink.  Darker here, lighter there.  

The paper top left was a light cream color.  What now looks like a lighter design was quite a bit darker than the background.  Brushing on walnut ink unevenly, stained and darkened everything but the design which resisted the ink, so now the design appears lighter.  Nothing more than that.  

The lettering was fun.  I did that by myself.  But the flowers--bottom left--were stamped with plain, black ink.  Adding a bit of the blue from the letters at the top turned the flowers into something completely new altogether.  

Alchemy!

Now the fun will be in adding more and more layers, making it uniquely personal, tying it all together, and turning it into something more than a composed grid.  

Abracadabra!

The Human Condition

Some bullet points from the week past:

• Working a lot.  
• Furtive attempts at decoding life--conditons of, and related to. Not the genome.  
• Solving problems, making repairs, and tying loose ends.  

Nothing bad, nothing good, just living the human condition.  

 

Anchored

One of the principles of graphic design is that elements on a page need to be anchored.  Interior design dictates that nothing in a room should appear to be floating.  

Pieces need to be anchored.  

Yet some people seem to think it's blissful to float through situations, and often through life in general.   I don't think so. In my opinion, it isn't much of a life unless it's deliberately lived, and to combat inertia, one must discover and employ the things that keep one anchored.  Only then can you decide when it's appropriate to soar.  

When you fly, choose to fly unfettered.  Random floating not allowed.

Canvas Book

Here's a look at a canvas book I constructed during an in-person workshop with Kelly Kilmer several years ago.  I thought I'd show it to you because it's one of my favorite books.  Really delightful to hold. It measures 6-1/4" X 7-3/4".  A pic would be better, but the lighting right now is awful, so I scanned it to get truer colors.

I painted the pages before binding the book.  On the left is the inside cover with the first page on the right.  The front cover actually folds over to create a pocket on the inside cover, which one of these days I'll probably stitch closed, top and bottom.  The back cover does the same.

This is the whole book, flared-out butterfly style, with the back cover on the left, the spine in the middle, and the front cover on the right. Not a great scan because of the shadows on the left (the blurring is in the scan, not on the book), but this will give you an idea of how I created the spine by stenciling over the center of the canvas in black.  It's sewn with a simple running stitch, one signature, pamphlet style.

I use a lot of canvas when I bind books, and I use it in many different ways.  Here are a few links to other blog posts where I've used canvas in bookbinding:

I used painted and stenciled canvas to cover the boards for this book:  http://artiphytheheart.typepad.com/artiphytheheart/2012/06/lateral-purple.html

I did the same thing here, except instead of stenciling by stippling paint, I slathered tinted modeling gel over the stencil to create the dimensional squares:  http://artiphytheheart.typepad.com/artiphytheheart/2012/01/a-handbound-book-start-to-finish.html

I used painted canvas for the spine of this book: http://artiphytheheart.typepad.com/artiphytheheart/2011/07/my-18x-book.html

If you scroll down past the first book in this post, there is a second book.  On the second book I used pieces of painted and stamped canvas as panels on the front and back covers: 

http://artiphytheheart.typepad.com/artiphytheheart/2010/12/orange-.html

 

I painted a piece of primed canvas for this little book, figured out where the spine would be when I wrapped it around the boards, then stenciled the spine in black using a plastic doily as a stencil.  It's one of my favorites: 

http://artiphytheheart.typepad.com/artiphytheheart/2010/07/integration.html

 

There are others, but these will give you an idea of how I use primed canvas in bookbinding.  Feel free to look around the blog.  You may find some I've forgotten about.