Arting with Friends

A year ago, my friend Ellen (above) and I took an encaustic class from Ellen Koment

in the Paseo Arts District here in Oklahoma City.  It was a long hot two days.

We learned a lot. 

And then, because we didn't use it right away, we forgot a LOT. 

So yesterday Ellen came over and we practiced, practiced, practiced.

And if you know either Ellen or me, you know we talked and talked and talked.

But that really helped us be loose in our experimentation.

(More on the experiments at the bottom of the post.)

Here's the only piece I made from scratch and finished.

Well, I'm not quite sure if it's done.  I think so but . . .

Makes me think of grapes for some reason

(maybe cuz I am ALWAYS hungry?  LOL)

The next piece is one I started in class and didn't like.

So when I first whipped up my batch of encaustics, I covered it in white.

And I still didn't like it!

So I scraped and dug and put green wax in the cuts, scraped some more, etc, etc, etc.

Still didn't like it!

So yesterday I pulled it out and covered it in black.

Then I scraped in a tree which I filled with gold.

A lot more scraping and torching and this came out.

I like it.  But it's nothing like what I usually do.

Which can be a very good thing some times.

Ellen and I had so much fun! 

By the end of the day, I think she was as in love with scraping as me. 

I'm telling you, it is soooooooooooo relaxing ~ even contemplative. 

And I'm pretty sure she'll be buying a kitchen torch soon. 

They are so much less intimidating than those big old tank things. 

And easier to control. 

My friend Roz loaned me her torch but I'm going to wait to use it til I do something BIG! 

You see, I am deathly afraid of fire and I burn myself all the time in the kitchen. 

Yeah, I'm a little confused as to why wax is my favorite medium. 

Talk about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone!

In my last post I mentioned I was working on 3 art group projects.

This year we're doing a round robin of boxes.  Very cool. 

When they're all done, I'll share pictures.

In addition, every month the hostess gives us a "challenge".  

I've got to admit, I am pretty lax about doing them.

But in May, Lynda gave each of us an unfinished curved wood cabinet door.

LOVED IT!

and I came up with this ~ After the Fire

Working on the curved surface was tricky. 

But again, something new can yield wonderful results.

Also in the last post I showed some works in process.

Here is one of them with a few more steps of wax collage & color.

Looking pretty different, huh? 

Well, I think it's about to change.

You see, while we were experimenting and talking yesterday, guess what happened?

I got distracted (surprise!  not) and ignored a piece

on the heat for a little longer than I should have.

And I loved the glass smooth finish it gave the wax

so I'm going to do it with this piece on purpose.

I have no idea how it will work becuz you just never

know what the wax will do when it gets hot. 

Okay, you know it will melt, but will it run, pool, slide completely off?

I'll let you know what comes next with this.

I love arting with friends.  New ideas just seem to form in the air.

And while most of the women in my art group do work entirely different than me,

I always come away so inspired.

I am so glad I revamped my studio so there's room for two or three to play.

There's even room for small class of four.

If you're in OKC, let me know. 

Maybe there's some arting in our future.

knowing when your art is done

Rhythm (finished)

Awhile ago I posted some pictures of pieces I'd been working on asking how do you know when your work is done?  At the time I was sure that the piece below wasn't finished but I had no idea what was needed. I finished it last week by making round impressions and coloring them with brown. It made such a huge difference.

before - not quite there

In that same post, I was sure that the other piece was finished. But I pulled it out last week and attacked it with the scraper and torch and ended up with this.

SST (finished)

These changes are much more subtle ~ so subtle, I have a hard time noticing them myself. Yet the refinements are just what was needed.

before - not quite there (tho I thought it was)


These pieces were relatively new so they might not really qualify as "re-dos" or "do-overs".

But I have some older pieces that I just don't like. Some because my style has just evolved. Some because the composition was always off.

A few of these are hanging on the walls but most have been added back to the substrate pile to become the base of some future piece. Some even have gone in the trash.

It's the ones on the walls that I just am not sure about. Should I rework them, adding more layers but allowing the original to show through? Or should they be relegated to the substrate pile or trash?  Or should I keep them to remind me where I came from artistically (I do keep the photos)?

What do you do with the art you've made but no longer like?

SST is available for purchase on my website.

Storming (a new encaustic piece)

encaustic, charcoal and hand-made paper (just barely peeking thru)

I started this piece in June at the encaustic workshop I took and just felt it needed a little more.  I did some scraping to even out a few lines then added more charcoal around the edges.  Then I hit it with my crème brûlée torch (again, buying tools and not using them as intended) to smooth out the marks from scraping and blend in the charcoal.

Now that I look at it, the differences are minute.  But important.  At least to me.  ;-p


same piece before I finished it today - can you see any difference?

 

Which Way?

Which Way?

encaustic collage on wood

A few posts back I asked how you know when a piece is done?  There are certain pieces that I know are done and others that I know need further development.  Then there are the others ~ those pieces that don't tell me to stop or to keep going.

Today I decided to attack one of the pieces I knew was not quite right (I'm very happy with it now but I can't show you yet because I need my husband to cut the end off) and ended up reworking the one shown here.

Here's the thing: I thought this one was finished when I showed it to you earlier.  But today I realized the wax was too thick and bland so I ironed off some wax and ironed on some color.  What do you think?  Was I right to listen today?

There are a couple more pieces that are speaking to me so hopefully I'll have more pictures soon.

In other news . . .
> as I mentioned in my last post, I started another blog this week.  I also set up a Tumblr blog (not impressed with the format so don't know if I'll keep that up).  And I'm contemplating Google+.  I'm starting to think I should stop - how much is too much?  I'm afraid that social media could take over ALL my time.
> I watched entirely too much Hoarders Monday while defrosting the freezer in the garage.  Now everywhere I look I see a mess!  So my daughter came over and helped me gut the guest room.  It looks so good with the art on the walls.
> Speaking of art - where do you keep yours?  I am getting quite a few pieces here so I decided I needed to hang more so I'm working up piles of what to hang in which rooms.  My house is looking more like a gallery every day.  And while I've sold a few pieces off the walls in my house, I don't really have tons of traffic traipsing thru. 

I guess that means I need to start looking around for gallery representation.  A few friends on facebook have given me some direction in that area so I have no excuse. 

Afterall, I can always make more art to fill the unoccupied spaces on my walls ~ if I don't spend all my time online, that is.

XXVIII

lazer transfer on encaustic

Happy Birthday Nate!

Not my usual style, huh? 

It's my son's birthday gift so I did something I think he'll enjoy.

I have been truly blessed in the kid department.  Nathan and I have a great bond.  You see, for awhile it was just the two of us - I was single when I had him.  And I think that's why he never went thru that phase of acting like he didn't know me or not saying he loved me.



Sorry about the quality here - I had real camera issues Saturday
(maybe it was really operator error)



Like his mom & sister, he's brilliant (hehe).  Math is just intuitive to him - he used to be my walking calculator (one time when he wasn't around, I asked Dani a math question and she indignantly replied, "I'm not Nate you know"!) and he picks up a lot of info by osmosis.  He's creative, a hard-worker and a good friend, quite charming & good looking.  And he is the most laid back person I have ever met!  Yet when he was forced to sit still in the hospital last year he couldn't stand it.

In some ways he's a lot like me.  So is my daughter.  And yet they're nothing alike.  Funny about that with kids.  And I've made the mistake of thinking I know what's going on with them becuz they're so much like me.  NOT!!

You give birth to these beautiful babies, you watch them grow and see their joys and struggles, you see yourself in them yet you see that they're totally their own persons, and you spend your life wondering at them, loving them, learning about them.  They come from you and reflect you and yet they are not you.  And they make you you.

Happy Birthday Nate.  I love you. 

More CitrSolv Experiments

Everything I've ever read about CitraSolv and art said you could only use National Geographics.  Since I don't believe everything I read, I tried a few others and got absolutely nothing (well, a color ad in the newspaper gave me a wierd floating text thing but it mainly looked dirty) so I played with National Geographics and made some lovely papers.  You can read about it in this post.

Then I saw this video

on the ARTWAX blog and decided it might be my technique, not the magazine itself, that caused it not to work.

You see, with National Geographics I used the spray-n-squish technique and the lovely inks moved on their own.  But with these fashion magazines, AJ first moved the CitraSolv, and therefore the ink, around with a brush. So I sorta gave it a try - except I used cotton balls cuz I didn't want to set up to do a lot of these. Here are the results with a black & white ad, sepia-toned ad and a color ad all from Vogue.

I think I need to do it exactly like she shows in the video - brush & cling wrap - since these still leave something to be desired.  However, I noticed that the back of the ad above looks like when you use NevrDull over a texture.  Hmmmm.  More experiments to try.

Then I tried the photo transfer technique I'd read about so much. Again the experts aren't always right - they say only photocopies not inkjet or laser prints but I did these two with my Brother laser printer.

(I love,love,love this Conde Nast ad - I have to find another one and try again).

Again, the problem with the first was my technique - too much rubbing with too much CitraSolv causing the inks to smear. The second with just pressure looks pretty good.

And now for the beeswax & encaustic part of this post.  Yes, all the CitraSolv papers work great in collage, with or without either type of wax.  But that's not the experiment I want to tell you about.

You see, I work on a glass desk and just scrape it down with a razor blade when it gets too messy.  Lately the wax build-up has really been clogging up my blade-holder-thingie.  So I poured a little CitraSolv on my desk and let it soak a few minutes.  And Voila! the wax came up so easily - as did the paint and glue.

Who knew?  You can actually use this stuff for it's original purpose - to clean!!  But don't tell Patrick I know that cuz then he might want me to try it in the rest of the house.  hehe

Is it done?

Above is another of the encaustics I "finished" at the encaustic workshop I took (you can read more about the workshop here).  At the end of the day we had a critique session and it received favorable reviews.  But I have the same issue with it as with other abstract work:

How do you know when it's done?

Now, with the piece below, I "know" it's not done - something in me is screaming that it needs some words added in somewhere (details are not being provided however- hehe).

So I get screams when an abstract piece IS NOT done but I don't always hear anything, feel anything, "know" anything when another piece IS done.  Especially in pieces that start out as experiments I often just look & wonder.  Ugh! 

How do you know when a piece is finished?
Is it a feeling of satisfaction?
And if you don't get that feeling, do you keep going or put it aside for another day?

Help!!

Encaustic Workshop with Ellen Koment

Last weekend, I took a two day workshop with Ellen Koment sponsored by the Oklahoma Art Guild.  It was amazing.  Ellen would bring everyone to the front and demo a technique and then we would go back and practice incorporating that into a piece.  Later we would repeat with a new technique.

I had tried some of these techniques before with varying degrees of success so for me the very best part of the workshop was having an expert show me the right way to do everything. 

The second best was the torch!  There is so much more that can be done with one compared to an iron or heat gun.  Fun, fun, fun.  This is one of several pieces I did at the workshop.  See the burned paper?  Clearly I need to refine my torch skills!! 

And the other great part was meeting some new local artists!  A sculptor, a glass worker, some painters and some mixed-media artists - so exciting, so inspiring, so envigorating!

Distant Bridges

Here's another one of my tax season art pieces. 
It began with a lovely water scene - see it next to the lips?

Next came some pattern tissue with a dart.

I dabbled at this 10 or 15 minutes at a time,

sometimes before work, sometimes late at night.

Actually, it became a tester board for another piece I was working on.

The problem with that is that lots of the stuff I tested didn't work!

So I'd layer on some gesso and test something new.

Then, near the end of March I wrote a journal page and blog post about a vision I had about how I wanted my life to be.  At the end I said I might write that on an art piece.  Well, I did.  I wrote it on here with charcoal pencil and immediately hated the way it looked.

So of course, I couldn't remove it which meant more gesso and spray colors and some modeling paste.  Then somewhere along the line, the image was turned upside down (I think with the writing) making it look more like a bridge than the dock it originally was.  And it all took on a yellow-green cast.  Here it is right before the final layer of beeswax and encaustic.

It's very similar to the final product but the beeswax added so much more dimension and texture.  And the encaustic helped balance the color at the bottom.

I have really been getting into beeswax more and more lately - I think every piece I've finished has had a topcoat of it.  Not only do I love the texture and dimensin it adds visually, I love the soft smooth feel of it.  I really like the look when I mix in colors from crayons or encaustics.

Speaking of encaustics, I'm taking an Encaustic Painting Workshop in June.  I'm so excited.  So far all I've done with encaustics is add color to collages - in this class I'll learn to use it as the primary medium in a piece.  I can't imagine using only one medium in a piece - let alone for always - but I cannot wait to have an expert teach me how to handle the wax.  Everyone I know who works with it can't get enough of it. I'm very excited about learning about it and about meeting other artists here.

Thanks for letting me share ~ Sherry

Beeswax & Encaustic Play Date

Today two of my friends came over so we could play with beeswax and encaustic. Lisa Bruno runs the stamp section at My Heart's Fancy and Roz Grage is a stamper and my BFF (yes, I'm in the 4th grade!!).

I usually collage the old-fashioned way, with lots of glue or gel medium, then add a layer of beeswax, sometimes with color, sometimes not.

This time NO GLUE.  Yikes!

We all started with a base coat of paint so we could dispel that blank-canvas-syndrome.  We followed this with some modeling paste applied thru stencils.

Then we ate lunch while the modeling paste dried.  I love this time of year with all the delicious fruit so lunch included a great fruit salad mainly made up of berries.  Lisa brought chocolate bundt cake with chocolate chips.  mmmmmmmmm.  (Later we discovered how delicious and how much more healthy it was to eat the cake with a pile of berries on top!!)

After lunch we applied a layer of beeswax with chip brushes and melted them in (and off in some cases) using our heat guns.

Next we added some sheer papers melted in with our irons.

Then the fun (and scary) part:  using only our irons, we added color with encaustics and crayons.

We had soooooooooo much fun.  Not much is better than friends talking, eating and making art together.

Here are the final products.
What do you think of our little experiments?
What do you suggest for names?

Thanks ~ Sherry

linked to the week 22 challenge at LOTS TO DO