Coming Back to Art

ANNOUNCEMENT :  Its my birthday on Wednesday February 27th and I am having a giveaway that day only so make sure to check back on Wednesday.

I am slowly recovering use of my hand. It's easier for me to type on a touch screen so I am typing on my iPad and taking a few times to put this together.

 I tried some art with my left hand but don't really enjoy it. This bird was drawn with my left hand some of the coloring was done with my right. I found it easier to make some gelli prints so I did

This was my first round of prints.

The fun thing about making these prints is the excitement you get when you try a group of colors or stencils and are amazed how cool things look.

That is how this print came about. I put blues and purples on the plates and did another layer on one of the orange prints. I didn't know if it would look good or not but was pleasantly surprised.

These papers look amazing in person.

I may even add some more to these, maybe some metallics would be fun.

This video shows making a foam plate to us with the gelli plate. It looks easy and fun.



In this video Andy Skinner uses the gelli plate to design an entire piece, I thought it was fascinating to watch him.




If you don't have a gelli plate did you know you can make you own?  Here is a link to making your own. Or you can use a piece of tile. You can't get deep detail with tile but you can get some great prints.

Pan Pastels

I enjoy using PanPastels but have not used them as much as I'd like.  When I found out that Donna Downey was teaching classes on PanPastels I couldn't resist.

This is a page in my moleskine sketchbook I was just tooling around with color.

This is page to see how panpastels look on differently on different mediums

Here I took lots of different papers to see how they take the pastels. It was interesting to see the different absorbency indifferent papers.

I loved how this exercise was going and then I made a big mistake. I started with black gesso on one side and white on the other.  I used my birch trees 6 X 6 stencil and extended it. I think I did a good job with it.  This exercise was to include layering of colors and I was supposed to spray with workable fixative. The three previous pages I sprayed with a matte finish.  A workable fixative lets you keep adding things but keeps your original layers intact.  So yes I used the wrong fixative. I do like the look just the way it is.