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Listen up Canberra people!  I will be at the Handmade Upmarket this Saturday 21st November at Albert Hall from 10am to 6pm and I really hope to see some of you there.  Pop in and say hello! 

 

It’s a great chance to get some Christmas shopping done and there will be over 50 handmade businesses there on the day. I will be bringing a bunch of my Red Instead stuff including handbags, zip purses, art and prints, children’s hats, women’s doily singlets and more.

 

Not sure if I have many of those belts left actually - I think they all went at the last market I did.   It’s all been a bit rush rush!  Lots of doily singlets and other goodies though. 

I’ve been doing a little bit more art and collage work lately.  This one will be there for sale tomorrow actually - I call it Fly Away Bird:

 

You might remember the canvas above looked like this a little while ago:

 

I did this next one in my Art Journal and I’m loving the textured blue:

 

I’m very excited because even though it was my last Mixed Media and Collage class with Rebecca last night, a few of us from the class (Rebecca, Kim and I, at least) are going to continue meeting up for an art night every Thursday!  YAY!   

I have done a few more spreads in my new art journal so I thought I would do some more show’n'tell.  I have really been enjoying my art/collage class with Rebecca Vavic and have been having fun with my art.

{THIS} IS ME - a spread using my favourite photo of myself, and of course featuring my favourite colour, red.  Lots of layers, including old sewing pattern tissue, photocopied photo, acrylics, paper, bubblewrap stamp and inks.

Bird in Book - this one started off with just the bird picture, ripped out of a vintage kid’s poetry book and sitting on my art table for months, waiting for the right project to use it in.  I like the yellows and textures here. Acrylics, stamps paper, inks, sequin waste stencil.

Girls - Last week, Rebecca showed us step-by-step her technique of drawing/painting faces, including getting the eyes just right. My first attempt (in class) was terrible and I was very frustrated.  Of course, I had skipped some of her suggestions and rushed through it, thinking it was going to be as easy as she made it look.

I tried to commit everything she said to memory and tried again at home in my art journal.  I went slowly and remembered that I was a beginner and needed to use pencil first to plot out the placement of eyes in relation to head (halfway down) and all that, and I was really happy with how the girls turned out.

I first drew with pencil until I was happy, then went over the outline in waterproof fineliner and used a kneaded eraser to rub out the pencil lines.  Then I used a mixture of watercolours and fluid acrylics to give them some colour.

Rebecca also showed us how to use watercolour pencils (then go over them with water) to give some shading to the face, but I haven’t done that in these two pieces.  Partly because I was hesitant about it, but also because I quite like the flat-colour faces and slightly vapid expressions in their eyes. I like their large eyes and small mouths too, and their long elegant necks.  I think Peter Pan collars is emerging as a theme - they’re so cute!

Thanks Rebecca!

I have been taking a class with Rebecca Vavic called “Mixed Media and Collage” which has been sparking my creativity.  From reading the info about the course and checking out Rebecca’s blog and flickr, I saw that we probably read the same blogs and mixed media books, but I do so much of my learning from books and the internet that I miss the crucial part - people.   People who are into the same things as you, people to make art with, people to talk about techniques and concepts with. 

So, I’m enjoying the course and Rebecca is great.  She bought us all a journal to work in - she picked up a few hardcover books from the op shop for each of us to repurpose as an art journal.  Mine is a British Diving Manual from 1972.  See…

 

I have decided to leave the old journal behind for now and start fresh with this new book and a new outlook. While I do like a lot of the spreads in my first art journal, there is a lot that I don’t like so much.  I worked in that journal from April to October 2006 and then left it for almost two years.  I don’t even know why.  I recently did four entries in there (August 08) but I think it is time to move on from that book.  I am thinking that I should go back in and just gesso over the pages I don’t like and rework them into something better.  Then I think, maybe I should keep them for posterity, to see how far I’ve come but why keep something you don’t think much of?  Still thinking on that… 

Anyway, I have started work in my new Diving into Art Journal already.  I want this book to be more visual and richer than my first art journal, positive and strong.  Sometimes I will work with the text or diagrams that are already in the book and sometimes I will just cover it over and make something new.  By the way, it’s a good idea to glue two pages together so that they are stronger and will hold the paint and glue without buckling.  There was a rather formal introduction to the diving manual and I inserted the word “journal” into the text to make it an introduction to my journal instead.  Stamps, watercolours, markers, papers and I have my first little spread. 

The first paragraph reads: “INTRODUCTION:  This is a new style [ JOURNAL ] the layout of the contents has been altered and the text has been metricated.  Many members will want to know the reasons for these changes, therefore this is more in the nature of an Explanation than an Introduction.”  And it goes on from there, talking about diving regulations and metrication problems, but it’s that first paragraph that I thought was rather appropriate, at least once I stuck the word JOURNAL in there instead of “manual”. 

 

I have to show you some backgrounds that I have been working on from the class.  We were supposed to bring in a stack of copy paper to work on for last week’s class, but I totally forgot to bring my paper and only remembered when I was about to pull into the carpark.  What to do?  I looked around in the (messy) car and saw some old sheets of paper that the kids had drawn on and thrown on the floor of the car.  There were a couple of old squashed paper planes to be unfolded and smoothed, forgotten school notes and some half done colouring-in pictures and a few other scribbles.  I gathered those up but there still wasn’t enough paper.  Then I thought, what about the map book?  A while back we bought a new street directory for the car but we kept the old dog-eared one in the back for the kids to look through as we drove.  They think they are helping me with the directions, especially Emma who can’t read yet but she forgets that detail.

Even though we were supposed to bring clean blank paper, I was more than happy that I had forgotten mine as I knew I had something much better.  So in class we used up our paper making monoprints and stamping and basically just making a mess with paints.  We squirted and scraped the paint.  We used stamps for interest and bubble wrap, plumbers tape, sequin waste and other things to provide texture.  We churned through our paper fast and were told not to be too concerned about what we were making, just to have fun and make some marks.  Looking at the papers drying, they didn’t look so great but it wasn’t the end…

 

The next step was to take our stack of dried painted pages and cut them all up into little squares or rectangles, say about 6-10cm (2-3 inches) in size, as you can see above.  Once they were cut up, they became interesting little pieces that reacted with the pieces placed next to them. 

 

Next step is to (sorta) randomly stick the squares to a substrate (eg. large sheet of watercolour paper, canvas or even into the art journal) and make a pleasing arrangement.  I used canvases because I had them already.

  

Now for the next step.  After the piece is dry, go over it again with some stamps, rubons, scribbles or writing or anything else that takes your fancy.  Think about a theme or story you want to tell.  Think about a focal image and add that.  These paper squares are just the background for the art piece so keep adding things on top until you are done. 

I am keeping the two canvases above to work on in the next class but I wanted to do a finished piece in my new art journal too.  Here it is:

 

Didn’t turn out too bad!  I will post more after next week’s class.

Thanks to all the lovely people who commented on my last post about microfinancing.  When I made the offer of putting $1 towards Kiva loans for every comment on that post, I was worried that someone would post the link somewhere and I would get 500 comments or something!  In the end,  I had 14 comments so I decided to put $25 in for good measure.  Mrs Mach Van thanks you.