Experimenting

Shedding Old Skin

9" x 12"

acrylic on paper

I just read Collage Journeys: A Practical Guide to Creating Personal Artwork by Jane Davies and liked her idea about making backgrounds and later isolating areas that can used in collage. She suggests scanning and enlarging areas that have potential to stand on their own. I realize some of my quick brayer paintings are more backgrounds than actual paintings.


So, I simply played, with the intention of cutting the watercolor paper smaller. But with these two pieces, I like the design going on enough to let them stand as is.

Discovery

9" x 12"

acrylic on paper

Thank You, Mary Buek

Mary Buek collage

7" x roughly 8.25"

This is one of Mary Buek's wonderful collages and I just received it in the mail today! Mary was having a very generous give-away last week and I was so fortunate to receive this one.

Go here and read how she created it http://marybuekart.blogspot.com/2008/12/kept-practicing-collages.html and while you're there, enjoy her colorful and creative blog. She now has an Etsy store, so you can find something you like, too.

Thank you, Mary!

Book Section Sewing Class

Paste paper covers

sewn one-section signatures

I’m taking four classes at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, spread over four months. Last month, we made paste paper covers for the books we’ll do in the other three classes. Basically, we took already-made handmade paper and covered them with prepared paste and textured them with various stamps and tools. The messy process occurred in the paper studio where I took a one-day papermaking class last summer (see: http://mymindisinablog.blogspot.com/2008/06/paper-making-class.html). We left the covers drying and our teacher, Linda Draper, picked them up the following week; thus, we only saw them yesterday morning.

Covers open

Sewn spines displayed

Following Keith Smith’s book Non-adhesive Bindings: One-, Two-, and Three-Section Sewings, we cut our paste papers in half to create covers for one-section books yesterday. The books have very thin spines defined with a bone folder with stitches meant to be seen on the outside. The last stitch, a sewn chain, seemed the most beautiful and easy, perhaps since we had struggled and mastered two stitches already!

McNay Visit

Disappointed about not finding parking for the Asian Festival yesterday, my husband and I decided not to waste the trip by dropping by the McNay Art Museum http://www.mcnayart.org/ .











It was a beautiful day and borrowing David’s camera, I took some inspirational photos.

I loved the texture in the sidewalk as well as a small painting in the traveling exhibit.

Too tired and hungry to see the new wing houseing modern sculpture, we now have something to look forward to next time.