Day Two, Art Self-Education

February 27, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

After I carved my stamps yesterday, I knew I didn’t just want to leave the “test page” look. I wanted to use those test prints as the bottom layer of a painting. I had put the corner stamp together in a pattern that looked like two little houses, and when I brushed gesso over it, the effect was Chagall-esque, and/or inspired by Katie Kendrick. In the work of both those artists there are a lot of pieces that are about people and their place, their home. There are women in kerchiefs, very Eastern European, before-the-pogrom feeling. So I jumped into the painting knowing I wanted that inspiration and to utilize my stamps somehow. Here is the progression:

Just gesso and ideas for the painting over hand carved stamp test page. The gesso smeared the block printing ink. I just knew I wanted to integrate those stamp houses with some large face image.

Added my standard Modigliani-ish face with Neocolor II water soluble crayons

Added some gesso and line. Decided the face looks too much like a face I have in another painting, so I changed the face:

Looking scary with vague undefined features. Maybe a good design for some weird group of faceless women in Buffy or something.

I didn’t really want that, so I added some line with a fine brush and india ink:

I think the bluish cast in the first photographs has something to do with the lighting, but it did have a somewhat yucky blue cast (from smearing the block-printing ink) until these last few steps.

The painting isn’t done. I think I am going to make the upper right sky a dark blue to get a night vibe. I also want to add my repeating pattern stamp, probably in a gold paint, on that dark blue. Also want to add more village touches and get some patterned paper in there somewhere, even though I don’t want a busy piece. As of this point, I think the painting is successful as far as getting the Chagall/Kendrick influence. If I can get the stamps integrated well into these upper layers that will be great. We shall see.

Lesson One, Stamp Carving

February 27, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

I’ve tried to carve stamps a few times before, but I never had the right materials. I used corks and erasers and an xacto knife, and none of them looked great. When Julie Fei-Fan Balzer (whose website is a literal treasure trove of info) released her book Carve, Stamp, Play, I knew it was the stamp book for me. I’ve had the book and the supplies for about a year already, and this is the first time I have carved any stamps.

I had a 4×6 piece of rubber that had a corner taken off of it for some reason, so I decided I was going to carve as many stamps out of what was left as I could. I started with the first lesson which was carving a simple heart. You draw or transfer the design to the rubber and then color in either what is staying or what you want to cut out. For the heart, I just drew it then marked out what to cut away. There was actually very little carving with the speedball carver because you basically just cut the whole outside off.

Then I had this little corner piece and I improvised a corner stamp with it. Also, I made a repeating pattern stamp.

I had to use a few different sizes of carving blade to do the repeating pattern one. The yellow is the first printing and there was a lot left to carve – you can see the extra lines. That is the look you want if you want a faux-woodcut, I think (which I like and will probably do often). I carved off more rubber and then printed in green. There is still a little that could be taken off, but in general I’m happy with it now. You see how you just join them up and they make a repeating pattern?

I can see that learning to carve thinner lines will be a challenge. You can see how much more finely carved Julie’s repeating pattern is. Mine is kind of clunky, which is a style that I like, but I don’t want to always make big clunky stuff just out of laziness. And there are a lot of stamps she shows that are very intricate and would need careful carving to be able to see the design.

I really enjoyed the process of carving the stamps. It was very meditative, like some people say they find zentangling or knitting. I think after making these three stamps I can carve an alphabet no problem. What I would really like to make are these interlocking stamps – you see in the upper right corner how there are three stamps to make the woman print (hair, shading and line)?

I have five more 4×6 rubber blocks, so my goal will be to carve it all within the next week or so, and hopefully I will understand the process pretty well by that time. I can tell that this is something I could be good at and will want to incorporate into my work in some way.

My Art Self-Education Begins

February 26, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

I haven’t received my paper order yet, but I found a single piece. So I can show you how to make my all-time favorite journal. You start with a 22×30 sheet of 140 lb watercolor paper (all the journals in the back are made in this format, with the one on the far right being four bound together in an open-spine, hardcover book:

Measure the paper into three 10-inch sections on the long side, then you use the ruler as a tear bar and get three sheets like this:

I forgot to take any pictures of the folding process, but what you wind up with is a total of twelve full two-page spreads, with four three-page spreads of two different sizes:

The first thing I am going to do is carve some stamps, using Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s book and speedball cutting tools:

I’m not sure if I am going to follow all the beginning stamp-making tutorials or just jump in and try to carve an alphabet, which is what I really want to do.

I am also going to be making Experimental Paintings on my many book-cover substrates. I may try to sell them off at a cheap price after I have 10 or so. This one started as a sharpie drawing on a piece of paper that got paint on it. It’s not done yet, the gesso layer is just the middle:

I’m not sure what’s going to happen to it next. I think I want to get some Gritty Jane influence in there somehow, and get rid of the cartoony look of the original sharpie face.

Another Month Offline for Book Work

February 25, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

I am starting to get some glimpses of non-chaos in my thinking about my book. I know that the most important thing is that I am qualified to write this book so I have credibility as an author. I think I have credibility to do the memoir, but not yet for the art side of it. So I am going to spend at least a month doing exercise after exercise in my art books. I ordered 12 sheets of Fabriano Artistico 140lb hot press paper, so I can make 12 of Teesha Moore’s amazing 16 page journal, and I want to fill every page of those journals with my experimentation. If I basically do a binge of filling journals with everything from hand carved rubber stamp alphabets to color mixing charts to comics, I’d have a record of what I do well and what needs work if I want to include anything like it in my book. I’m not talking about going through every art book I have and doing every lesson or project in them, but rather taking the stuff that already interests me and putting it together in some kind of scientific-study-verifiable-kind-of-way. I would definitely have to make all the journals at once and just start at page one and end at page, well, what’s 12×16? That’s kind of a generous number though because there are fold-out half pages in the journals.

So, when the paper comes I am going pretty much offline until I am finished with this project. I just bought a new digital camera that has very true color, so I will practice taking photos of the work (which is itself one of my weaknesses) and post it here, but that will be it as far as unnecessary internet use. I recall with great fondness my month offline last September.

Some Rambling About The Same Old Stuff

February 19, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

I am feeling some benefit from my maxi-minimalizing adventure and my hiatus from self-improvement. Even with getting rid of almost all stuff we don’t use, the place still gets pretty messy during the course of a day. But the process of cleaning up (even though it can look so daunting to my already chaotic mind) is much simpler and might take 25 minutes for the whole house, including vacuuming and sometimes excluding the kitchen (depending on what’s happening in there at the time). I think now I could actually follow a focused day kind of routine like recommended in Bootcamp for Lousy Housekeepers, which is the only housekeeping/homemaking book that made my cut during The Great Purge of ’15. When there was worthless stuff in all my rooms (and I’m not talking about stuff that would be considered crappy in general, it’s just superfluous for me and our lives), any focus I put on housekeeping seemed to go towards maintaining and/or organizing the excess so it didn’t put out its tentacles and take over.

Now, post-minimalizing, if I go into a room that’s messy, what I see might be toys and dirty clothes on the floor (which does look super overwhelming at first glance and can really make my heart sink if I’m having a discouraged and/or bad-attitude kind of day)… but really, they just need to be picked up and put in their proper toy homes and the washer or at least laundry area. 10 minutes tops. I am doing surprisingly well having no or low expectations of the outward impressiveness (or lack thereof) of my life. If I feel like painting, I paint. If I feel like cooking, I cook. If I feel like scrubbing the kitchen sink (which I occasionally do) it gets scrubbed. If I don’t feel like doing much at all I will just putter around all day, getting into this and that.

I finally started writing the mixed-media/memoir book that’s been percolating on my inner stovetop for a few years. I’m not sure if I know enough to write the kind of book I’m envisioning. Not sure if I have enough actual content for actual book length, which looks to be in the 125 -150 page range for this type of book. But making the book is the only thing that’s going to answer those questions. Either I’ll finish it and say, wow, this is pathetic I need more OR (I hope) wow, I can’t believe I had enough stuff to fill a book! I am gonna give myself a deadline and say it will be done by the end of September. I want to positively utilize those long months when we are hermetically sealed into the house. I have been trying to remember that I want to Make Positive Effort For The Good, which can often be a tiny thing. I bet if I worked steadily for just an hour a day on:

1) book research – doing artwork and doing hands-on planning of the projects and/or

2) actual writing of memoir text portions that will probably lead into the projects

…that I could be way done with the book by the last day of September.

I have chosen my closest personal artist friend to read every section and give me feedback. I am keeping a little journal close by so I can jot down any thoughts about possible content. My oldest daughter is pretty much living in my art studio room temporarily while she does some redecorating in her own room, so if I am going to work with paint and stuff I am going to have to use my 8 feet of living room table for the time being. I’m going to go through my own art journals and see what “techniques” I already use naturally, and probably work my way through my few absolute favorite art books and try some new things to incorporate into my repertoire. I also need to look through my own zines and the book The Zine Scene, because one project will be an actual old-fashioned handmade zine.

The demo zine in the book will be called something like going zen, and one feature I want to have is a list of what I did in a day, rather than things I want to do in the future. So, today I did the day one work of making danish pastries (it’s a two-day affair), I washed sheets, sat outside with my younger kids and worked on this entry, I made nummy baked chicken with a spice rub, buttery white rice and salad. I washed quite a few dishes, vacuumed and enjoyed watching my little one playing with the Daniel Tiger figures I ordered her as a surprise. If I didn’t write all that down, I would think I did the proverbial Nothing. Hopefully I can finalize the list by saying I watched the Americans, but that won’t happen for an hour (God willing).

The End.

In Which I Write a Book

February 14, 2015 ~ artjournalmama

The writing of a book has always loomed large on my personal horizon. I finally got tired of seeing it there (looming all ominous like) and so last week I started writing the thing to avoid its terrifying gaze.

Even though I love planning as an “activity” or maybe even a “hobby”, it’s really only something I do when I’m looking at the proverbial Big Picture. Once I know I want to do something, the only way I ever actually get it done is if I just jump in and start. If I overthink how/when/where I will do it or exactly what I want it to be like, I will get sucked into the Misty Land of Well-Laid Plans and never seen again.

Since I am an inveterate self-publisher, what starting means is creating a book format file in Publisher and simultaneously writing and designing the whole book. Since quite a bit of it is art instructional, that includes detailed photographs of me doing various art things (my hands look like lizard hands, though, so for vanity’s sake I won’t take any photos until I use a good lotion for a few days). So as not to get too intimidated, I am just thinking of it as a really long zine in color, plus with only my own stuff for illustrations. I have A LOT of art instructional books to look at for help in designing that kind of book. I usually work in black and white, so I’m not confident with designing in color. But without the margins, I am going to try to use bleeds (where photos go off the edges of the page). When it’s all done I will have it made into an online flip book and I will use that to see if any actual publisher wants to publish it. That would be my ideal, but I will self publish it some way if no one has any interest in it (NOT as an ebook). I’m not assuming any publisher would want it as-is, including my oh so perfect design and everything – but creating it from start to finish, seeing what works and changing what doesn’t, letting it come to be organically – is what I have to do in order to complete a big project like this.

I am dealing with serious Impostor Syndrome as I work on it. But really, while I know I’m not the world’s greatest artist at this point, I believe I can be called an expert on Creative Chronicling and Everyday Memoir (the tentative book title):

I think the uniqueness of this book would come from that angle. The market is pretty much glutted with mixed-media art books right now, so what I want the ultimate theme for the book to be is not artsy projects or “techniques” (which will be there) but rather leaving a creative paper trail of your own inner and outer life and also connecting with other people through art and writing in a non-virtual format. This book will bring together all I have created naturally and developed mostly on my own over the past two decades, with what I have learned through books/courses etc. Tentative contents, though likely to expand, change and/or morph:

I go back and forth, wondering if I should give myself a deadline to finish it. Having a deadline usually helps me, but only if the deadline is super close. If I give myself six months, I’d probably only work halfheartedly for five months and then cram to get it done. I think I just want this to be a project I work on steadily (which means in between all the family-and-household-stuff which takes up most of my time).

One last peek into the prototype so far (before I get started on the aforemetioned stuff that takes up most of my time) the first two-page spread of the introduction, which I assume will be pretty long:

samantha blythe

creative memoirist…creative enabler

Month: February 2015