Art in Trade

"I Believe in Magic" Artist Trading Card, 2.5" x 3.5"

A grand welcome to the harvest season of Autumn!

While I did love the unusually mild weather this Summer, I am very pleased that Fall is here. It is always my most favorite season of the year.

Since the beginning of Summer I have spent a lot of time contemplating what I will "do" with my art. I have been engaged in asking myself, "What form of art do I want to send out into the world?" It's not any easy question to answer. I love making art, but for the most part I have made it to give as gifts to friends or for my own simple pleasure of manifesting an idea into reality.

In late August, I decided to join several art swapping groups with other mixed media artists. One of them is a closed group on Facebook, to which I was invited, the Artful Mail Groupies. You can join, but they have certain rules to help keep the group active and friendly. (Note: Send me a personal message if you are desperate to learn more about this group.) 

The other swap group is part of an online artist community that I joined in 2013 run by the amazing artist-extraordinaire Tamara Laporte over at willowing.org. Tam is the originator of the amazing year-long online art course Life Book.

I love these online communities of artists. They inspire and amaze me everyday. I really find a lot of solace and comfort sharing my process of becoming an artist with these wonderful people.

The Art Swaps are a great way to send your work out into the world and get another person's art in trade.

Autumn Moon Artist Trading Cards made for Artful Mail Groupies Swap

One way that many artists are sharing these days is to create very small-scaled art works -- the size of a baseball or playing card: 2.5" by 3.5". The small size makes projects easier to complete although there is a real art to using a tiny space well. I have been learning from some talented people. I decided that I am ready to throw my art out into the unknown and receive other art and feedback in exchange. Plus, receiving mail from a person far away is fun! (I always enjoyed having pen pals in other countries as a kid.)

My first swap was the Autumn Moon ATC (ATC = Artist Trading Card) swap with the Artful Mail Groupies on Facebook.  I had so much fun inventing a way to use the Martha Stewart silhouettes of owls, ravens and spooky things for my moonlight purpose. I wanted to create a Harvest Moon shining behind each silhouette. I created all of the moons from cardstock or hand-painted (by me) papers. I added some additional collage elements.

The second way that I'm exploring for spreading my art out into the world is that I'm trying to find a way to make art books that are not so labor-intensive as professional book-binding. I have several friends who are paper conservators and book-binders for a living, so I know very well just how much time and energy goes into creating most books that are bound by hand.

I recently took a workshop at the Queen's Ink with artist Terry Quinn on printing techniques for the Gelli Arts monoprinting plate.  The class is taught periodically and called "50 Shades of Play." Terry took the guesswork out of the workshop by selecting your pattern tools and colors for you, so that our minds were free to play and explore. She taught me that there is no such thing as an ugly monoprint because you can always add another layer if you don't particularly like the color or design that you used. That is a really significant lesson to learn.

Monoprinted Index Card book that I made in Terry Quinn's "50 Shades of Play" workshop

I was able to produce two sets of monoprinted index cards in the class which will become tiny books. Not sure what I will put on the pages yet because I like the patterns and colors so much just as they are. Each page is unique, and that was true of the 50 pages that each of the students made in the workshop also.

Detail, front cover, monoprinted book from "50 Shades of Play"

I discovered, for example, that my new favorite color is called Gunmetal Gray; it offsets bright colors like these golds and oranges so well. I wouldn't have known that if I wasn't limited to a palette within that session of Terry's workshop.  Don't you think this mini-book cover turned out pretty well?  The book measures only 2.5" by 3" -- one half the size of a folded 3x5 index card.

I cannot wait to put my second book together and experiment in collage on these pages! Promise that I'll share.

Wishing you joy in this season of harvest! (Or of new life if you are living in the Southern Hemisphere!)

Tricks of the Trade

Aspen tree stencil applied in gesso
with green spray ink.

I've been having a lot of fun making & discussing art socially in the past week, in addition to making art on my own. I have some very talented friends who are a constant source of energy boosts and support and I want to use this opportunity to give a shout-out to thank them all for being there. I *really* mean it!

Ms. PocketSize, who blogs regularly these days on her incredible adventure with "arting" has been posting some examples of her work with stencils and gesso.  I wanted to learn this art, since I'm rather limited in my stencil repertoire. Fortunately, I know Ms. PocketSize IRL, so she generously agreed to include a gesso with stencils demo into our randomly-scheduled art-nites at her mother's gorgeous and well-equipped mixed media studio (Zingala has another studio just for her textile art. Wow! Two art studios.)

The gesso stencil technique is rather fiddly, but I got the hang of it fairly quickly. I started with several stencils from TheCraftersWorkshop.com and then went for gold and used my artistcellar TEXTure Rivermap stencil by Jill K. Berry. The results were uneven, but I'll share my best efforts.

I made several great impressions of each stencil eventually. Ms. PocketSize encouraged me to try turning the stencil over on a blank page after I've pushed the gesso through the "positive" side of the stencil. The results of the "negative" stencil of the gears was rather steampunky, especially when I sprayed ink over it using my Glimmer Mist in chalkboard by Tattered Angels.  Another successful attempt was the aspen tree stencil with a medium green ink spray overlay (see above).  The best of the bunch was definitely the Rivermap stencil.  Not only is Jill K. Berry's font so awesome-looking, but I used red and green spray inks blended together, meeting in the middle.

Gessoed Rivermap stamp by J.K. Berry with spray ink.

The result of flipping the gear stencil over
while it was covered with gesso. Chalkboard mist.

Art adventure number two, was an impromptu opportunity at work. Several friends in my day-job world are paper conservators. I love to watch them carefully sew books back together, reattach their covers, and glue down marbled end papers whenever I walk through the conservation lab. They are all artists. Really, you have to be to do what they do everyday. You not only put things together, but often you have to take them apart, remove layers of nasty tape and other ickiness.  It's a kind of magic to me.

The other day, Vicki Lee was demonstrating for the benefit of her summer interns, how simple folded calendar books are made.  The calendar books are based upon surviving examples of late medieval and renaissance books in the Vade Museum. Vicki learned how to make these at a workshop, so now she was sharing the techniques.

No greater thing is there in life but to learn something and then share it with others. Spread the love, I say.  I want to try and make a fold-out art book using a binding technique like this.

Folding Calendar binding,
based upon historical sample

"Take Me Along" binding showing where
the pages will be sewn together

"Take Me Along" binding page laid out open

Working alongside other artists and creative types is the surest way for me to continue to practice and grow as an artist.  My other collaboration of the week was formed from a need to reconnect with a friend and to beat the heat wave we've been experiencing.

My friend is herself a budding multi-media artist. She's taking classes in a variety of techniques and working out through practice how she can best express herself. In other words, she and I are on a parallel path.  We spent more time just catching up on each other's lives and gabbing than we did on making art itself, but the process of talking about the art you're making is almost as important as the art-making part.

We tried out a "artful shamanism" guided journey technique that I've learned from artist Effy Wild as one of the mixed media lessons in Life Book 2013.  If that sounds too out there, think of it purely as mediation like you might do in a Buddhist monastery or during a yoga class. Anyway, let's just say that the process, or journey, enabled each of us to find a powerful symbol to use in a creative way.

The symbol that I imagined is becoming a work of art. Since the resulting visual image is still in progress, you'll have to wait for the next edition of Pull of the Tides to learn more.

Stay tuned to this channel.

Until then, get off your duff and do something, anything, creative!