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!)

Growth Happens . . .

New Oak Moon art journal spread

This abstract oak tree is the result of an art journaling exercise facilitated by Effy Wild's Moonshine 2014 course.  We are making art inspired by the seasons and cycles of the moon all year long. She provided the course content in June, but it took me a while to get started. And then it took me weeks to finish. This is the most intricate art journal spread I've ever undertaken, but I'm really pleased with my results.

While I was working on it, I never thought it would look cohesive. There are many layers to this page. The very first is a background layer of color painted onto the paper with Gelato pigments, giving the whole page a softer, nearly pastel feel.

New Oak Moon - detail

Effy's lesson recommended a collage layer next that would create a mosaic feel. I was skeptical about how mine would turn out, but there are enough greens and earth tones to off-set that energetic paint layer with Summer colors of oranges and reds.  Next came the tree, painted in acrylic and then detailed with "bark" lines of Black Pitt pen and Sakura metallic gold ink.  Then I drew in each oak leaf and filled them in with various gel inks. The metallic just jump off the page. Finally, I used a paint pen to make all of the green circles with the final touch of outlines around them in black ink.

I worked on this piece off and on between other projects over a period of three weeks. I had to practice drawing the tree a number of times to get a trunk and branches that I liked. I also had to teach myself to draw abstract oak leaves, so I filled an entire sketchbook page with them drawing slow at first and then speeding up. It was time-consuming to create all of tree's detail, but the detail is what brought together the living-tree shape.

I used to prefer to keep backgrounds very simple if the main focus of the piece was going to be an illustration (rather than pure abstract collage). But now I think that this tree would look very different on a plain background. The effect was worth the effort.

In the meantime, I have devised several ways to recycle my own art.

I shared a page of watercolor lines in my last blog post.  I have several of these pages of watercolor lines because I practiced the same blending exercise several times.  I took giant hole punches yesterday and punched out 2" inch and 1 3/4" inch circles from one of the practice pages. It's very likely that these circles will begin to appear in different collage pieces I create in the near future.

Collage circles punched out from a watercolor practice page.

Each circle has its own character. I like how some have more curvy lines than others. The colors (even in the page made with cheap watercolor paints from a classroom set) are cheery and take on a whole new appearance when they are liberated from the rectangular parent-page.

Finally, I had been debating what to do about the cover for my recently-begun art journal. The book is an 11 3/8" inch by 8 1/4" inch bound Dylusions journal book specifically made for mixed media creating. I love the size of it and the fact that the pages are bound to open completely flat, making painting and drawing easier.  The cover is just craft-paper brown, and it kept staring at me asking, "when are you going to cover me with art?" But I could not decide what to do.

I debated for days. Maybe I should just paint it a color so it's not blank. No, maybe I should collage it. Then it hit me, I had a favorite 4x6 index card piece of the full moon in July.

Brand new cover for my art journal.

I used the book cover as a frame for my index card art, by painting around it in acrylic and ink layers. I taped a starry-night washi tape border along the book's spine so that it matched the night sky theme. And I glued on mylar stars surrounding the picture and an arrow with my title and the date to remind me of when I created the hand-moon picture.

Now it is happily situated on the front cover of my journal so that I can look at it and let it inspire me all of the time.

Turning My Face Towards the Light

Last winter was a long and cold season. I had to fight hard in order to keep the winter blues away.  I am now fully aware that I experience a dramatic shift in mood and energy once autumn rolls around. It has been a struggle to educate myself on how to deal with this mental roller coaster.

I bought a blue light box in late November and began using it every morning at the recommendation of a medical practitioner. I reminded myself to take walks outside in the sunlight on my lunch breaks whenever the weather wasn't too bitter. I sat near any windows I found. My daily routine included opening the shades in my apartment early every morning (I know, it seems obvious that the shades should be open, but I like it in my cave when my winter mood is upon me.)

The one fully-realized painting I did was of a sleeping girl and her guardian wolf in the winter woods. I was actually quite pleased with how the vision in my head was realized on the page. The painting is actually proof that I managed to gather some energy for art-making even in the darkest month. Too late, I realized that I had already planned another project to distract myself again from art-making.

Fearing the mental stagnation that I felt during the winter 2013, I had enrolled myself in an intellectually challenging, paralegal class that began in January. It was a test, really, to figure out if I wanted to expand my career horizons. I worked hard all semester, and did well in the course, and the information will be useful. I also learned that I don't want to go in that career direction. A useful thing to learn.  I had a sinking suspicion that as easy as it is for me to do well in a field where brain-power is key, focusing on adding facts to my brain at this point in my life is kind of like running on a treadmill. True, it is good exercise, but it is at odds with a need to expand and vary my training. Especially, if I have a goal to think beyond the boundaries of my life as it has been until now.   Taking the law class helped me to decide that making art is what I need to be doing with my spare time.

I recognized this because as I began the climb back out into the full light of day, my mind and my mood cleared again. Slowly I was able to push the cobwebs away.  I discovered that I wanted to be outside. I wanted to do something more active.  The old me would have found engaging in class work productive, but studying did not give me the same feeling of satisfaction as painting or mixed-media creating. While being engaged mentally in a class did help me mentally, it dawned on me that I was craving something not purely about filling my mind with facts.

April rolled around and I was using my weekend time to draft legal briefs and memoranda, when there was something inside me nearly bursting to create visual art.  Just as soon as my class began to wind down, began to include painting in my routine again.

I am part of a year-long group working with artist Effy Wild on imagery relating to the lunar cycles. I'm very glad that I chose to begin working again on journal paintings on her May flower-themed prompts. I learned a great method for creating idealized feminine faces from Effy's online tutorials.  I find faces so difficult, but when the prompt came, I took the plunge and worked in acrylics to create this Forest Sprite surrounded by blooming flowers, with inspiration from the iconic gold backgrounds with spirals and halos of blossoms favored by Gustav Klimt.

 I look at her and still see all of the problems, the lines that didn't quite go where my mind willed them.  I am trying to also see that my practice is leading somewhere, I only I am brave enough to continue trying to draw and paint.  The violet tucked behind her elfin ear, just felt right to me.














It is clear to me now that the work I am doing in attempt to be more balanced and creative year-around is slowly happening. I have no idea how I am going to keep my creative juices flowing during the darker months later in the year, but I realize now it is the path I'm on.

I don't have any difficulty with it at all in the warm months, and now the height of summer is coming.  And now my face is turned like a flower to soak up those sunbeams.