Master's Registry

Grrrrrr, Blogger is not saving drafts!!! I've sat here recreating a blog post I wrote yesterday that disappeared!

I just committed myself (pun intended)! I joined the Master's Registry last week. This new program bills itself as "the most prestigious and professional credential in the field of metal clay." With a rigorous curriculum of fifty projects it will indubitably provide me with a challenge to improve my technical skills and tackle projects I might not otherwise choose.

The program interests me because it is is judged hands-on, with the work submitted for in-person review. Critical feedback is given, and the work must receive a passing score based on published criteria to be accepted. Ten successful projects, two each from five categories, are required to achieve the Level I Master credential. The categories impose some structure upon the required work, but leave a lot of room for individual creativity. Clearly a much more selective process, this is different than a PMC or ACS certification, where a few days of class with prescribed projects can purchase a "certification." Higher level credentials require more and more of those fifty projects to be completed, so while it's possible to stay with familiar work at first, eventually there is bound to be something new to attempt.

While awaiting my information packet that hopefully details more fully the judging process and criteria, I keep perusing the thematic categories online. Construction includes boxes, nesting rings, handmade chain, etc. That seems straightforward. Color is an enticing category, with possibilities for stones, enamel, and patina. Materials seems to be a mixed media category, incorporating metal, wood, faux bone or glass. Guess which one appeals to me?? Metal Clay & Other Metals requires gold (keum boo or paste) or another metal, copper, steel, etc. There's an obvious place to try to insert my electroforming experiments. The Miscellaneous category interestingly brings in a variety of work that doesn't easily fit in the other categories -- mechanisms such as hinges and threads, metal clay paper, stenciling, and my personal favorite: making a hallmark!!

Goaded by friends to design a stilt rivet brooch, I've been thinking about this all week. The image above is a set of brooches from my sketchbook that predate the Master's Registry decision. I covered many pages in my sketchbook with designs this week, working toward a more dimensional version of these ideas. The image below is version 22. I even made some paper assemblies to mock up the 3D item. I know it was in jest, but it was fun!

I won't tell you yet quite where this is going. Suffice it to say that I have a lot of found (and not so found) objects piling up here that I wish to incorporate somehow into the work. I'm still toying with my model and plotting how to make this work. Just know that those center circles are stones, the triangular areas are filled, and the two lines of holes are all beaded rivets, at least in my current vision.

Treasure Box #4

I'm totally backlogged with working on the chemistry class starting soon. Eight high-school students, $1000 in laboratory equipment, and multiple books to wade through while writing the syllabus; that's where I am.

So now is a good time to post about the treasure box I painted in a bit of free time a couple of weeks ago. This is cigar box #4, for which I used a brand new box from Michael's rather than a recycled box. I also challenged myself to simplify the surface by using printed imagery rather than my own painting. The bird, leaves and a flower on the back were cut out and applied with a bit of gel medium. I approached the project with the thought in mind that I might teach a class or write an article to submit to a magazine somewhere, so I wanted it to be doable by anyone, even those convinced they can't paint.

I especially love the first stanza from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, handwritten on the side:

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

Spoonflower

My fiber roots have not completely deserted me! I've been reading about a new fabric service on Kelli Perkin's blog that I just had to try out.

Spoonflower is a digital fabric printing service, where you can upload or design your own fabrics, then have them digitally printed onto either quilting or upholstery weight fabric for very reasonable price. I decided to try uploading an image of the front of my first painted cigar box to print onto a sample swatch.


The upholstery weight swatch was in my mailbox in just a few days. Unfortunately, I did not read thoroughly the discussion on color adjustments, so I was a bit dismayed to find a very yellow version of my pink painting. The photo shows them side by side, so you can see how "off" the color is.

I have since learned about LAB color in Photoshop, including out-of-gamut colors, and resubmitted the image to try again, this time on quilting weight cotton. I ordered a fat quarter with four copies of my image, with borders so I can cut them apart and make something with them.

I'm so excited about the possibilities of playing repeatedly with my images. As a person who has spent hours recently shopping for fabric to cover my bedroom chair and ottoman, where I work on my Books of Attraction and journals, I'm spinning with visions of my own fabric surrounding my artistic pursuits, for about the same price as the mass-produced cloth available in shops.

Painting Cigar Boxes Again

I finally finished Cigar Box #2, which needed its ruched lining installed. Here's the outside again, so you'll know which one it is.


I also started painting Box #3 (shown in progress), with a Carolina wren perched on the front with prickly pear cactus blossoms, in honor of my recent preoccupations -- birds and the garden.


A wren is raising four babies under the double petunia on my front porch. It's tough to get a good photo through the leaves -- the autofocus gets fooled. But I see mama ducking in and out, and the nest is built on its side, the way wrens do. Maybe when they are a few days older I'll brave moving some branches further aside.

My back yard is full of 12 yards of new dirt, ten big boulders, a new fountain and reservoir, and many, many plants, including the purple prickly pear that I've been craving.

Birds and Butterflies

Since all my favorite recent beads are away at shows, I need to make some new ones to take with me to Bead and Button next week. On Saturday, I drew black outlines onto glass tiles and fired in the kiln to set the enamel. Then this morning, I painted in the color details, fired again, and got down to torching.


These are big beads, 2" long and often more than an inch across. I did learn my lesson about not making them longer than my cushion press. Yet again, I'm chiding myself for filling that tiny canvas. It's hard to see the entire painting when it wraps around the bead. I press the beads to flatten them, which helps, but can distort the image if it's too extreme. Today I added more clear glass on what would become the back of some, to keep the image mostly on the front.

I also tried to keep it simple with this batch. All are single wraps. I didn't use any dichro. I did put some simple dot flowers on the background for one of the birds. Most of them will get a coat of copper electroforming this week.

Cigar Box Jewelry Box #2

I guess I'm happy with the first box, because today in between painting glass tiles for beads and torching, I painted the outside of the second box.

Sides:


Tomorrow being Memorial day and full of activities, I don't know when I'll get the inside done.

Cigar Box Jewelry Box Finished?

I painted the inside of the cigar box today and added a ruched violet chiffon padded lining.

I'm going off to work with glass for the afternoon and ponder whether I'm happy with this finish, or whether I need a few more details. After all, I have more boxes to paint!

Note to self: keep working on that "simpler is better" thing.

Painting a Cigar Box Jewelry Box

After I popped the bronze clay into the kiln, I voted for a change of pace. First I painted a cheap, on-sale, wooden picture frame that I bought to hold a watercolor from San Gimignano, Italy (I get annoyed by the idea that it should cost as much to frame it as to buy it!). Then I walked past the cigar boxes calling for paint for months, and there I was with a paintbrush in hand.

So, a coat of white gesso and several layers of Golden fluid acrylics later, I'm starting to get a feel for what I can do with a $5 cigar box. It's a bit pink for my taste, yet my mind has moved past toning down the outside and is racing with possibilites for the inside.



Here are the sides:


How to use this for jewelry? Do I just line it in silk velvet, yum? Do I try to divide it up somehow? Do I make a set of coordinated bags to protect my goodies? I think this may be my traveling box for taking pieces to show at Bead & Button next week.

Painting on the Wing

I think I've mentioned before that flying seems to be the perfect time for sketching. I see that when I fly with DH in our small plane, and I found that to be the case on the long flight home from Rome.


Drawing seems like an obvious connection to making metal clay or glass: I can visualize where I'm going. Not only do I get the design worked out, but I run through in my mind HOW it will come to be. Why don't I do it more? Time -- that worn out excuse.


It's so easy to decide that there's not enough time for that intermediate step, that I should go straight to the important stuff.



Hmmm. I teach this to my teenager all the time (we homeschool). Do the prep work. Don't be fooled that it will take too long. It speeds things up in the long run. Just commit and get it done, then the real work will go easily.


If only I listened better than a teen!

Making Art While Snorkeling

It's tough to make beads, stitch quilts or work with metal clay while immersed in the Caribbean Sea. Grand Cayman is a very laid back place that can suck the motivation out of you to do much of anything but lay face down in an azure infinity watching gayly colored fish curiously inspect your fish identification book. 

The best I could do was to try to hold to my notion of at least one doodle per day, in quest of material for tear-away textures. 

I did make a quick sketch of a rooster. Evidently, in Hurricane Ivan many chickens regained the species' lost freedom, and they have prospered in the wild. I bought a small watercolor of a rooster to commemorate the trip. The gallery owner alerted me to watching for wild chickens in front of the islands' two Kentucky Fried Chicken shops. Despite numerous passes with my camera handy, I never caught that irony in person.

The most involved work I made was a watercolored drawing of a catamaran beached near my lounge chair.

For art supplies, I packed a set of different line width markers, a watercolor pencil set and water reservoir brush, and a stack of precut 4" square card stock. I took watercolor postcards, but never used them.

Artistic Synergy 2

Reading dj pettitt's blog is like opening a box of chocolates -- so many sweet ideas! One brilliant idea was to photograph one of my original painting/collages to modify in Photoshop, print out and then paint/stitch further.

What a brilliant idea! I can try out wild color schemes, blur and filter, crop and texturize, all without risk. When I continue painting more layers on the original (as I certainly will), the earlier stages will be preserved for new brainstorms.

Now if I only had a really nice giclee printer. Somewhere around her I do have some canvas made for printing and some Bubble Jet Set to use on regular fabric, which I bought ages ago and haven't yet used.

Artistic synergy for certain!

Fabric Painting Continued

I'm adding more fuchsias to the swallows. I've decided to add some single fuchsias to the doubles. Each area like this takes at more than an hour to sketch and paint.

Memories

Supposedly the strongest memories are associated with the sense of smell. I've been painting and have to attest that the smell of acrylic paint definitely brings back that sense of deja vu for me. How long has it been since I pulled out fabric paints?? Months, I guess. It was a real sense of coming home. A big "aaaahhhhhh."

This week in yoga, I finally got fed up with hanging off the end of my mat. The standard mats are 68" long, and I am 71" tall. I should say that three years of regular yoga has gotten me back up to that original height. I was appalled sometime back to get measured in the doctor's office (an indication of my mature years and the expectation that we women start shrinking as we approach menopause), finding that I'd lost 1/2". I'm always repositioning myself in yoga so that I can keep my hands and toes on the mat, or that I hang off in the right direction. Long mats are available, but after months of watching I had never seen a really long one for sale in either of the yoga studios I frequent. Thursday, there it was! 85"!!! Ten pounds??

The upshot is that now it won't fit in my carry bag. And finding a bag big enough is also a challenge. I've been looking at new bags for months as well, and it finally hit me that I should just make my own. So out came the paints.

I had this notion of something simple, and it started that way. I pulled out some Kona cotton and painted five black swallow silhouettes swooping across it. Today I thought to add some flowers, flipped through the reference books, and started sketching fuchsias in one area. That's when I found that a lot of my Setacolor and Jaquard paints are almost empty/nearly dry. No matter, this thing doesn't need a nice hand to the fabric; in fact, I want it to be sturdy and heavy, so Golden Fluid Acrylics filled in for some colors. What I didn't realize was that I would get so carried away with the painting. This was just one area on that big piece of cloth. So now what do I do??? I may decide it's too cool for a yoga mat bag...

Connections

Life inspires art. When in an artistic slump, my best advice is look around you for some handy inspiration. After the wicked tulips arrangement for my table, I remembered the wonderful crow, pumpkin, and sunflower candlesticks, so out they came. Staring at them over breakfast, I decided they would make cool beads. So I made some. I call them Harvest Totems.

When I didn't have much time for glass this week, I decided to act upon an article I had read in the latest issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors about stitched paintings. The article was by Kelli Perkins, so I had to go check out her blog, Ephemeral Alchemy . Then I got some small watercolor paper trimmings out and a set of black markers. The first try was sitting in front of this blog, sketching from the palm silhouette photo from Hawaii. I took artistic license with the watercolors.


No stitching yet, but it was so fun that I had to do another. This time I tried the rose carved pumpkin also shown here in a recent post, and blended it with the Harvest Totem bead concept to add a crow perched on top. I had given no thought to the background before diving in, so that took a little brainstorming. Once I had the idea of the full moon, I had to include the Japanese rabbit in the moon. This thing is just snowballing. Now, what can I do next????? Maybe I'd better try the stitching part.

Cactus

More crossover -- I've been painting fabric to work on another cactus quilt and found myself last night making cactus beads.

Here's the fabric in progress: starting to paint, same area after the salt has been in place for an hour or so, and the entire (almost 2 yd) piece after it dried but before washing out.
What, you've never seen pink, blue and purple cactus? Here you go (yes, they are real!):

Idea books

Sketchbooks and sample books are source materials for artists everywhere. I recently sorted through a huge stack of old sketchbooks and journals and discarded many (blasphemy to some I'm sure). It was interesting to see that some were full of uninteresting random doodling, while others had page after page of intriguing sketches. Why??

I've been working recently to try to improve my use of these support materials. Maybe it's all the scientific training that makes my journals read like experiment logbooks. There's something to be said for assessing what I've done and planning what I will do, but the language nature of that approach is not as exciting as the visual experiments. Often the contents devolve to brain dump, a record of where I was and what interesting things I saw.

Recently, I've been trying to take a more proactive view of my journals and view them as a jumping off point. If I saw an interesting site, can I focus in on one idea and work from it as part of the record? On my recent trip to Europe, I tried to make time to do sketching and collaging in the journal I took along (very difficult at the pace we kept). I prepared some pages with quick watercolor washes beforehand, and carried watercolor pencils and crayons, markers, scissors and glue, and a sacrificial magazine. My favorite page is the pen sketch of Casa Batllo in Barcelona, with added color from Aquarelle crayons.
Now I'm planning to try this approach with enamel painted beads. I'll prepare a base bead and anneal it, then paint a wash background with enamel and fire in the kiln, then add a freehand pen sketch on top and fire again. Finally, I'll tweak the color with more enamel.

On the flights home from Minneapolis, I worked on electroforming sketches. Here are a few of the ideas currently in progress.

Scrimshaw?

Friends have a way of influencing us!