First Day at the Aurobora Press Master Class

Today was my first day in Aurobora Press' new location and the first day of the five month Master Class workshop I'm taking there. Aurobora recently moved from Natoma Street, behind the SFMOMA, to 370 Brannan in SOMA.

The new space is light-filled and beautifully remodeled by Michael Liener. It is also within a very short walk to the South Park area, which has several nice restaurants and a tree-filled park. I'm going to enjoy being in this location for this Master Class.

Deb Sibony, Master Printer, setting up the press:

And mixing the inks:

My first plate, all inked up and ready to print:

The first few monotypes - the Fish Series:

More Encaustic (Beeswax Coated) Art

Here are three new pieces, each 11x14 when unframed. They were inspired by an Italian magazine/newspaper I got from a yard sale over the weekend. It is called Piccola and looks to be from the 1940s. I couldn't find any information when I googled it. Maybe I will ask my friend Roberto to see if his dad, who lived in Italy during this time, remembers it.

The pieces read:

Edward agonizes over not being able to control his emotions.


Doreen is jealous of those around her.


Jaques confides to Alexandra that he's keeping secrets from Claudia, but pulls back from revealing what he knows about Claudia's role in Michel's death.

Cow 2805 Finished, With Details

Cow 2805 Ready for Encaustic

I really, really do need to wait until tomorrow to let this dry before putting encaustic on it - just on the polka-dotty parts. The cow is already varnished with a glossy medium. That helped her look more like she was painted in oil. Ok - I'll go to bed and get up early tomorrow morning to milk her, I mean cover her with beeswax.

Working Bigger - in the Collage Style

Here's the base of the painting - Cow 2805 - ready for the mixed media collage part over it.

Prints with Akua Inks

Today's experiment was a set of four prints using the collagraph technique and Akua soy-based inks that came by way of today's UPS driver. He can't quite figure out why I'm smiling so much when he arrives. Because he always has something new and fun for me to play with!

Painting for Yesterday

This might be called: Fishies Whisper Secrets in His Ear, Mixed Media/Collage on Board, 18x24

Boxes All Done

I had a wonderful Saturday doing all the embellishments on the boxes. I have 25 done, so 5 more to go to get to 30. I am very happy with them. Each one has something special inside as well as outside.

I used the DIY tutorial for making a photography light box and lit the set with two 500W halogen work lights from the hardware store. I still need to figure out how to get my Canon 40D (did I mention how much I LOVE my camera?!) to do fill flash even when there is plenty of side lighting in the shot. This would enhance the front lighting and eliminate some of the shadows to the sides that I couldn't get rid of because of the light positioning.

Here are a few of my favorite boxes; see them all here on Picasa Web Albums.

Boxes Done - Inside and Out

Each paper clip represents one completed box. I clipped the postcard image to the background paper and matched each set with it's box. As I moved through the boxes to apply the papers and image, I put the paper clip on the hook on my worktable.

Here are some of the ones I created - now ready for the fun part - embellishments!

4 Down, 26 To Go

I got the insides of all the boxes done. I find this part a bit tedious. All about being very neat, getting the edges just right, etc. Plus, it is just really a lot harder working on the inside of a space. Still, the time I spend on these is meditative - contemplating all the curious things in our minds that have to do with boxes and these spaces they create. Here are the first two:

30 Boxes Project

I made a lot of headway on my 30 Boxes project. I'm going to use painted paper and vintage French postcards (mostly French) to decorate a slew of boxes I've been collecting for some time. This is part of my commitment to use up all my art materials before I get anything more. Maybe it will be more like 35 boxes, but it's a lot. Here are about 30 of them stacked up with the paper and image that will go on them. Next step is to clean the inside of each one, adding some internal lining if needed (most do). Then, I'll gesso the outsides for a nice base to start adding material onto. My plan is to add these to the inventory of material to sell at my own "trunk sale" in the Fall. Stay tuned for my progress on these.

(Did I mention lately how much I love not working!?)

The boxes are small, large and everything in between. Old and not so old, wooden and cardboard. I have a little bit of a thing for boxes - hard to pass a good one up. And this is great re-purposing of them.


Here's a close up of each paper and corresponding postcard stacked with it's box. Yum!

Dreaming of White Trails of Smoke

These pieces all seem to be about dreams. This one is 24 x 30 - mixed media encaustic (coated with beeswax). Enjoy! I'm moving on to matching painted backgrounds (colors) with vintage french postcards for use in making 30 boxes. Whew - that is going to be a big project which I hope to do this weekend. I'll keep you all posted!

More Beeswax Coated Art

Today's art (yesterday's actually) was created from the techniques I learned at ConvenZioNE again. These are all found paper coated with beeswax. This first one, 145 Parlor Games, is on a 9x12 canvas. Beeswax is fine on this non-rigid surface.

These two are more of the IKEA mirrors, each 9x9 wood with a small mirror in the middle. The art on these pieces was inspired by using some very old paper I found when I unframed a really cheesy fruit decal that I bought last week at the thrift store. More will be revealed about that piece when I use it later. Anyway, the paper was so luscious with all the aging and streaking from sun and damage over time, but that all but disappeared under the beeswax. However, these are my foray into something more minimal, which is extremely challenging art for me to do. I do like Key No 13 a lot though.


This piece measures 12x36 on wood and was done over a Beatrix Potter wooden wall hanging. I should have taken a "before" photo. Basically, it was a large poster firmly mounted to this piece of wood. Very sweet, but I gessoed over it, then went to town with my images from Le Petite Echo de la Mode catalog. So many wonderful vintage images I have from this find I got in Avignon in 2006. I call this Dreaming of America.

Garage Studio Now Flowing

Amidst the sinusy allergy thing and all the computer problems of last week, I got a lot done in my (garage) art studio:

- organized all paper ephemera by color (what a simple, but profound, aha!)

- created a box for various things (paints, stamp pads, stamps, felting tools, ribbons, 3D ephemera, boxes for a big cover-the-box in ephemera project, smallish frames for future projects, sandpaper and sanding block, encaustic materials, large bags, personal treasures [not art-related] etc.

-put office related stuff into drawer's at arm's length to where I sit at the computer; and

- cleaned up bookcase, including removing piles o'things into their own boxes.


These things all being in their own box makes finding them when I need them so so much easier. I'm still looking for my more industrial-sized hot glue gun, which I know is there somewhere.

Now I'm ready to do more projects.

Carnaval

I've had some time to work with the techniques I learned at the ConvenZioNE workshops. I made some collaged wooden mirrors - two each of different patterns and colors. My inspiration was the La Louviere Carnaval guys. This is a festival in Brussels, Begium that happens a few times a year. The first image I found several years ago while surfing the net. I love the plumage and stoic faces on these guys. It would be fun to go to Brussels to see this event.

I first used the self-colored/painted papers and some vintage papers and other scraps around the border of the mirror. These are nice 12x12 wooden mirrors sold at IKEA. I think they were pretty reasonably priced.

Here is the first layer - just the papers glued onto the wooden frame. (The Carnaval guy is glued to a heavy stock - matting to be exact - and set on the piece just to check placement, colors, etc. He'll be set aside to add to the piece later, after the beeswax layer is in place because I don't want to cover up the detail on him with the wax).

I added more painted circles and added some colored pencil marks.

Then, a coat of beeswax, painting the edges and adding the Carnaval and button embellishments after the wax cooled.

Here are all four, side by side:

Is It Just The OSX System Causing All The Problems?

After spending most of my waking and some precious otherwise sleeping hours on my computer systems, I stopped in to a local computer store yesterday to see if someone would be available to work on my computer (Macs). I explained all the various and sundry problems I've been having and in amongst the agreement that I could use some help and scheduling an appointment, the technician mentioned that an upgrade to the Leopard OSX came out yesterday. I came home and installed on both the iMac and PowerBook and what do you know? All the problems have for the most part disappeared. Yahoo (the expression, not the company!) But it makes me think that Apple is less than transparent about viruses, software glitches, etc. and that some of this may have been the need for the software upgrade. I also heard that Mercury was in retrograde, so maybe it is just the cosmos out there causing all the chaos with the electronics, and the pollen.

Now I can get back to focusing on doing some art. I have a project in mind to use some of these lovely vintage images of La Louviere Carnaval (Brussels) with the techniques I learned at the ConvenZioNE workshops. Seems now like a lifetime ago that I was there.

Since then, I have organized all my ephemera by color family, amassed a small collection of ribbons, dug out my button collection such as it is, and secured some new ephemera images. Here's one I want to work with:

More Bookmarks from Envelopes

Today was a really bad day, computer-wise. I lost (hopefully only temporarily) my iPhoto library dating back 10 years. I think there are between 16 and 19,000 photos in it, including a lot of my art and photoshop jpgs. Tomorrow, I will receive a backup drive from Office Depot that will allow me to move around some things. Right now I'm constrained by being out of memory on the laptop and the iMac so I can't back up the whole library, and in bits and pieces it will just be too easy to accidentally not get some photos back. So, I will do that tomorrow, when I will also be in a better frame of mind. I was so so happy last night to have made about 50-60 of these little bookmarks.

Here are my favorite three, which interestingly include a cat motif on two of the, even though I myself am highly allergic to the little beasties! (Click for more detail).

Convenzione Workshop - Day 2

Today's workshop was on making a background for your photos taught by Brandie Butcher-Isley. She did a great job of taking us through doing an interior and an exterior background, discovering lots of ways to make interesting textures and colors.

I did four more pieces:

LOVE - 10"x12"
Click to read the text.

LAS GEMELAS - 6"x6"

EXPERIMENT No. 12 - 12"x10"

FLOWER GIRL - 10"x12"