Not Bad Art Night, But We Did BA Anyway

Thanks to the instructions and inspiration in Water Paper Paint by Heather Smith Jones, I did some good art tonight with my friend KDub.

By Kdub. Love her work!

Keep on Keeping On Making Bad Art

I'm just getting to posting photos of art I made at this week's Bad Art Night.

I wanted to make jacked-up pomenades like the beautiful ones I saw here, but not so precious. Bad Art Night was the perfect place to work on them.

I was able to do three in our 7-10 pm time slot. That included punching the flowers and putting them onto the styrofoam balls. The first one I did with bright paper from an ad inside the New York Times magazine. I liked the hot pink and blues. I think it was for a resort down in the Bahamas. At any rate, I used the regulation pearl-head pins.

It took nearly a whole box of those and they are almost $5 per box, so that wasn't going to be a sustainable model.

Just for kicks, for the next two I used regular everyday straight pins. They have almost no head on them because they are so cheap and flimsy, but that was perfect for this job.

The blue pomenade is made from flowers I punched from some Thomas Bros. map book pages a BAN attendee gave me. She also gave me some beautiful origami sheets and I used them in two colors (lime green and orange) to make the third pomenade.

I have a large stash of ribbon, so it was easy to find something that coordinated with each pomanade.Oops - now that I look at the step-by-step instructions, I see they don't put a ribbon on them to hang. Oh well. Happy accident.

I really like making these as long as they aren't too pretty.

I also made these random collages using left overs from the punching for the pomenades, which I then glued to some paint chip samples I happened to have lying around.

It was another successful Bad Art Night for me!

Image Transfers to Cloth

I experimented with transferring images to cloth tonight by printing out a simple vintage ruler onto the inkaid transparency and using purell on the little journal cover.

The image on the right is a copy of what I transferred, still on the transparency. The image on the left side of the cover is the transfer, still a bit wet.

It seems like it worked well. It may not be the best final image, but it is a good guide to overpaint and augment with acrylic or maybe even some paper with a coat of matte medium over the top of the whole thing to fix it.

Wow - I Like Her Description Better

Yes - we did sedate backgrounds at Bad Art Night. Then we moved on to Bad Girls. RPRT's write-up on this part of the evening, long after the official ending time, is so much better than anything I could write, so I'm not even going to try.

Slight correction - her attribution to me as the "teacher" is a bit mis-placed, because it is our other BAN after-hours participant, K-Dub, who showed us the gesso magic. However, I did venture into re-creating Charlize while RPRT looked on. Then she did her Jersey Girl splendidly and with more reckless abandon than I could muster.

At any rate, here are our Bad Girls. I would only add that if you don't feel like going out on Friday night and being a bad girl yourself, consider staying in and making some of your own at Bad Art Night. There's no nasty tequila hangover, sore arches or regrets about performing drunk karaoke.

Charlize (L) and the Jersey Girl (R)

Step-by-Step Instructions

I'm helping my friends at Bad Art Night learn how to do interesting backgrounds they can use in their mixed-media pieces - whether it is an altered card, journal page, large painting, or a box.

It's great having a public blog (which feels similar to being a featured columnist). Patch Half Moon Bay has been great to invite me to participate in their community forums so I am blogging about art and creativity, and life!

Next week, my blog post will be about creating an interesting focal point.

Enjoy.

Patch Plugs BAN

We got a good little plug on HMB Patch this morning with a brief review of last night's Bad Art Night activities. We have a good, consistent group showing up and it is truly the light of my life* to have everyone in my space, creating.

*after my kids, of course.

More Digital Image Transfers @ BAN

I am continuing with the digital image transfers. These I did during the week or maybe on Friday with Nancy before Bad Art Night really started.

In Bad Art Night, I worked them over with watercolor (flower) and collage (Starter Buddha). I really hated the Buddha one before I started and a new BAN person, Linda, suggested turning it upside down. So I did! And added the printed word and the chandelier and voila! The bad art became a good and inspirational background.

New Direction for Art?

I visited the Recology Transfer Station (San Francisco's "dump") last Saturday. The rest of the weekend turned into kind of a personal train wreck, but Saturday afternoon was a blast.

Recology has an Artist in Residence program that I am going to apply to for 2012.

While on the tour, I took a bunch of photos, which you can see on my travel blog here.

This one is a composite of a photo and some Photoshop CS5 fun.

Digital Image Transfers

Thanks to my friend Charie from Bad Art Night, I'm now up and running doing digital image prints. She is such a doll - full of good energy and so helpful with all the tips and tricks.

She turned me on to Bonny Pierce Lhotka's new book - Digital Atelier Studio Series, or something like that. I did these image transfers using the special transparencies and hand sanitizer.

Then, I did these using hand sanitizer and regular old photo paper with the ink jet printer.


I'm loving it!

It Stings When Someone Calls Your Activity a "Fad"

I stumbled across a blog post from a local artist, Connie Andrews, that talked about Bad Art Night. You can read the post here.

Connie's post talks about how the term "Bad Art" bothers her and she uses her writing to process through to the conclusion that calling combining the term "bad" with "art" is wrong.

  "Deliberately creating bad art does not "free" you-it locks you into the idea of creating something that you and everyone around you considers substandard.  It locks you into all the negative connotations that are associated with the word "BAD". Its a cheapening of your art and Art in general."

I like that as a fellow artist, Connie is challenging me. She states right in the top of the post that her comments are likely going to be controversial and possibly lose her some students.

And, I feel stung when she says Bad Art Night is a fad and nothing more than a social gathering.

"One last point: Bad Art night is not Art,  its a social gathering.  What's wrong with a social gathering?  Nothing.  But why not gather in the name of good art or Heart and Soul night or something with positive overtones"  

While it is new in Half Moon Bay - only 6 months since we started these meetings, it is more than a social gathering, and it's been going strong in St. Paul MN where artist Laurie Phillips and her writer husband Jon Spayde started BAN more than 16 years ago.  Up to 10-15 artists come every week and I hear one story after another with positive statements about how artists are expanding their horizons:

- Photographers expand into painting and drawing and then see their photography in a new light.

- Fiber artists work now in three dimensions on collaged boxes.

- Mixed media collage artists discover new techniques and ways to express ideas on paper.

- People with no art experience or confidence whatsoever are trying watercolor and collage and experiencing success without the pressure of having to create masterpieces from the get-go.

I welcome Connie to come to Bad Art Night so we can get to know one another and so she can experience it for herself. Meet us fellow artists and try it before concluding "bad" is bad. The last thing in the world we need is for our opinions about art to divide us. For me, art is about collaborating and uniting. Artists and their art are what is going to heal the world.

For Sale!

Currahee by William Daniel McHugh

PJs at Bad Art Night

Tonight we wore pajamas to Bad Art Night. We had such a big crowd - overflowing with people all over the house doing bad art.

Here are the two pieces I completed tonight.

Art Spa Fun

What fun we had at yesterday's Art Spa for the winners from Art in Action's Atelier silent auction fundraiser in March. After a light lunch, we dug into making journal covers and memory boxes using handmade papers and wine bottle labels collected by Denise and Dani in Tuscany. Relaxing, creating, unwinding our minds....perfect way to end the week.

Half Moon Bay Bad Art Night Info

We do Bad Art Night (BAN West) on the 2nd and 4th Friday of every month in Half Moon Bay (HMB).

Here's the 2011 BAN HMB calendar. For information on the location and to be added to the group announcement email list, contact Laura McHugh.

For more information about what BAN is, read this article from Patch Half Moon Bay, January 2011.

Bad Art Night in San Luis Obispo

I was in SLO this weekend for an antique fair. What fun! And, I took a few art supplies so I could do some Bad Art on Friday night while catching a recap of The Royal Wedding. The inn we stayed at had a British influence and they were serving Prince William's cake in the lobby. Yum!

Something Beautiful I Saw Yesterday

And I admit right up front that it is going to be very impressionable on my work.

Kurt Kemp and Marc Perlman collaborated on these drawings/encaustic panels at Aurobora in SF:

Fast Shots Out the Window

I carry my camera with me in the car. I'm usually alone, thus I'm driving. Especially along 280 between San Jose and Hillsborough, there are some really beautiful trees and the green this time of year accentuates their graceful presence.

Here's a shot I took yesterday. Opened the passenger window, stayed in the right-most lane and held up my Canon 40D and pressed the shutter. Hoped for the best.

This photo - unretouched. I didn't even have to straighten it up.