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.