art – Page 5 – Mixy's Art Blog

from then to here – bit 1

hey folks 🙂 So good to be back amongst you and to see what you’ve been doing and making and sharing. I love your beautiful minds and words and colours – thank you all for being here!

gapingvoid

Y’know the one where life gets so full that some of it sloshes over the edges? I guess those bits don’t get lost; they just mix n mingle in the briny blend in which we bob.

I’m casting about back and forth, recalling some of the happenings of the intervening months since we last convened. Convened properly, I mean.

If I said gelli plate you’d know where some chunks of the time have fallen off 😉 But oh, so, sooo much more too….

Mrs Skinner, the mannequin, nestled in her natural surroundings

A change of home, a change of priorities, some big lifestyle shifts – some very literal, some more figurative.

boxing, unboxing, reboxing… no time to think

A lot of worse before it gets better

1266 — wait up, did I think this through…?

Daunted, doubtful, but deliberate and determined

Mmmmm, texture.... art is where you find it. — Mmmmm, texture…. art is where you find it.

The biggest art project to date: my new life.

It took me a while to really get printmaking.

Messy, colorful, layered up, can’t really go wrong…

…funny, it had all the ingredients of something I’d usually love, but it didn’t get me

But something kept drawing me back to the studio, and suddenly I was hooked. These are a mix of lino & mono printing. (And a few branches)

a quick flurry!

Hey folks, I’m back! Not that I’ve been anywhere else, I’ve been right here inside your computer, I just haven’t been getting the words and pictures out to you for a few weeks 😉

So here’s a little round up since I last posted……….

Looking back over the last few weeks I can see it’s been centred a lot around stencils and ink spraying

I treated myself to a bunch of bargain stencils a few weeks back. They were 1/2 price, it would’ve been sheer madness not to.

I also started making some of my own, cutting from acetate sheets, paper and card.

The paper/card ones are getting recycled into collages as (or before) their edges n corners begin to disintegrate!

Ooh and stapling! I seem to have about a gazillion boxes of staples… so naturally they’ve joined the art ingredients

This is just scuffing the surface of the iceberg of things I’ve been busying at – more pics to follow soon! 😉

deeper into the book of wishes

Yesterday I showed you the first page of my latest project – the first one I could call finished (ish).

This is the latest page, I began playing with over the weekend.

Starting out with gesso and inks, layered up and finished with hot glue blobs

Inspired by the very lovely and talented Contadina K

Metaphorical omlette

They say you have to crack eggs to make an omlette.

Right now I’m more than a bit absorbed in strategizing, selecting which eggs to crack next.

TBH, it’s gonna get a bit eggy around here, for a little while.

But my metaphorocal omlette will be delicious, not least cos it’ll provide space for me to create, that is in every way, a very big improvement on this:

This is my not-very-big bit of floor in the loft room. Ankle deep at the shallows, its main benefits are better light than the rest of the house and the radiator immediately behind where I sit! 😉

I’m still dropping by as often as I can to catch up on your doings and makings, for the invaulable inspiration you put out there, and cos you guys make me smile like a fool (quite a lot). Just I might not have so much time for posting as I’d like.
Wish me luck, folks! X

obsessions de jour

Hey folks – Happy Holidays to you all!

We’ve had a lot of dark, gloomy, rainful days here. Not a big grumble, weather happens, but the half-arsed grey wet daylight has severely hampered my ability to any good photos lately. This week, finally I got a few pics of my latest adventures and obsessions!

When time and people permit, I like to pretty much hibernate from around 21 December straight through to a couple of days into January. Not so much a big sleep, but a big re-charge. I spend most of these days actively pursuing colors and shapes in some fashion or another 😉

Recently I’ve found myself making a whole load of these. Srsly, like dozens of them. Ranging in size from about 1/2 inch upwards to 2 inches, they really satisfy the no scrap is too small to keep mentality!

To what end I can’t be certain, but I mounted a few up on some dyed paper and framed a few in little Ikea box frames.

Some of them have a very dimensional quality – consisting layers of paper and some with corrugated card – so they work well in a deep box frame. (pics to follow…)

Hang on… like a deja vu thing going on here… these things remind me of something…
Yes! these things
Curious… I’d totally forgotten about them til typing this post… But do feel encouraged, at least I’m consistent with my obsessions, even if I’ve no idea what they’re for (yet).

So, dear friends and visitors, whether you’re getting ready to party the new year in, or already have done, I wish you all the very best for 2013.
May it bring you what you wish for, and more 😀

Eph X

acrylic gunk bird

Y’know the gunk that builds up round the top of acylic paint bottles?

Y’know when the paint is copper color and it’s just so shiny and gorgeous that although it’s also dried up paint something inside you says No! Don’t throw that away! It’s pretty – stick it in the book!

Y’know when this happens on a day you’ve already started with a page covered in hairy paper that does have a certain feathery like quality?

Y’know when you look at the dried up copper color acrylic paint gunk that you stuck to the page and it looks back at you, demanding: OK, I just have an eye and a beak. You must make me a body with a tail and wings. Immediately!

Y’know? Y’know that feeling?

I knew you would…

That’s how this happened.

Jam Jar Art

Have you ever noticed the underside of a *jam jar?

Me neither… until by happy accident. I checked all the old jars I have collected up, and they all seem to be the same. (I’ll wait here, you go off to the kitchen if you need to check yours now)

They all have a ring of raised dots – like glass Braille – I guess an anti-slipping thing.

Turns out if you wash out a jar and instead of drying it, leave it to dry naturally on the nearest flat surface, like maybe an inky page of an open sketchbook, a beautiful ring of dots appear where the water has run down the sides and puddled round these dots!

Oh yeh – and if you get carried away trying to recreate the effect you can obliterate the dot circles just as easily with too much water!

The patterning reminded me of sewing machined lines (unthreaded needle, just perforating the paper) …that seemed like the best thing to go with the page in progress

So that’s what became of page 36!

* strictly speaking mine are all coffee, mayo & pasta sauce jars. I don’t like jam. Funny how they’re always called jam jars…

Seeing through new eyes

Over the last couple of years, my perspective has shifted. Like after an epiphany, I began to see differently. Expectations and assumptions either altered or vanished.

I’ve always enjoyed the process, creating, painting, etc-ing…. but inevitably it would go wrong and be set aside (that paper/fabric/material etc was expensive/so nice before I ruined it… for these reasons I can’t through it away. Haunted by a residual value… It must remain as a warning not to repeat this mistake. It must fester. It can sit there stewing in guilt, shame, regret). Weeks, months, years would pass. These ghosts of ideas would move house with me. Boxed up past failures.

Art school taught me to question these feelings, the judgemnents I made. Finally I found out why I’d kept so many of these past attempts: they weren’t wrong, they just weren’t finished!. They took a detour from the path I’d imagined for them, but that didn’t mean their journey was over.

Through these ‘new eyes’, I see possibility in so many places. This week I’ve been playing with water – as bits of dyed paper lie about my work space, often splashed and used to dry wet brushes, I came to notice how the dried watermarks disrupted the pigments of the dye/ink. This had to be investigated further…..!

editDSC_2767 — Water brushes are the perfect tool for this!

The moral to this story? Keep playing! Keep on swimming! 😀

papery things

The dyed printer manual has really got me thinking about all the other redundant paper lurking in the house and office – future dying ideas………..

All instruction manuals – speshly those ones relating to things long broken, gone or forgotten
Phone directories; the Yellow Pages would be a fab base for warm-colored dyings
Newspaper, magazines (but not the very glossy type – unless there’s time to give them a very thorough scrumpling to break the surface up)
Old bills and receipts, tickets, shopping lists, that kinda stuff
Paper bags

Added to previously explored and sucessfully played with……..

Old envelopes
Out of date manuals/instructions, insurance docs (they send me all this art paper every year!)
Diary Pages – the calendar pages, the lists of international holiday dates and all the extra stuff that isn’t actual diary & the unused pages!
Maps
Sheet Music
Misprints from the computer – y’know when it fails to feed the paper and you get the top inch on one page and the rest on another. Both of these!