(yet more) freebie gelli prints

I luuuuuve this batch. Love the colors, love the shapes. Love. Love. Love.

I'm finally getting a grip on how to put down the layers so that the end result is what I had in mind. These are all done on cereal boxes roughly cut to the size of the plate, 8x10". 

Started with at least two layers of a bright but fairly dark blue done without much in mind except getting some color on the cardboard. Began adding turquoise to the blue for the next few layers and doing some sort of texture, either bubble wrap, a stencil, that marker holder thing that makes dots - anything to get something other than a smooth sheet of color.


I did about 12 of these in rotation, pulling one and setting it aside to dry, doing the one next to it, etc, until everything was well covered with 6-8 layers of blue/turquoise. Then I let them dry while I went off and did something else that I can't remember now (this was a few weeks ago) and when I came back, it was time for the oranges and rusts!


These I did thru stencils or by laying down color on the plate, pulling some back off with bubble wrap, pressing the bubble wrap to a cardboard, then putting another cardboard onto the plate. There are so many ways to use color and implements with the gelli plate - I'm still figuring out new ways to do things.


Anyway, this batch came out just like I'd hoped because after Rhonda was here on Easter Sunday, I had gelli print envy something fierce and had to make some of my own like hers that I so admired. Job accomplished! Then I scanned them for posterity and cut them in half for postcards. 

Scanned at 300dpi, use them however you like, just don't sell them. 

Linking up to Mandarin Orange Monday.

Fresno journal spread, sheep, ice cream

While cleaning my art desk the other day, I came across all the junk ephemera I'd gathered up in Fresno, and thought I'd better do something with it to commemorate a fun weekend. An hour later this journal spread was done. 

Gelli print backgrounds, altho nothing's left of the right hand background.

On the right side - I bought a deck on vintage Flinch cards in the original box ($2 - SCORE!) at the Mennonite quilt auction and tore one of the "3" cards up since there were 3 of us amigos. Added bits of brochures, a few choice words.

On the right are some of the more interesting artists' cards I picked up when we gallery hopped on Thursday evening. Fresno has a First Thursday Art Hop and altho it took us a while to actually find any galleries (faulty map reading on my part), we eventually saw a lot of cool stuff.

The next pic is the inside of a brick water tower that's now a store that sells a variety of pieces by various artists. I bought a mug.

While walking to what we thought were galleries, we passed a cool old Art Deco theater, The Crest. 

Also drove by a field full of more sheep than I've ever seen in one place. All milling about and eating down the stubble. Kris was fascinated so we sat there for a while on the side of the road watching them while they watched us. Wouldn't have noticed them at all except we made a left turn when we should have made a right and had to make a u-ey to fix it.

Then... then... for dinner we had ginormous ice cream sundaes at Superior Dairy in Hanford. They were huge and delicious. For dinner.

Fresno, I think you used 
to be the murder capitol of California or something equally awful but we had a great time. 

pearl earring

I enjoy the book Girl With A Pearl Earring, and I think the painting is just lovely. How incredible it must be to wield a brush with that much talent. When a mailer from the de Young art museum in San Francisco arrived, I was pleased to see that they're having an exhibit that includes this painting. Not sure I'll be able to get to the museum but I knew I wanted to use the girl in a piece of art.

From all those gelli printing sessions, I have a pile of postcard-sized gelli printed cereal boxes on a shelf. I pulled them down and shuffled thru, auditioning the girl against various backgrounds until I found one I liked. (the back is Great Grains Cranberry Almond Crunch!)

The words had been sitting on my desk since I cut them from a page, just waiting for the right thing to come along. They're from the author's notes of Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, a book I really enjoyed. (bought the large print edition in Fresno with the intention of cutting it up for collages, but got hooked and had to read it first)

The white leaf shapes are gesso pounced thru a stencil that I cut on my Silhouette. Added a few white dots, some ink scribbles. I quite like it and think it will go in a small frame and up on the wall.

the front hall

We moved into this house in March of 2012, a little over a year ago. Since then I haven't done a hell of a lot of decorating on the main floor. The upstairs guest room is all foo-fooed up but it's mostly white-wall city in the rest of the house.

Years and years (decades!) ago I bought one of those old wooden expandable cup racks at a yard sale. Remember those? They had, like, 9 pegs and you hung your coffee mugs on them? Well, this was one of those, only this one had... wait for it... 75 pegs! I've never seen one like it before or since.

I've got this long from hall, which is actually one wall of the living room, but since the living room is my art studio and filled with a ton of tall furniture (storage!), it has created a long hallway effect coming into the house from the front door. There's a bench and my Boone hutch (with my mom's old butter churn on top, next to the original glass flour canister for the hutch), and an old ladder and an even older trunk, but I had this long chunk of wall above the bench that was bugging me. I played around with the 75-peg-mug-rack and discovered that it would stretch reeeeally long, so I hung it up and dangled all sorts of things from the (75!) pegs.

It was fun going thru my boxes of collected stuff and finding things that looked good on the rack.

The pics are a bit grim because the light was terrible that day and I don't have the oomph to do them again right now. But I'll do another post soon on all the hanging goodies.

The third image is a little bench that I made out of some old red fence boards a long time ago. (So I lied in that last post where I said I had no red in my house. I forgot about the little red bench, but it's all worn and isn't the hurt your eyes sort of RED that those postcards were.)

On the bench is a piece of wood with grooves cut into it that had some other purpose entirely but now I use it to hold ATCs and postcards and collages, done by me and other folks. In the first image, the bench sits between the bench and the hutch. I also have a doily collection you wouldn't believe and the last two pics are the shelves of a piece that sits across from the bench. It has vintage things on the shelves and dog walking paraphernalia in the drawers.

The last pic is a vase of dried curly willow branches that I picked up on about 150 dog walks from a house on the other side of the block. Every time we got a good wind, I'd walk the dog that way and collect some more fallen branches. So far, they're on the mantel, in this vase, in a pot by the front window, and sticking out of a vintage glass lampshade that you can just see behind the standing up spindles in image 5. Oh, and a pile out on the patio drying.

RED swap

MMSA is having a RED swap, so I paged thru a few magazines until I had a pile of RED stuff, then got to work.

Added a bit of paint and then gesso pounced thru stencil waste, doodled a little and called them finished.

Not much more to say about these except they're done. RED just isn't my color. I don't think I have a stitch of it in the house anywhere and I own only 1 RED piece of clothing - a sweater I wear only at Christmas. Mr. OneWomansHands looks good in RED cause he has dark-brown-might-as-well-be-black hair and the right skin color.

Why would I even enter a swap where I don't like the main thing about it? Well, I just like working to prompts because my own head seems to be mostly empty of ideas lately. Once prompted I can do a mildly creative job, but I mostly need to be kick started by someone else.

Which is fine.

altered playing cards (APC)

MMSA is having an APC swap so I dug out my cards and did a few. Made me remember why I like ATCs so much - the tightly defined design space. You have to be creative in 8.75 square inches - the area of a 2.5" x 3.5" ATC or a standard playing card.

I've recently been paging thru Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin, trying to add a few more tricks to my usual collage/gelli/stencil/doodle repertoire. It's one of my go-to books  because the techniques are mostly ones that use supplies I already have on hand and it's chock full of finished ATCs by a variety of artists so there's lots of idea-inducing eye candy.

Anyway, I had the hots to do some gel medium transfers so I dug around for likely looking images of women or kids and slathered a few layers of gel medium on them.

While they were drying, I collaged some gelli printed book page onto one of the cards and some white tissue paper layers onto a few others. Sprayed the still-wet tissue paper with inks, then with water and let two of them drip onto the third. Two got two layers of tissue but on the third I wadded it all up and made a highly textured surface. Took forever to dry but it looks cool.

As I was rubbing the paper off the transfers I tore the eye area off the little girl, and said a dirty word. Then I realized it wasn't a disaster, it was a design opportunity! (put another layer of gel on the other two transfers cause one 'opporunity' a day is enough for me)

I get impatient with the rubbing-paper-off part and always get too rough with them. They are very delicate, and I know that but I still do it pretty much every time. (what's the definition of 'stupidity' again?)

The top two pics are the correctly done transfers and the third one is the one-eyed girl. Shoulda put her a one-eyed Jack card, huh? Didn't think of that till just now. Darn.

Found some appropriate text in my folder of old book pages, drew a branch on the textured one, and wa-la - four APCs for the swap. They didn't all have to be green for the swap but that's my color family these days.

lovin art

***ACK! I see now that I DID post this. They say the memory is the first thing to go... Well, read on anyway, I talk about my Mom a bit.***

A journal page from a couple weeks ago that I forgot to post. There's that turquoise again, used in a stencil Rhonda brought with her on Easter Sunday. I was just reflecting that I've almost always had some sort of artistic thing going on in my life. Macrame, sewing, crochet, knitting, spinning, weaving, quilting, crazy quilting, dyeing. And now all this paper fun.

I can thank my mother for starting the art fire within me. She was a painter of some skill and I have many of her works around the house, including the somewhat odd painting of cats and sunflowers that I have hanging by my front door. Unfortunately it isn't signed or dated (unlike her) but I know it was done when she was in her 20s, so sometime in the 1940s. (there's that turq and orange again... it's EVERYWHERE!)

It's about 10x14, done on a canvas board. Our house always smelled of oil paint and linseed oil and turpentine cause she usually had a painting or two going. In her later years, she worked on commission in the little Ohio town she lived in, doing portraits of people's houses and pets and kids.

Thanks, Mom.