"Soar & Fly" Art Journal Page

From this ...

... to this ...

... to this! Ta da!

This page had more planned for me than I did for it! My muse was here in my presence. I could hear her whispering to me to "let my Little Bird fly". 

Fly, Little Bird. 

Fly and soar. 

Trust your wings. 

Sing your song! 

Your amazing tiny heart 

will take you anywhere.

This bird stamp is my design, and is made from foam sheet and cardboard. It is outlined in orange Copic marker and then black Stabilo pencil for dimension. The bird cage is white-out pen. I drew over that with a sparkly gel pen to make the bars look shiny and metal. 

The purple circle and scalloped dictionary page were scraps laying around. I added my handmade button stamp to the circle and layered them. I used my label maker to print the words because I was in a hurry. They are pixelated, and that bugs me, but it's not a deal-killer on this piece. 

The letters for "soar" were brown to start with. I painted them and stamped some dots and lettering on them with paint. The dimension the raised letters add is lovely! 

The little heart banner is punched hearts from book pages and baker's twine. A little watercolor splashed on the hearts creates some interest. 

Look! I managed to sew in curvy lines - not jagged straight-ish arcs! The paper itself is created with gelli plate printing and white gel pen. This is before I drew the heart and swirly black line.

To connect the theme of singing I glued down some tissue tape with music on it. That needed some color so I washed a little acrylic paint over the tape. Using a Molotow white paint pen I wrote the words "sing your song" and added black to make it more readable. Some little doodles and stars here and there finished the piece nicely. 

There you have it! This is the first art journal page I have completed this year. It took several days to work out. I printed the background about a month ago with my gelli plate right into the journal. 

I worked on it here and there for a while until the full image finally came together. I wanted to experiment with some ideas I had in my sketchbook, and this piece gave me the chance to work those ideas out more thoroughly. That's what I love about art journaling! Mad science experiments! Focusing on the process! Mastering techniques! Practice  Practice. Practice!! 

I hope you have a wonderful weekend! Happy Easter if you celebrate! Also, Mr. M turns 40 this weekend! Huzzah!

- Vickie

"Summer Evening" Gelli Print

Since my Artist Spotlight post went up at Gelli Arts' Facebook page I've had some inquiries into how I've created some of these prints. Several people had questions regarding the vibrancy of my prints. How do I do it?

To be honest, I'm not completely sure. I really had to go back and almost dissect my work to produce an answer. 

Right now my best "guess" is using color theory to not layer colors over each other that produce muddiness (like putting a bright yellow over a purple because red + blue + yellow = mud). 

I use rather bright paint colors to begin with. As with any kind of paint the colors vary in opacity and translucency. Knowing your paint helps a lot. 

Let's take a look at my "Summer Evening" gelli monoprint.

I will freely admit much of this print is a happy accident. This piece was very experimental from the start except for the leafy vine stencil I cut freehand. 

The first layer of paint is a dark cranberry purple -  Yes, I know I just ignored the suggestion above about putting those colors in a bottom layer. Experimental, remember? 

The large circles, when wiped out with my finger and a paper towel, looked really nice with how organic the edges became when printed. 

I added a little fuchsia over that cranberry purple. You can see in the wiped out circles the little lines and squares of fuchsia. 

I wanted a lot of color and layers under the vine to create a lot of dimension. Intending to just print on the left side under where I planned to put the vine stencil, I inked up my gelli plate with yellow. While printing the left side of the piece, the right edge of the paper fell out of my hand and into the yellow paint. EEEK!

Mud! Instant muddy brown. What to do?! Grab a baby wipe!

I figured there was enough paint on the paper already that it would hold up to a wet wipe down. When I wiped away the yellow paint it left this glowing, bright yellow orange behind. The fuchsia and yellow created this color in the white space of the wiped out circles. So basically this side of the print received a yellow color wash. Nice happy accident! 

Incidentally, you can see how awful that yellow muddied things up if you look in the upper right corner of the piece. There is some of that yellow that I didn't wipe off. (I suppose if I wasn't going for bright colors and wanted brown I would have been satisfied with that yellow.)

I printed a thick layer of turquoise while masking out the vine with my hand cut stencil. Then I used a handmade stamp over that with more fuchsia. Several more handmade stamps, some stenciling with punchinella, and some white gel pen brought the piece together.

Ta da!

Working on this piece got my brain wondering how color washes over prints would look. I added Distress Stains over some parts of other prints, and it looks really cool. Adds a pop the piece didn't have before. I also seem to have a thing against white space. I love full blown color all over. I made some prints on paper I covered completely in Distress Stains and watercolor. 

Color washing first also helps me avoid the "white blank page" staring contest. It's already started! All I'm doing is adding to it, I tell myself reassuringly. 

I would love to share in the joy of your happy accidents! Link up to your posts about them in the comments, please!

- Vickie

{be creative everyday: 2013} MARCH 8

{be creative everyday} MARCH 8 :: gelli print collage, a photo by Vickie @ In My Head Studios on Flickr.

Gelli Print Collage - work in progress

paper collage of acrylic monoprints, gel pen, ink, handmade stamps
5.5" x 4.25"
© 2013 Victoria Porter

This isn't quite the finished version. I added a little more detail to it after I took this photo with my phone. 

All of these pieces of paper were printed on my gelli plate. Some were already printed with text, like the Japanese newspaper I picked up on a visit to Austin, Texas, and some dictionary pages. Using my hand-carved stamps and black archival ink, I stamped some designs on some of the pieces.  

I'm deciding whether or not to send it through my sewing machine for some random stitching. It feels disparate to me and needs some cohesion. 

What do you think? Stitching or not?

Happy Monday!

- Vickie

Gelli Arts Artist Spotlight: ME!

If you've been reading along then I don't have to tell you how much fun I am having working with monoprinting. Printing has always been in my blood in some form or another - from lino block cutting and printing, rubber stamping (it is too a form of printing), making my own stamps out of anything and everything, creating collographs, screen printing, and now making monoprints with a Gelli plate.

The joke around here is that if it sits still long enough I will either print on it or ink it up to make a print on something else. Nothing with wonderful texture is safe around my inky and painty fingers! Yes, I've been caught inking up interesting cracks in the sidewalk and making prints from them!

Right now I'm having such a blast with my Gelli plate that I've hardly had time been able to stop printing long enough to fill you in on some extremely cool news! 

I was contacted by the folks at Gelli Arts, the company that makes the Gelli printing plate, about the prints I posted to my Facebook page and blog. They enjoyed them and asked for some images to feature me in an Artist Spotlight on their Facebook page. They posted 18 images from various pieces I have made in the last few months. 

How cool is that?! 

Rendered even more speechless by the response - thus delaying this post further - I am still at a loss for words over the number of comments and "likes" my work has received. 

(The album itself currently has over 100 "likes" and 13 shares. One piece has 125 "likes"! The amount of traffic here and almost every other site I have for In My Head Studios has roughly tripled.) 

Gelli Arts, I cannot thank you enough. To have my work shown alongside the work of many of my favorite artists is intensely humbling. The positive response is icing on the cake, next to which I have been doing the Happy Dance of Joy for more than a week. 

Several people have had questions about how I make my prints. I don't currently have a tutorial about gelli printing on this blog to share, but I am working on a few ideas for showing you how I do the printing. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the rest of the Gelli Arts Facebook page for some awesome artwork and a ton of resources about printing. Their Pinterest page is chock full of eye candy, tips, and tricks, too.

As for me, I am headed back into my hermit hole to make more prints! 

- Vickie

Piles of Prints!

If you are anything like me and have amassed hundreds of prints from your Gelli Plate printing sessions...

...then you are BURIED in wonderful, gorgeous papers! Happy digging!

What to do with all these prints?! DOODLE! 

acrylic monoprint on paper, marker
4" x 5"
Victoria Porter
© 2013

- Vickie

"Courage" for A Cause

Our greater Rochester community suffered a tragic event on Christmas Eve 2012. While not on the scale of the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it certainly brings those memories and images too close to home, especially since this occurred only 10 days after Sandy Hook.

The Story: A man set fire to a house up by Lake Ontario, then opened fire on the first responders. Two firefighters, nineteen-year-old Tomasz Kaczowka and Michael Chiapperini, were killed in the ambush and Joseph Hofstetter and Theodore Scardino were injured. One police officer had minor injuries related to a bullet-shattered windshield. The gunman fled the scene so the burning homes could not be secured. The fire spread and eventually seven homes burned to the ground and two more have been deemed uninhabitable. The gunman was found dead a few hours later from suicide. His sister was later found dead inside the shooter's home. 

The killed and injured firefighters were from the West Webster Fire Department. Many, many fundraisers have been started to aid the families of the deceased, injured, and those who lost everything in the fires. 

You know me... I can't sit back and do nothing when people are suffering from senseless violence like this. So I sat down and created this piece of artwork to donate to this cause: Fundraising Raffle for the Families of the West Webster Firefighters.

The fundraising event is tonight - sorry for the short notice. You can still buy $5 raffle tickets at the door from 5:00 - 5:45 pm at the Applebee's on Empire Blvd. in Webster. Please contact Walter MacDonald IV at 585-269-4761 for information.

"Courage"
acrylic monoprint on paper, ink, collage
4" x 6"
© 2013 Victoria Porter

I wanted to honor the fallen as well as those who keep our community safe everyday. It is  their COURAGE that make them special. 

This piece started as a monoprint made with my Gelli Printing Plate. I used stencils,  some store-bought and some of my own design, and lots and lots of layers of paint, which created this texture that I'm in looooove with. 

The lettering was stamped and altered a bit to make it thicker. The stars, hearts, hand, and wings are paper and were collaged onto the piece after I did all the drawings on it. Then I went back and outlined things in white to make them pop. 

I worked on this piece here and there over the course of the past few weeks. The work has fit in nicely with my {be creative everyday} practice. 

Of course, I would have liked to post this sooner, but it took me a few extra days to complete as I had to do my own framing. I drew right to the edges of the 4"x6" paper so a traditional standard mat for a piece this size would have covered the edges. That left me with a fussy sized mat window to cut. I got it right on my first try! I wanted to keep the frame size small so the organizers weren't storing and transporting large glass pieces. Plus I knew the Rochester Artisans would be donating a lot of work (62 pieces in total thanks to Stefani Tadio!).

I can only hope my work brings some measure of peace to this community and to those directly affected by this event.   

- Vickie