What's On My Work Table Wednesday

I spent yesterday playing in my art journal. This is still on my work table today because I cannot decide what else it needs. Maybe someone dancing among the stars? Or someone hanging around on a moon? 

It started in a totally different color scheme. I had not played with Tim Holtz's tissue paper on the roll yet. It's not as absorbent as I was expecting - being tissue paper and all. Water and ink practically beaded up on the surface. The many pieces of crumpled tissue in the background began as a rainbow of colors adhered to the page with matte medium. 

It wasn't pretty! It got "muddy" looking after a while.


So I painted over it with phthalo blue (green shade) fluid acrylic, phthalo green (blue shade) fluid acrylic, and some yellow craft paint. I made the paint more translucent with matte medium and some GAC 100. This works better for me than just thinning them with water. 

This star stamp is one I created with fun foam and cardboard. These were stamped with a thinner glaze layer of paint. 

I've noticed in some artists' work that I love there is often a bit of shading around elements in the image to blend them in. I had to play around with a few different media to duplicate this effect. First, I tried a water soluble graphite. It was too gray and shiny like pencil marks - not black. So I busted out the good Conté pencils and used the pierre noire B grade pencil. The B made a nicer blending mark than the H did. After I traced around the stars I blended the marks with a paper blending stub. I like how it worked out and plan to use this more often.

Head on over to the Stamping Ground blog to see a lot more work tables!

What's on your work table this week? 

- Vickie

What's On My Work Table Wednesday 2/15/12

My kit came from Tim Holtz's Etsy shop!! It's adorable!! Everything in the kit fits inside this tiny suitcase.

This is how it looked when I opened it. So neatly tucked in and waiting for some ink! I love the little elastic pocket in the top of the suitcase. 

The tiny suitcase has real working tiny snaps! 


It came with some really nice hardware. All the pieces compliment each other perfectly.  

This photograph is showing all the parts of the kit. Each page has a pocket folded up. There are also eight clear ATC sized page holders.  

I'm really looking forward to putting this together. I will certainly keep you posted on the process! 
- Vickie

What's On My Art Table? Wednesday

Let's just pretend it's Wednesday, just you and I, on the down low.

Honestly, as you will see, I had too much happening on my art table on Wednesday to find time to post! Then taking photos and editing them made it impossible to get this up on time.

Give me a break, please. I'm new to a weekly post schedule and am still working out the kinks. :)

Without further ado, my projects!

These are 1/4" paper circles I punched from a regular hole punch. This a really close up photo. I glued them down in a punchinella pattern and added gesso over them. This will make great texture for collage and art journal pieces after I paint it. It's quite fiddly and took forever to punch all these and glue them down! You can't see the whole page, but there are more than a hundred glued to that page. I am sure doing this kind of prep work will pay off soon!


I am still working on my art journal page for 2011 in my theme of "healing". Some of my selves need to be stitched back together. I took some rough hemp and very vintage gaffer tape and sewed them together. Then I glued it to my page. A heavy layer of gesso was added to blend it in.

Right now the page has a ton of layering simulating pieces and parts, layers of myself, layers of skin, all healing back together. Evey thing has been coated in gesso to mimic a layer holding everything together. Whole. Healed. All put back together. One.


Distress Crackle Paint in green ("peeling paint" color) looks really neat in a macro photo! Those cracks look deep. It was green on the "healing" art journal page so it needed gesso, too. But not too much. I didn't want to fill in the cracks.


This is an ATC sized (2.5" x 3.5") piece of watercolor paper with texture from a "super sekrit" process I developed. It has two layers of gesso on top of the texture part.

I really cannot tell you how much I love gesso. I previously poo-pooed it in my head trying to be economical. I recant that opinion. It makes paint so much paint-ier (fun)!


This is the same piece as above... just with paint! I scribbled a little yellow and light green NeoColor 2 watercolor crayon on it and wet that with a baby wipe to spread it, which worked better than I expected. Then I made a very watery, slightly darker lime green acrylic paint wash and painted it over the whole thing. I wanted it to settle into the recesses of the texture so I let it sit to dry a little. I very carefully rubbed the darker green off the raised areas with a plain piece of copy paper. Newspaper works well for this, too, as it's absorbent. Paper towel would have picked up too much paint because it's too absorbent.

I did have to touch up the darker green as I rubbed a bit too much. It's easier to touch up the recesses with a tiny brush.


(Have I mentioned how much a love the macro zoooooooom on my digital camera?)

These pieces are not anywhere near done. But I have a pretty good start so I am happy. I certainly have no right to claim boredom with so many UFOs (UnFinished Objects)!

- Vickie

What's On My Art Table Today?

A mess?

A Tiny Work of Awesome?

Both?!

Yes!*

* It's your lucky day!

The Mess:

This is the usual state of things on my work table. I make tiny things. I work in tiny spaces. I use a lot of tools.

The Tiny Work of Awesome (Domino Pendant):

That is an original, one-of-a-kind, paper and mixed media collage on the domino pendant in the middle of the photo. The artwork measures approximately 3/4 inch x 1 9/16 inch. Yes, it is very small as you can see from the scale of the items around it.

The different layers of the flower are made of various papers. I hand cut all those little pieces of paper. I only use a punch for 1/8 inch and 1/16 inch circles.

I paint and collage all of my paper by hand. The stamped designs are stamps I created myself from various found objects, craft foam, or cardboard. The word "bloom" is also hand stamped.

This domino pendant isn't sealed properly yet. I've just now finished the paper part. (Let me know if you are interested in it though.)

Plus there is a mess of other potential Tiny Works of Awesome on my table!

Look! More dominoes! More stamped and painted paper! Wheeee!

Over at flickr there are notes on the picture above! I've marked the image with words telling what stuff is! It's amazing!

- Vickie

Some Works In Progress

A sneak peek at a few domino pendant works in progress...


Isn't she the cutest little fairy?

These will be ready to go for reHATCHED: Female Artist Showcase Series this Saturday at the Tango Cafe! Hope to see you there!

- Vickie

Collage Paper Prepping

Lately I have been creating my own papers for collaging. I’ve needed a couple specific colors for some new ideas that I could not find in my scrapbook paper stash. Gasp! How could that even be possible? I know! But it is indeed true!

My process starts with a generous coat of gesso on regular white cardstock. Nothing fancy… just a pack of white cardstock from the craft store. I kind of lay the gesso on thick creating a great deal of texture. This step is best done in batches so I do between four to six pieces of paper at a time. I bought some of those giant plastic carpet protectors so my chairs could scoot on the carpet in the studio. They have turned into great carpet protectors from painty projects (not that we are really attempting to save the carpet in the studio anymore at this point)!

I don’t know if it’s a throwback from childhood or what but I prefer to sit on the floor when I work. My body is displeased with this however and only lets me do it every so often. But painty gesso on paper calls for the floor! Huzzah! Also, there is not enough room on my worktable to accommodate the drying of four to six pages of paper.

The gesso dries quite quickly and I get to paint them soon. I think today I need more yellow and orange. Maybe some red and green for domino Christmas ornaments. Pink for cupcakes. I will also play around with some glazing and layering for visual interest.

This is a page I painted for a project a few weeks ago.

So what becomes of all this painted paper? It gets cut up into ridiculously small pieces for decorating dominoes. I’m talking about pieces smaller than half an inch, mostly much much smaller. Often I wade into dealing with one millimeter by one millimeter pieces. Yep. I do. Why? I’m still looking for the answer to that question.

- Vickie

Color Theory: Work In Progress

In the new issue of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine is a great project about using the color wheel. I tend to use a lot of bright colors in my work but find I’m getting tired of the same old color combinations. So I started this project to work out the kinks in my use of color. Here is what I’ve got so far. I’m still stitching it and assembling it.

I’m using the sewing machine to add details. I love sewing on paper and that is the main reason I got the sewing machine in the first place. I’ve had it for more than a year and I don’t think I’ve even run any fabric through it!

Since we are on the topic of color I thought you might like to see how my scrap paper is looking. I’m definitely going to save it and use it for collage! Isn’t it cool?