Here’s the black shirt last week.

And here it is this week. I put more Soft Scrub on as the first time it didn’t take well. I did learn that if you spray with water after putting on the Soft Scrub it soaks in better.

And here’s the blue one last week.

And after spraying with bleach and leaving for over 1/2 hour. This shirt is very slow with discharging. But I like them both better now.

I have finished my September page for Cobi. Her theme is Art Nouveau. Here’s a little peak. I’ll mail it off tomorrow and post the full page after she receives it.

Carole, from my surface design group, gave me some plastic a couple of days ago. Two big sheets of it. So I thought it would work great for stencils. I have several stencils I made out of paper that are wearing out quickly. So I am going to re-do them in this new plastic. And it works great. Here’s the first one. More to come.

In my studio journal this week, I worked with some of the bleached papers that I made. This one is based on my continuing obsession with tree bark. It has a base of bleached paper, with torn bits of bleached paper towel and then drawn lines with pen and Sharpie marker.

This is the back side of the bleached backing paper in the bark piece. It reminded me of a horizon with clouds. So I accented with very light Lumiere paints to give the look of water and added a moon.

With my new local group, we are going to be working on design elements and principles each month. I am going to be taking charge of this activity and I’ve been doing lots of research. Since I am going to be doing all the work already, I thought it might be fun to put the information and exercises here as well. Then if you wanted to join in, you could let me know in the comments and we could work on design, show the results on your blog and then I can post links for other people to see what you’ve done. Anyone interested? It will start next month and a new design topic with a short explanation will be posted each month. I will also give a list of exercises/practice ideas for each topic to follow along with each month. You could do the work in your studio journal or make practice pieces or just use that topic in whatever you happen to be working on at the time. What do you think? Join in the fun and improve your design capabilities at the same time!