Sketch Book Pages

Posted on August 8, 2014 by ruthlane under sketch book

I’ve been working in my sketchbook when I get a few minutes. I have been trying to do some “layering” of different techniques.

This one has been painted, printed and then I used colored pencils to better define the flower shapes.

The photo on this one is one my sister Margaret took by our house while she was here. I stenciled on the little blue flowers and then used Inktense pencils and permanent marker to draw the larger blue flower.

This one is another photo by Margaret and then the rest is paint.

I painted the background first on this page and then silk screened purple ink through a screen that was made from a photo of marbles in a vase. I then added colored pencil. I think I will add more to this but haven’t decided what yet.

This last page has several different layers including paint on the first layer, then silk screened dark green ink followed by a layer of light gesso. I then put more color back into the background with colored pencils. Again, I think I will add more to this one but not sure what yet.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a good weekend.

Completions

Posted on August 1, 2014 by ruthlane under Felt, surface design

I have been working steadily on my piece for the Totem exhibition as it needed to be completed before August 15th. I finished it today including mounting it on matte board for hanging.

Here’s the finished piece. You can click on the photo to see more detail. It doesn’t really have a name yet but it is supposed to look like a “totem blanket” that has been found as an artifact.

This is “Rising Reflections” finally attached to the canvas. I have had this sitting around for a while but since I was mounting the Totem piece, I thought I should just get this one mounted too.

And this is the small landscape that I needle felted, machine stitched and then hand stitched. I don’t really like it much though. Not sure what it needs but it has been finished for a while. Not sure what I’ll do with it but I’m sure it will go in the pile of stuff that still needs to be mounted or framed.

While I was taking photos, I heard lots of crashing around behind me in the woods. I turned around and this deer went running by. At least it wasn’t a bear 🙂

More Sketch Book Work

Posted on July 25, 2014 by ruthlane under sketch book, Sketching

I worked on more sketch book pages and backgrounds today. I also did a bit of felting but I’ll show you that on the Felting and Fiber Studio site soon. I printed out some of the photos that my sister Margaret and I took while she was here. There are of wildflowers and I want to work on sketching the flowers and developing further designs.

I also played around with some acrylic inks, acrylic flow release and rubbing alcohol.

I’m not sure I can tell what the flow release does. I will have to play around with it some more. Has anyone else used it?

These last two photos are using the rubbing alcohol. I painted first and then while the paint was still wet, I dropped alcohol onto the paint. It causes a kind of resist effect.

I really like this effect. It’s the rubbing alcohol again but instead of drops, I squeezed it in a stream across the page. It’s always fun playing with different color combinations and paint techniques. Have a good weekend!

A Wealth of Goodies

Posted on July 18, 2014 by ruthlane under printing

I recently got a couple of gift cards for my birthday and I ordered some art supplies.

I got screen printing ink, dye-na-flow paint, fiber reactive dyes, soda ash and several sets of marker pens.

I decided I needed to paint a few background pages for my sketchbook. I used greens because I am going to be using the wild flower photos that my sister took while she was here as inspiration.

Then I decided I wanted to try out the inks with some mono printing. I put the ink on a piece of glass, used a Q-tip to draw the design into the ink and then placed my paper on top and rolled it with a brayer.

This one is a ghost print from the print above. I used a piece of the paper that I had already painted green.

Then I tried using the left over ink on the glass to draw on the back of the paper. I had my ancient bird doodle handy so I used that as the design.

Then a few swirls…

and a spiral to finish up. It doesn’t take a lot of ink to do these which is nice. You can also use the ink on fabric and heat set it. So I will be trying it out for stamping and screen printing as well. More to come!

Toad and Totem

Posted on July 11, 2014 by ruthlane under machine stitching

I thought you might enjoy seeing this big fella that was outside my door the other night. I hope he’s out there eating all the mosquitoes!

I am a bit behind working on my piece for the Totem exhibition in October. I had an idea but it is a large sculptural piece and I don’t have the supplies to make it. So I decided to go another direction but was having problems thinking what my totem is. I have never really considered that I might have a totem. It is supposed to be an animal or plant that represents your or your clan. But that definition didn’t help much. So what to do. Then I remembered my prehistoric bird doodle. Perhaps that would work?

This is the doodle after I played with a scan of it in Photoshop. It was really quite ugly before that. But I do like the bird now. Kind of a cross between a turkey and an ostrich. I decided to use some screen printed fabric for a background. I found a piece of “acid” green linen to use for the bird body.

The bird body does look more yellow here than green but it is green. I added some tail feathers and I am going to couch down some yarn for his legs.

Here are some more parts of the piece after some free motion machine stitching.

I am going to add a bunch of hand stitching now and see what I come up with. If you have a piece that you’d like to enter into the Totem exhibition, you can find all the information here.

Ruth Lane Art

Experimenting with Arts Endless Possibilities

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