Mixed Media Paintings

Posted on March 15, 2014 by ruthlane under mixed media

I met with my local group yesterday and Louise showed us some techniques that she uses for mixed media paintings. We were in Louise’s basement so you’ll have to excuse the low quality photos as the light wasn’t good. Louise makes gorgeous jewelry, scarves and now she is moving into mixed media paintings. You can see a bit of her work here but none of her paintings are on the website yet.

This is a very bad photo of one of Louise’s pieces that she made with the screen printed fabric we made out my house in February. She stretched the fabric over a board frame and then covered it with a cold wax medium. Anyways, she had made up 4 different surfaces for each of use to try. The great thing is you can use old boards or ceiling tiles, cover them with plaster (the kind you use with dry wall and get cheaply at the hardware store), let it dry and build your layers from there. She also applied plaster to burlap, let it dry and then roll it up to crack the plaster to give really cool textures.

Here is one of my plaster ones that I have cracked and painted with sepia acrylic ink.

This is one of Carole’s pieces that she painted first and then screen printed with thickened walnut ink.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this purple one but I was thinking of peeling paint so there will be multiple layers and it won’t end up to be bright purple.

The blue one in the middle is plaster on a ceiling tile – it is drying. I thought I would try a gel medium transfer on this one.

I printed out one of my circle sketchbook drawings and painted it with gel medium. But I was too impatient to let it dry completely. Plus it is done on an inkjet printer and should have been printed with a laser printer.

So after it was dry to the touch (not long enough), I put it in water and rubbed the paper off the back surface. So it really faded and I tore it in several places. I didn’t end up using it on my blue plaster piece. Instead, I am using a nail to incise the pattern in the plaster and then I’m going to paint the design. I’ll show you that one later.

Here is Louise’s “bark piece”. She sanded it down in the middle to get the white and then is contemplating adding the fabric and string to it. It will be finished with a layer of wax.

I sanded my brown crackled piece and then added more color back in with oil paint sticks.

This one, I painted and then silk screened. I should have stopped there and though through what I wanted to do but instead –

I plunged ahead and added more color on top with a stencil. It looked very leopard like so I added more color. And now I don’t think much of it. But I brought it home and added some walnut ink layers. It looks a little better but I’m not sure where it’s going. You can add layers of sheer fabric, organic matter or whatever you like.

This is one of Louise’s with a leaf added. The only problem is that now I have 4 pieces started with only the base layers. I now have 4 projects to finish and little idea of where I’m going with the designs. I am really going to have to just allow myself to “play” with these and not stress over what the end result is. We’ll see how that goes – I’ll show you my progression as I go along.

Circle Sketchbook

Posted on March 7, 2014 by ruthlane under Sketching

I have been busy with company from Chicago all week and haven’t had much time for creative pursuits. I’m still working in my circle sketchbook in spare moments. These photos are from pages that I have completed over the last month or so.

This is the most recent page that I finished. It is actually two pages with the orange painted page being a “frame” and the page behind a doodled radiating design.

Here’s the entire doodle page.

This is another radiating design done with black pen and colored pencil.

This is two pages as well. The circle design is on one page and the painted green background is a separate page.

This one was done with black pen and Inktense pencils which I then painted with water to spread the colors.

The design here is based on a tattoo design that I found on the web. It is done with black pen and colored pencil. All of these are on paper that is painted beforehand with acrylic ink or paint.

Now we’re moving back into some black and white designs. This is using black pens of various sizes and just doing loose swirls. I am really enjoying working in my sketchbook and circles is such a broad theme, it’s amazing the different ideas that come to mind with circles as your theme.

Ice Flowers Finished

Posted on February 28, 2014 by ruthlane under free motion machine stitching, journals

I received my order of stretcher bars this week and framed my ice flowers piece. I am deciding if it should be called Ice Flowers, Ice Flower Riot or Ice Flower Stampede. What do you think?

I had never put stretcher bars together before but it was pretty simple. I ordered extra support bars since the piece is so long and narrow. The supports help keep it square.

Once I got the stretcher bars together, I put them on the back of the piece and began stapling from the centers outward.

The corners were a bit tricky but I finally got them folded nicely.

Here it is. This is a terrible photo but we’re having a blizzard here so I couldn’t take it outside. I’ll have to get some better photos later. I decided against the leaf sprigs. I also had a suggestion to add a more prominent flower as a center of interest. I did try a few but didn’t like them so I just left it as it is.

I have shown this piece before but I really didn’t like the leaves. I had previously made really long leaves that looked like tulip leaves. So I tore them off and cut them up and now I think it looks more like rose leaves. I just need to glue them down now.

I have still been working in my circles sketchbook. This is one of the pages that I have done with markers. The background was a breakdown screen print from our mammoth screen printing session. Hope you have a good weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Exhausted…

Posted on February 22, 2014 by ruthlane under wet felting, yurt

Normally on Fridays, I spend all day doing fiber art of some variety and then post about what I did in the evening. But yesterday, that wasn’t the case. We had nearly a foot of snow here on Thursday and hubby’s “back is out” so he couldn’t do the usually plowing. So I ended up spending 3 1/2 hours on Friday morning (after having a lovely mammogram), shoveling and snow blowing. It was “great” fun. Then somehow, I had signed us up to participate in the “Mini Maker Faire” at the community college on Saturday to set up the yurt and demonstrate felting. So I spent the rest of Friday, getting all the yurt felt rolled up and packed as well as other felted items for demo. The we packed up all this stuff – 1 pick up truck and 2 SUV’s filled to the brim – and taking it over to the college Friday evening.

Here is a bad photo of the pile of stuff we brought in. You can see hubby in the background in a sort of bent over position. I didn’t let him lift anything and he got a little grumpy.

Here’s a better photo of some of the stuff we brought. This is about half of it.

Here’s the yurt being set up with the ladder in the middle holding the center piece where the roof poles fit in.

Here is Paula helping to fit the poles in. She was very brave and climbed up on the ladder.

Here it is before we started adding the felt covering. I was planning on taking lots more photos but then the people started pouring into the faire. We got the yurt covered and then we started doing felting in a bag demos. I think we probably had 80-100 kids felt a “flower” in a bag. We had an assembly line going and just kept felting and felting and felting. Everyone loved the yurt and I can’t believe how many people don’t even know what wool is. Most often we heard “where does wool come from?” – I tell them a sheep and they looked at me like I had two heads. One lady was very disgruntled because “just think how many sheep were killed to make this yurt”. Paula explained that no sheep were killed, they were just sheared to harvest the wool. The lady didn’t believe her. But we did teach tons of people how to felt and showed them a variety of projects that can be made from felt. The faire lasted 5 hours and I would estimate 400-500 people came through in that time. Then we had to take the yurt down, pack it all back up and haul it home. Thanks Paula for all your help – I really appreciated it. Next time I mention that I think it would be a good idea to do this again, shoot me.

Leaf Sprigs or Not?

Posted on February 16, 2014 by ruthlane under free motion machine stitching

I stitched the ice dyed flower piece to the background, got all the flowers stitched down and now I have to decide if I want to add the leaf sprigs or not.

Here is the entire piece with the added leaf sprigs and an extra cheesecloth flower on the left edge.

Here it is without the leaf sprigs (I left the flower).

Here’s a closer view with the extra leaves.

And without. What do you think? Should I use the leaf sprigs or not? I can’t decide.

I did add a little bit of stitching out into the border of additional leaves.

So there are leaves going over the border of the red into the green. So do you think I need to add the leaves? What’s your vote? Do you have any good ideas for a name for the piece? I keep calling it ice flowers but not sure that’s really a good name.

Ruth Lane Art

Experimenting with Arts Endless Possibilities