In progress... paint and hand stitching.

Hi there!  I have been just loving the hand stitching process lately.  Here's a little something I've been working on.  I have an old worn out pair of linen pants that I cut a scrap out of and mounted on a small wooden hoop.  I painted the background with acrylic paints and then free hand drew a pattern on the front.  Then it was just following the lines to create the image with 6 ply off-white cotton thread.  I am currently working on a second one painted in reds/yellows/pinks and will show you them both together on the wall.  (the hoop that will mount this one is currently drying from being painted black and white stripes).  I cant wait to see how they turn out on the wall.

Now I have to get back to work.  I have a HUGE mess of an art room, resulting from months of neglect and stuff piling up, and I am ready to get back in there and make some art! Why do I love the mess making, hate the re-organizing process so much, and yet love working in an organized art room?  Anyone else have a process like this?  You love to have your space simplified and clean when you start working but can never bring yourself to consistently keep it that way? (Sigh).  I'll post some before and afters as soon as it's done for you to see my progress.  Happy Sunday everyone!  I hope you have a more relaxing agenda ahead of you today than I do :)

Whats On My Work Table

My son got sick this week, so no painting time for me, but I really wanted to share with you a bit of what's laying on my work table right now, calling to me, begging to be finished...

Each of these pieces are totally different in intention, style, technique, and my goals for them... I suppose I am experiencing a bit of creative schizophrenia...

What's on your creative plate this week, pulling at your heart for your full attention when you should be doing dishes/laundry/homework/etc...?

A Day of Work in Pictures

I have a very large show coming up on the very intimidating Thanksgiving Weekend.  So I needed to get a little work done yesterday.  Here's a few pics of the result...

 I dont know how a person could take an entire day to make 30 pieces of jewelry, but I managed to do that.  So now I have to do a little catch up.  Today is all about finishing touches, pricing, making giveaway buttons, and counting inventory... love the weekends when my husband can take over parenting duties! :)  What have you been doing this weekend?

Update from the Art Room...letting go and trusting

I've been feverishly working away trying to get ready for the looming craft shows.  I wonder whether I will ever be as ready as I want to be?  I may have to accept that my own need to make perfection a goal when it comes to my own craft is a waning dream, and I'd be better off just shooting for above average and maybe surprise myself.

 (Hope or Lets Just Be...print by Jessica Gonacha...available here...not my work, 

but I adore it and it makes me happy.  I just had to share)

What I mean by this is that I have a picture in my head of how perfectly beautiful my booth will look.  I want it to be an experience for people, bursting full of handcrafted things with beauty and inspiration dripping from everything, color and texture so intense and yummy that the booths next to me look bland in comparison.  I want my displays to be gorgeous, professional, and look like I've been doing this for decades (and not 6 months).  I want to have so much inventory that I dont sell out too early, and have so many different kinds of products to sell that people have trouble picking what they want.

 (my heart is always home...by Harmony 2010...3"X3" Wood Panel mixed media painting covered in beeswax)

These are HUGE dreams, I know.  I tend to over achieve when it comes to this kind of thing and will always overspend on decor and display, because my vision of what I want it to look like somehow becomes as much if not more important than whether I end up making a profit when it's all over.  (Like right now I am in negotiation with myself on whether or not to buy a dress form to display the journal necklaces.  $70 just so I can put wings on the thing and create a story around my jewelry line).  I think I get so over the top with displaying my artwork because I am still not completely convinced that I am a "good enough" artist to sell my work, and maybe if I create a really special environment to display it in, I can convince people to take the time and find what is special about my art held within it.

 (Dream Flight...by Harmony 2010...top half of 18'X36" mixed media painting on canvas board)
Print available HERE

 I need to trust myself more.  Trust my friends and family here in Florida and you here using the internet, that I am good enough to show my work, to sell my work, and YES to even one day have a fan base!  Its a process, I know this.  Some days I feel more confident than others. After I finish a painting that I think is really good, I'll hit a high and be soaring with confidence and assurance that I should keep pursuing my passion as a profession.  But it takes no time at all before I am starting on a rough sketch on a new white canvas and feel that cloud take over my head and my heart sink a bit as I start to think, "there is no way I can pull this off well.  I might as well not try."

 (Loved Birds...by Harmony 2010...Mixed Media assemblage piece on 4"X4" Wood Panel)

So that is where I am at... learning to let go and to accept and love myself for who I am and where I am at in my artistic journey.  These pics are a few of my HIGH moments this week, and I wanted to share them with you.  Thanks for all the support you have given me.  It is part of what keeps me going.  I would love to connect with other fledgling artists like myself.  If you have an artsy blog that you keep up with pictures and stories from your own creative path, please share the links in the comments.  I promise to visit often and return the support.

Be Blessed My Friends :)

 



 

From the Art Room: A Peek Inside My Workspace

I cant believe that it is almost August! Time has flown by this summer and I have so much left to do before that dreaded day when my wonderful husband has to return to work (elementary teacher) and I will have my art work time cut in half! I am ecstatic to be able to stay at home with my son while my partner works to support us, but I have gotten really spoiled with 3 months of help and space to give me lots of me-time in my art room. I will miss that. The other freak-out part to this coming transition is that I am looking at THREE major craft festivals in Oct and Nov and I am nowhere near ready for them. There is SO much work needing to get done in the next 3 months, and I thought I would be much further along by the end July than I actually will be. 

 

So in light of my waning time being able to have full days of work time, I've been feverishly creating away all week and wanted to take a little break and show you a bit of what I've been doing.

Remember the Custom Nursery Painting Project I had going on a few weeks back? I blogged about it here. Well, that buyer ended up backing out, and I was left with 4 super fun backgrounds ready to paint on, but no real inspiration for them. Without a buyer for the nursery art idea, I just wasnt really feeling excited about the content enough to keep going with it. So I put the canvases aside and let them wait until they spoke to me and told me what they wanted to be. A few days ago inspiration struck! It came with the discovery of this artist, Rania Hassan.  She makes these amazing art pieces she calls Ktog (knit togethers). I just adore her art.  If you have a few moments just peruse her gallery on her website.  The pics of the installation pieces with many of her works all together are just breathtaking!

Ktog 9 by Shoofly (Rania Hassan) sold here

I got an idea to use hand carved stamps with a monoprint technique to create the subject of the pieces and then connect them all together using crocheted yarn.  I started working in layers, doing some stamping and then covering the paintings with a resin glaze to add depth before affixing the final prints on them.  I am in the process of crocheting the webbing I need to connect them all, then they will need frames attached to the sides and a final layer of resin glaze on the top, but here's a glimpse at the series so far in progress...

I am really excited about these pieces!  I think it could end up being a beginning of many more mixed media works just like it.  What do you think of them?  I plan on using the stamps I carved for them on a few art journal covers for my etsy shop, so keep an eye out for those.  I think they will be quite lovely.

Here's the fun part for you!  Before attaching the monoprints on the surface, I scanned the paintings, just to see what came out (you never know what you'll get with a super glossy surface like these.  What came out was AMAZINGNESS!!  I loved the look of the scans so much that I wanted to share them with whomever was excited to add onto them.  I put them in my brand new blog page called Art Journal FREEBIES!  Just look for the tab at the top of my blog.  The files are there for you to copy to your desktop and use for personal use only.  I thought they would be perfect as backgrounds for an art journal page, as a great journal jump starter.  I just ask that you respect my work and not use them for anything that would be resold. 

While I was scanning, I got excited about making more art journal starter pages and started making scans of other textures and items that I thought would make great backgrounds to work on.  Here are my two favs...

This is a scan of lace scraps left over from when my mom made my wedding dress.  Its a gorgeous imported French Lace and I saved every bit and scrap that was cut away as she sewed.  It shows up now and then in different collage works I do.  I love the possibilities of using it as a background for a painting.

This one I did on a whim and it turned out really beautifully.  Its two scans actually, overlayed and dissolved together using photo editing software.  The first image is a mess of ribbons and handspun art yarn that I use as embellishments on the Art Journals I make.  The other image is a bunch of cut twigs and branches found at a very personal and spiritual place in my life, collected a few years ago while hiking out in the Utah desert.  They remind me of the incredible beauty of nature and the cycle of life and how I fit into it.  It seemed fitting for these two images to go together and I think they look really lovely.  I faded the images a bit to make it easier to write/draw/paint over.  These scans are also for grabs on the FREEBIES page, ready to jump start your imagination and creativity in your personal journaling or artworks.

If you do end up using any of these images for your personal artworks/journaling, I would LOVE IT if you shared the end result with us.  I could do a whole post showing all the different ways they were beautified.  Just send the jpegs to feedyoursoulart@gmail.com

Ok, it's back to work for me... Ciao Bella!

 



 

Update from the Art Room

Here's a bit of what I've been doing the past 2 days...

I was asked to do a series of paintings like my bird paintings, but with butterflies, adding inspirational words, and using a slightly more girly color palette.  It will be for a nursery and I was really excited to jump to the challenge.  

I came up with a rough idea of what each one would look like: (mostly to play with space and design elements to make sure they went together well)  After this pic, I ended up doing a reverse of the Bloom design to fit the overall scheme better.

The buyer wanted me to use my usual mixed media techniques and so I played with some paper layering to build a base background for the paintings.

Then I used gel medium to fasten all the papers down on the canvases and to create a brushed texture on top of the papers (I like lots of texture on my paintings and dont like working on top of flat smooth paper.  The gel really helps me create that rough base I like to work with.)

Next I grabbed my brayer and created the color pallettes that I wanted each painting to be in and worked away creating layers of color over the papers to get the exact background look that I wanted.  (Hint: keep a dry and wet work rag on hand to wipe away areas of paint as you are working)  Then I added some texture and patterns with some hand carved stamps and random household items (paper doily and bubble wrap).  Here's a short video of me doing some of this (its my first attempt at doing a video of myself, bear with me, the view is not that great)

Last I added drips with alcohol inks and Voila! The canvases are ready for me to start on with the paintings.  Backgrounds are always super fun to make in this way.  It always feels like playing to me and there is very little chance of messing them up.   

The "Imagine" canvas in pinks and reds

The "Create" canvas in purples and blues

The "Bloom" canvas in greens/yellows

the "Discover" canvas in yellows/oranges

My other news for today is that I finally got 3 of my newly redesigned Journal Necklaces photographed and listed on Etsy.  I am really proud of these.  It took quite a bit of time and money to get all the materials that I wanted for them, but I think it paid off.  They make me so happy!  I have 6 more almost complete, so keep an eye out for more shop updates.

See them on Etsy Here

 Have a Happy Day where ever you are at!! And before you leave please leave a comment to introduce yourself if you have not already.  I adore making connections with new friends, and you are welcome to leave your website address and whatnot as well so we can all get to know each other better.  Ciao!!