New Year, New Month, New Day

 

Well well well...another year has arrived, and it's time for a new monthly marker. For this year, I've gone back to combining two of my photos, one from my quilt/art making and one from elsewhere in the app, SnapSeed.

I combined the picture of the gate that my DH made for us last year. (oh my goodness, last year).

It's combined with this photo of four of the Hourglass blocks from the Lupine Mystery quilt. I really liked how the lines on the gate line up with the lines on the block, and the lines on the fabric.

My chosen word of the year is: Alignment. I will be doing my best to work on making sure my inner world is matching up with my outer expression. There's a lot going on inside of everyone (including me), sometimes some or all of it gets stuck inside, pushed down, pushed away, ignored, de-prioritized, etc. The occasional successful expression of my own interior world shines so much more brightly to me among all the other less personal work that I've made OR am in the process of making OR am meaning to make at some point. All of it is useful and necessary as it adds up to skill-acquiring, facility (but not yet mastery) of processes and materials, training the hands and the brain to work together and so forth. But I'm finding I need to put more of my focus on making sure I'm prioritizing or working on my own projects that I've come up with all on my own.

I'm starting off the year doing a month of Drawing Every Day This is my illustrated More/Less list for the year. It relates to what I was talking about Alignment.

Here's to a year where all  your More actually happens and as much of your Less gets lost or worked out.

Gelli Experiments

There was a discussion at the latest CQFA meeting about a Youtuber artist, YeatsMakes. I decided to check one of his videos out and tried one of the techniques he describes. This one is about making a print using a drawing done with a Chinagraph or grease pencil. I made a quick sketch of my hourglass and gave it some texture with one of the random FabMo thingies I keep around for that purpose.

My first mistake, happened in the second step, I placed the drawing on the Gelli Plate and rubbed the back of the paper to transfer the markings. Well it transferred, rather permanently (but more on that later) even without the paint I should have brayered over the Gelli Plate surface first. Guess I should have taken notes on the steps in the video, whoops!

This was the print that I pulled. I kind of like the ghostly image of the hourglass drawing. But otherwise pretty much a bust since I didn't do things in the right order.

I hadn't worked with a brayer in a while, so I was having fun rolling off the excess in my sketchbook. These will make good backgrounds for something else.

I made a whole new drawing and tried again. The black paper on the right is that drawing covered in the black paint, with the drawing transferred to the Gelli plate on the left.

Here's how it looked on the surface of the Gelli Plate before I let the paint dry. The last step is to brayer white over the whole thing, let it dry with weight on it, and then pull your print. 

Well, it worked a little bit better, but not great. More attempts at this are required. It was fun playing around with all my printing stuff, I haven't done that in years. I haven't used the Gelli Plate too much, and I'm really impressed with how it performed. 

Procreate Class

I'm taking an online class in Procreate offered through Carla Sonheim with artist Lewis Rossignol. I really like the platform that Carla has created, the classes are presented very professionally and clearly, it's all very easy to use. In this class, Lewis is showing us how he combines digital and paper work together. It's so interesting to see how this is done and get to know how to use this powerful program just a little  bit more. 

The above was my starting point drawing of a face. No laughing, please! I haven't drawn a whole lot lately, and haven't drawn a face in quite a long time.

After watching the first lesson I did the work on my iPad outside because it was so nice. We used a separate scan program to get the image into Procreate and then the fun really began. The power of layers (just like in Photoshop) was brought home to me once again. 

I like a lot of things about my picture so far. And some I really don't, which is easy to replace/erase or transform in Procreate. The possibilities are endless with this program, which is a big part of the reason I've never gotten too far into learning a digital drawing program, that endlessness is frankly rather paralyzing to me. But I'm diving in and trying to push myself to get a little further along this time. 

I found that the Apple Pencil was a little hard for me to hold for very long at a time because it's quite slim. I got myself a barrel grip thing and it really helps my hand. That's what that red thing is on the white pencil.

Roll It Up

I needed a really good birthday present for friend J, and she had recently posted about a colored pencil roll she'd found online at PinkChalkStudio. I guess this is also in the book "Last Minute Quilted Gifts."
Luckily the blog post had some directions (not exact, but enough to get me going). The first step was cutting strips in each color. This was made to fit the Prismacolor 24 set. That was the most time-consuming part of this project! Pulling out the red box. Then the orange box. etc... as we march through the rainbow.
After that it went pretty fast. Sewing the colored strips together, finding a good fabric for the pocket (I used a thick woven cotton, almost to a light canvas. That was folded in half and basted along the sides and bottom. The filling was flannel so that the roll would roll up small enough. I chose some fabrics for the outside of the roll, right sides together, with the ribbon tie basted on one end.
After sewing around the outside, then turning to right sides, I did some pressing. Then the stitching in the ditch between each color, over the pocket to make the holder for each pencil.
This ribbon started out as just a boring white one, but I had this really thin trim that I thought tied in (haha) really well with the fabric I'd chosen for the outside of the roll. I sewed that on with clear thread.
Tada, voila', fini',done! And I'm happy to report that she really liked it!
And it turned out that I read the notes I'd made on assembly wrong and had thus cut the colored strips twice as long as I needed. So now I have one that I can assemble for me. Haha, I love "mistakes" like that, wonder if I really really wanted one subconsciously and thus changed the number around in my conscious brain.