Notan

The new Quilting Arts Magazine came the other day. Jane Dunnewold has an interesting article in it about the positive/negative exercises called Notan. So I decided to try it, and this is what I came up with:

For the above, I cut a blossom shape out of the dark paper, and reversed it for the positive/negative effect. Very lacy, and the black and white squares are very quilt like.

Next I tried a more involved design, of a Christmas ball. Unfortunately, after a considerable amount of work, it looks like baseballs to me. I like the pinwheel effect caused by the roundness of the image.
Read the article and try it. It really is fun and it's way different from the way I usually work. I remember that Jane taught a weekend workshop in Notan a while back at QSDS. Now I wish I had taken it.

Image transfer

Yesterday, well actually Sunday and Monday since it's a long process, I tried image transfer with gel medium. I had an old letter copied (it has to be a toner based copy) and coated the paper with four coats of gel medium. After the last coat, it had to dry for 8 hours. Then I soaked the paper in water and rubbed the paper away, leaving a rubbery copy of the letter. It was a lot of rubbing, since it was an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. I like the results, and I need to practice applying the gel medium so that the brush strokes don't show. I plan to use it in a collage, but I don't quite know how yet.

Here is the most recent weekly:
I need to work on shadows. These make the trees seem more grounded, but I don't think that that is how shadows really work. I should go draw some trees, I suppose, so that I know what they actually do. It's a very pretty day, not too hot yet, and that would be a great way to spend the afternoon.

Another Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day again. Since this is an art blog, I'll stay away from the current war, and instead here are photos of the American Cemetary in Normandy, where 10,000 American service men are buried. They died in the Normandy campaign, not just on D-Day. It's a very sobering place.




I took these pictures in the spring of 2005, on a trip to France with other artists.

Painting Fabric

This is a piece of fabric I painted over the weekend. It's about 18" square. I used black and burnt sienna Setacolor transparent paints, and scrunched it up to dry.

I've been having such a good time painting fabric that I called Testfabrics to order pfd. In the fall, I toured their facility with Cathy Kleeman. It is very interesting. At one point, there was a big pile of narrow bolds heaped in a corner. Seems taht they have a client who wants narrower bolts than Testfabrics usually carries, so they cut the ends off. Those cut ends are great for painting, so I ordered one. It's 18" by 135 meters. I won't need to buy any pfd for a while! But I'd better invest in more paint.

Weeklies Update

Here is weekly #39.

As you can see, the background is the same woven technique that #38 used. This weaving did not have enough contrast, so I screen printed the trees on it. I wanted to make the tree on the left come forward, and the one on the right recede. More or less successful.

But while I was getting ready to photograph it, I looked up at the rest of them. I have them hanging on the wall of my studio, just below the ceiling, in chronological order. I started this series in July, and the first 8 are relatively bright, not cheerful really, but light and airy I guess. (Except the fish.) September's output was less so, and they get darker and darker until April, when they begin to lighten up again. I've always hated winter, and I dread fall, because I know what's coming. It's interesting to me how this has played out in the choices I made when making these.

Here are photos of them in my studio. The light is bad, but you can see how I have them displayed.