Planning the next steps

I am not a huge sketcher, usually I don't do things with sketches.  But this piece has been making me sketch.  Mostly because I don't really trust myself to keep the visual thought I had for long enough to actually achieve it, considering how long it takes me to get anywhere with it.

So what I'm thinking is using the purple/brown/gray thread to surround the brown square, and then stretch it onto the frame... then crochet yellow into it, coming out of the arch.  I don't know if I will use this actual frame or if I will build a new one with the same dimensions.  This frame already has a lot of hooks in it that I made, and I'm not sure I need that much for this piece, so I might save it for a future thing with more layers.

It's gotten cold outside, and now my fingers are cold inside.  Cold fingers!  Not good for crochet!  Need more hot tea!!

Challenge

I challenged myself to make an entire mini piece today, the crochet and painting and stretching.

I actually almost did it.

During the babies' nap I made two small paintings and cut them like I wanted them.  And I made one of the attachment crochet pieces.  And found a suitable picture frame.

In the evening I finished all the attachment crochet pieces, so now it is ready to stretch.  But I can't do the stretching in the apartment while the babies are sleeping (will need to hammer into the frame) so it's just not going to happen tonight.

So close!

I wanted to do a whole piece because I want to finish something.  I want to go through the whole process.  The last piece I finished, only the second one ever, I finished in November (?) 2011.  Since then I have started a few but never finished.

Using a picture frame as a guide makes it easy to stay small and not get out of hand.  I have a bunch of picture frames, I can make a few small works.

I'm going to finish this one tomorrow.  Then I'll have SOMETHING.

Lately working late

This is what my work looks like when I am working on it.

I do most of my work at night.  Sometimes I get some things done during the babies' nap during the day.  But actually this is a better view than I get while I work on it because I normally can't stretch it out as I work, I just have to imagine.

I am really getting into crochet.

I love that it has an immediate building quality that I don't always see with other media.  I can see how the stitches build structures.  If you make a chain like this or double back through here, it produces this shape or that shape or stretches or becomes stiff.  There is a real sculptural quality to crochet, something I hadn't considered in fiber before.

Another thing I love about crochet is how quickly my things become HUGE.

One moment I'm making a tiny circle that is the seed for a portion of my piece, and the next thing I know, the piece has become over a foot in diameter, and getting larger and more amorphous by the minute.  I don't know in what direction it will expand until suddenly I see it bubbling and frothing out to the right, or oozing down to the left, and I follow it with my army of hooks and yarn.

I wish I could show you but I can't because there isn't a way to stretch anything to its full size yet.  I don't even know what some of these pieces look like really.  I have to use my imagination.  I have one enormous piece, it takes up probably more than 5x5', but it is stuffed into my yarn bag.  (Another great thing about crochet, even though it is huge, it folds right down into my yarn bag.)

A few weeks ago I took a rare opportunity and bought some wood to be a frame for one of the pieces I'm working on.  It's pretty big (3.5x2.5') but not TOO big.  I'm trying to contain the size because the weight of the frame may make it hard to hang and store the piece.  But now the wood sits un-built because if I put it together I have nowhere to store it in our small apartment.  Maybe soon there will be a place.

I'm excited to have so many pieces in progress.  I bought some blue/green/purple dyed wool yarn the other night so I could start on another piece and have a wider color palette.  I haven't gotten to it yet, but it is exciting.

It's also exciting because it's like my secret.  Since I have to use my imagination, since the pieces are still stuffed in my yarn bag, since even if I laid it out it doesn't make sense to anyone else, it is totally mine.  I'm the only one who has it right now.  Just for me!

Arting Away

This is a sneak peak of the work I'm doing for the show with the November 1 deadline.  I set out to do a mixed media piece using materials/techniques including crochet, shrinky dink, water colors, and maybe embroidery.  I've been working on the crochet elements for the last two weeks because it just takes forever when you use the thin thread instead of yarn.  The picture shows how I incorporated shrinky dink into the chrochet.

So far my unemployment has been peppered with holidays so I haven't really had much time to fill.  This is my first full week without a holiday coming up, and it's pretty busy.  Tomorrow I start back up at the pottery studio finally, and I am working on these shows as well as revamping my portfolio and website.  Those projects combined with general erranding and the inexplicable time warping that happens when you're home all day makes for a full-feeling day.  Why is it that time goes by faster when you're at home all day?

(Click for larger version)

My camera was stolen and there's a good chance I won't get it back or be reimbursed.  It's pretty sad.  My phone camera just doesn't take the kind of pictures I want, I have no control over the adjustments to light or focus, etc etc.

As a result I have been using my garden as a coping tool.  Today I decided to share some pictures of progress in the garden.

I love that all of the herbs are really taking off (except the cilantro for some reason).  But I think what I'm most happy about is the flower bed feeling alive with wildflowers.  Last summer the flowerbed was completely dead, not even weeds grew in it.  The last tenants threw trash and cigarettes into it.  I tried planting in it last year but it was July when we moved in, August when I was planting, and that is the worst time to plant.  Plus there was also cat poo and stuff in it, so I didn't want to really touch any of the soil.  This year I sprinkled wildflower seeds every week for a few weeks, not knowing what to expect.  Only a few little white flowers have blossomed, but everything is so green and alive.

The whole garden patio is full of life, it is so different from last year to look out there.

PS Sorry for the low quality photos.  Sad sad sad.

Haggadah Project

Blank pages, just waiting to be illustrated

My next big project...

A complete haggadah, fully illustrated by me :)

Yes, it's ambitious.  I have already set out my deadlines and figured out how many pages and illustrations I will need.  I will use this blog (as I did for my mural project) to inspire me and keep me going as I work all the way up until April 2.

This haggadah will contain the full traditional text, highlighting a few songs along the way (and at the end), as well as a little bit of commentary.  There won't be any specific "bend" to it, it's not a "feminist" haggadah or a "revolutionary" haggadah.  It's just a regular family haggadah... made by me.

The final project will be printed in limited quantities for me and my family to use, and then will be available for purchase in a few formats.  I'm hoping to have a cheap PDF downloadable format as well as a full-color printed format.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure these will be ready to purchase by Passover (my goal is to use them by then but I don't know if I can realistically pre-sell them), so follow along and maybe buy one for next year!

Since I'm not going to post this until after Found Object Art Month, I will continue to update this post until I reach Dec 5, when it will be officially posted... if that makes sense.

Variation of Ripped Paper

I was pretty inspired by the ripped paper directive I came up with this week so I made a variation to do at home. I am usually intimidated by a blank canvas (I think this is the same with most people) and my painting teachers always told me to just cover it with another color. That somehow doesn't usually work, either, because then I just have a blank brown/yellow/blue/orange canvas instead of a blank white one.

This time I made an unplanned shape on the canvas:



Then I stared at it for a little while. I left, did some grocery shopping, cleaned a little, came back, and it still kind of looked like a troll doll waving hello. Hello troll!

I turned it around and looked at it from a few different directions and finally left it on its side and began to fill it in. It was kind of random at first, but the shape jutting out to the side now looked more like a leaf than a troll doll's head.

This is how I left it yesterday:


Today I attacked it with glazes. I like glazing because it makes the colors glow and add a lot of depth since you aren't just layering opaque paint on top of opaque paint. Also there's a lot of surprises since you don't pre-mix the colors on the palette; they mix on the canvas when you put down the transparent glaze layer.

And the final product:


I like this technique, I had a good time painting this piece with pretty low-pressure in terms of having a desired outcome. When I started feeling like it was being overworked I just stopped.

I have at least one more canvas board sitting around and a few canvases that have paintings on them I sorta hate, so maybe I'll keep going with this idea :)


11x14" acrylic paint on canvas board

I'm an ugly teapot, short and stout...

On Friday I created this little number here:


Well, it's hard to make something that's supposed to look like something. It looks like a teapot but will it eventually be one? Time will tell. It still has to be bisque fired and glazed and then fired again. The blue on the top is an engobe which I think is just a different colored clay that's been watered down and you can paint it on kind of like a glaze except you do it when the clay is still wet-ish.

There are four other pieces I worked on tonight but they're still wet and I have other things to show you, so moving on...

Thirteen pieces ready to be glazed and then sent to the kiln! I think I will glaze this Friday morning.


Well you can only see twelve in the picture above because one of them is hiding inside a bigger bowl.

Now I will break down these piles into smaller piles. The only one I'm not picturing is the wide bowl at the bottom of the middle pile... it just didn't make it into the pictures I took tonight.

Here are three smaller pieces:


One is kind of a mug with a teeeeeny tiny handle, which you can't even stick your finger through. It's more for decoration than practical use, but it is decent looking. The little cup in the front has an avocado engobe on the bottom. It looks really pale but I don't know what it will look like once it's been through the kiln.

Two larger pieces:


I felt that these two were too awkward to be bowls, the shape just was too weird. So I cut holes in the bottom and now these are flower pots, perfect for planting little plants :)

Medium-sized pieces:


Three of these bowls will be decent cereal bowls, maybe. The other two are weird. Most of these bowls are really heavy, too, because I was timid with trimming the bottom and they are heavy down there.

Two large pieces:



A bowl and a vase, yay! I like the shape of that vase. I made another one with a similar shape and gave it a similar engobe treatment, too, except instead of avocado (pictured here), I made it blue.

So there you have it... thirteen pieces to glaze, that should take about 2-3 hours, depending on whether I make my own glazes or use the pre-mixed ones in the studio.

Yes! Glaze recipes are my new OCD hobby. I get to calculate things over and over again for no reason. I am terrible at math but it doesn't matter if my calculations are wrong so it's okay! Maybe I will post some glaze recipes here along with pictures of pieces with those glazes. Look for that in an upcoming post...

Embroidery progress

Another Plant Day

A few weeks ago I made some clippings of my pink spotted plant and let it sit while we traveled. Today I saw they all had roots so I decided to plant them.


It wasn't until after I planted them that I realized that I had just helped this plant to reproduce. The act of clipping and rooting and planting was a reproductive act. It was a really interesting moment for me, planting these clippings that I had made. Until now, I had received clippings from others and planted them or bought already-grown plants and repotted them. Now I am making my own plants. I've never reproduced anything living before; all of my animals have been spayed or neutered, and I have never had a baby. So... this is the first time I can think of where something I took care of started as one and became two.



Also, I have never been very good at keeping plants alive. But now, not only was I able to create a new plant, but the plant that was clipped is growing new shoots in the places where it was clipped.


My succulent has also been progressing but some of the lower leaves have shriveled and fallen off. My mom says this might be due to over watering, so I am cutting back.



I'm not sure why it's getting so tall - when I bought it, it was a short wide plant. Now it is getting tall? I'm not sure what kind of plant this is so I don't know what it's supposed to look like.


This is a close-up of new clippings I made today in their water. Soon there will be roots coming out of that stump. I also like the air bubbles trapped on the leaves.

I Made THINGS!

Yes!  Day #3 at the wheel has shown a dramatic increase in the thing-ness of what comes out!  LOOK!

Isn't it amazing?  They are pretty much in chronological order, so you can see at first I was still making wobbly cylinders, and then I made bowls, and then I made a PLATE!

Some close-ups:

The plate (above).  You can see it's actually quite thin!  Even though it's not perfect I think it's pretty amazing.  After I made it, I stood up and said out loud, "I made a plate!!!"  The other students in the studio weren't as excited as me, but whatever.  You can't tell from the photo but I would say it's about 6" diameter - pretty small.

This was probably the best bowl I made.  Assuming it survives the firing, it would be a good little serving bowl (it looks bigger in the photo than it really is).

A shot from above.  How pretty!

The instructor told us last class to think about the design of the objects and to really take advantage of the plasticity of the clay by making it into weird shapes and not just making boring round bowls and plates.  However, this is not the way that I work.  First, I try to do really well at the basics before I start messing with the shapes.  I feel like if you make it badly and then make a weird shape out of it, you're just covering up how badly you made it ... which is kind of obvious to me.  I saw some of the work done by people in the beginner's class, either my class or the other one, and they did shape it into interesting shapes, but the sides were so thick and uneven.  They looked all right but obviously not good bowls, just interesting ceramic pieces.  So my goal is to make good bowls, and maybe I will make interesting bowls once I learn how to make good ones.

I wish I had started learning the wheel earlier because honestly this is the most fun I've had in the class so far!

Glazing away!

Today I went to the studio all morning and just glazed, glazed, glazed away. I wanted to glaze everything before we started working on the wheel (which is Thursday, ee!). I was much more organized this time so everything really took just a little over 2 hours and I think I glazed about 15 pieces.

One piece in particular I think may turn out to be very, very nice. It's a red balcones clay vase that I glazed with TC White, and put Rutile Green along the top rim. Hopefully the green will melt down and drip over the white and look really pretty. I also painted some loose brush strokes with iron oxide on the white. It's hard to describe and I forgot to get a picture, so you will just have to wait until it's fired to see how it turns out.

In any case, I am glad that part is done with. I still have to make my self portrait nose and finish the hanging jars, then I am done with all of my assignments. This class is kind of exhausting!

First Large Piece

Today we had to make a piece out of a slab of clay. We spent the first hour and a half of class talking about slabs, how to make them, how to handle them properly so your piece doesn't curl in the oven, etc. It was actually really interesting. I'm kind of thinking of making a slab and just messing with it, stretching it in odd ways and whatever, then I'll put it in the kiln and see what happens. I like that kind of stuff.

So today's project didn't have to be fancy shmancy or anything... I decided to make a larger version of one of my pinch pots. So now it's a vase.

Here's the sketch I did:



And here are the pictures:







It basically looks like the sketch I made. I wanted to start with a sketch because apparently once the clay starts to dry, you can't use it anymore (you have to put it aside and "recycle" it).

The vase is about 14"x8"x7" - that's kind of how big I remember it being, so it's pretty big. When it's done it will be smaller.

I imagine that the big hole is for a large bunch of flowers that will sit diagonally, and if you want you can put a couple of flowers in each of the small holes (the holes reach to the bottom so all of the flowers will share the same water).

I hope it doesn't come apart!!!

It's Over

Phew.

Today I was kind of racing against the clock, but then I ended up waiting around for two hours (waiting during a staff meeting and during other meetings), so I could have taken more time. BUT, I was emotionally done with it, anyway. I was ready to not be painting anymore.

The pictures.


This whole building took less time than the top of the building around the mirror



Doesn't appear to be different, I just did the sky



Building over the mirror



Corner



Three buildings in one shot



Three buildings the other way (plus some employees)


I hope they're clear enough, because they are the only pictures I have and they're the ones I'll be using to put in my portfolio for grad school. Well, these and the ones from yesterday.

Wow I am tired.

I also got a jacket. I didn't want to accept payment in product, but I felt like I couldn't sit and stare at their clothes for a week and not get anything. It wasn't so much out of the payment...

I just made a professional-looking invoice on Pages (yay mac programs) and sent it to them. I probably won't see the money until I get home from my traveling.

Wow, I can't believe it's over. And that I am leaving tomorrow. And how much work I have to do tonight, and I'm playing online and updating my blog.

PS, this blog isn't over because the mural project is over. Assuming I do more art, I will be posting it here :)

Lessons Learned & Rushing

I finished the front column and the back of the middle column:


Back of front column



Back of front column



Back of back column



Back of back column (close up)



Front of front column



I learned a few lessons today.

Lesson #1: Communication is really important, and it's really up to me to make sure that everything is being communicated properly. I wasn't asking enough questions or anticipating questions well enough. For example, today, at least two people came up to me asking when I'd be done with the front and middle columns. They need to put their shelves up already and work on the poster rack. I thought it would be all right if I finished those tomorrow morning, but they informed me today that they needed to be done ASAP. I should have asked at the beginning, before I started painting, what the timeline would look like. Instead, I just assumed that I had to be done by Thursday, period. Also, I think that people just like to know what's going on, especially if they are investing money in the project.

Lesson #2: Take inventory before leaving every night. Yesterday I left without looking at what supplies I had left, assuming that I had overbought everything and I would be fine until the end of the project. Well, I ran out of matte medium today, which is probably the single most important painting item I have. Medium helps lower the viscosity of the paint so that it spreads better and so that I can use less. Medium costs $20 a tub, which is about 1/2 gallon, whereas paint costs $10-20 for a 50oz tube. I managed to finish the sky on the front and middle columns, but then I had to leave because I had run out of medium. I was planning on finishing the entire middle column today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Today was my longest work day on this project and my feet are killing me. Also, my left leg hurts. I realized today that I use my left leg on the ladder for all of the going-up and going-down grunt work. I tried to switch it up but I almost fell off. Poor leg.

One more day!

The Difficult Day

Today was the difficult day. I'm sure there is always a difficult day in a process like this. I'm sure if the process were longer there would be more difficult days, and I'm hoping that this was the only one (as I only have two more days).

Remember my Goal Wall plan? With the contact paper stencil? Well, I should have planned more thoroughly and invested in a proper knife, because cutting with a pocket knife just doesn't do it. Obviously, the lines I made were jagged, although they looked straight to the naked eye. And obviously, I didn't have too much time to test it out, so I just threw it on the wall with no research or testing. This means it didn't go exactly as planned.

Well, the stencil worked. It came out legibly. But it was very splotchy and the lines were all jagged and bumpy. I spent two hours fixing it. And because I'm not especially good at making straight lines by hand (hence the stencil idea), I ended up with straighter but still kind of bumpy lines. Not jagged, just not as perfect as I'd want them to be. So I put in some shading, which helps make the lines look straighter, and did some really subtle things with the paint to help make everything pop a little more and look nicer. This is the result:



Not bad. Closer up:



The last "L" in particular was the worst. I couldn't position the ladder correctly (there were lots of heavy boxes right under where I needed to work), so I was stretching pretty far, plus that was where the stencil was especially bad, so I was trying to cover up a ton of splotches.

However, it looks fine from a distance, and unless you are really inspecting it, you won't notice that it's a little imperfect. And anyway, they wanted me to paint the letters on. They could have easily bought letters that you rub onto the wall, or made a banner on the computer. But instead they wanted me to hand-paint it on, so you get the human-touch, right? Right?

So, spending two hours on something I'd spend 45 minutes on kind of put me in a bad mood. Not a bad mood but not a good mood. I started working on the buildings again, but I was getting frustrated, and I was tired and my feet and back hurt from standing and stretching on the ladder for the "Goal Wall." Despite all of this, I was able to finish the building on the back column and the building on the front of the front column:





Tomorrow I am hoping to be there all day. I wasn't there all day today because I was taking pictures of my other work for my portfolio that I need to put together for grad school. Oops, I have a life outside of the mural?

My goals for tomorrow: Finish both pink-based buildings. The back of the back column and the front of the middle column. If I have time, I'll finish the entire middle column, including the back. Thursday I will do both green buildings (or one, if I do one tomorrow) and the sky on all of the columns, and then I am done, done, done.

It feels like it's been a long time, doesn't it? Maybe because I post three times a day.

It's All Coming Together

Today, JewishGuy helped finish the last bits of base coat and I was able to start the first part of the final coloring.

Pictures!!!!!


Front of back column




Side of back column



Back of back column



Back of front column



Back of front column again



Painted over the stencil :)



Front of front column - FINALLY


Yay!

The bottom half of the front of the back column is what I really worked on today. I spent probably an hour and a half on it. I think the back column is going to take 6 hours, total. The other columns won't take as long because there isn't as much space on them to paint.

I kind of went a little crazy on the paint-buying today at the art store. What can I say? I LOVE PAINT. But even with the ridiculous amount I paid for all of the paint (at least $10 a tube, and I can't remember how many tubes I bought but it was over 12), I am running very much under budget. So I'm going to keep the paint, since I'll be teaching painting classes next semester. Maybe this will also encourage me to do more painting in general - maybe I'll have enough for a show!

(This is a lot of hopeful thinking).

Anyway, I am super pleased with the progress. I really feel like the bottom half of the back column looks exactly like the sketch, which is how I want it to look.

Here, let's compare:


Column in real life



Column in sketch


See?!

Yay!