success!

 This painting  ended up being a few inches shy of 3x4 feet after I stretched it.

This one is about half the size of the one above...sorry I didn't make any standard measurements. I get caught up in the process of painting and forget about practical things like documenting the progress or writing down the sizes. 

I'm excited because this is the closest I've come to replicating the look of my business cards in a large scale. I ended up using a lot of gesso and absorbent ground, but these paintings are on canvas, not watercolor paper which means I can blow up the scale even larger- I could go 7' by 12' if I remember my canvas roll sizes correctly. How cool is that??

 I added gold acrylic paint to my usual paint ingredients, so there a subtle luminosity that happens

The usual tools

 The first few layers

 A few progress shots before I got too covered in paint to safely use my camera

I painted my island two different shades of gold. I'm thinking that they will peak through the tape layers I'll be adding to the frame.

 I cut 72 business cards

 ...but I ran out of drafting tape.

 I purchased a different brand of 300lb water color paper, and I found out that even with the drafting tape the paper layers were separating and tearing after taking the tape off. I wasn't expecting that, so I need to revamp my game plan.

Winter projects

 I've completed my new color chart

...Finished one obsession and started another.

I recently got hooked on Kendama, which is a traditional Japanese game. Learning the tricks is challenging but fun. Plus it makes a really satisfying wooden clink. I've been using it as a focusing tool, and it's improving my hand-eye coordination. 

In less nerdy news, I started prepping some large canvases.

 I didn't have any stretcher bars at my studio at the time, so I just tacked/taped the canvas over some boards. I'm priming them with acrylic gesso (which I haven't used in years) and absorbent ground. I'm hoping the absorbent ground will create a paper like surface- something that my rabbit skin glue paint can stick well to. I had been using 300-400lb water color paper, but it was really expensive and there were size limitations. 

I haven't worked with absorbent ground before, but a former CCA grad student Conrad Ruiz  uses it for his larger than life watercolor paintings, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to try it out.

The weather has been rainy and cold, so it takes a while for everything to dry. I started playing with some paper scraps I took from a free pile at work while waiting for the layers of gesso to dry.

 At first I was thinking about topography, and building the layers slowly.

Then I figured I could make it function more as a frame. Right now I think of it as an island, and that I'll build the land with layers of my leftover tape. 

I gessoed the surface and painted the base a textured silver. It was fun to make waves with impasto paste. I still have a bunch of layers of absorbent ground to prep, so I'll be jumping between my canvases and my little island for the next few studio sessions.

I wanted to spend the day there today, but last night my back got all out of whack at work, which is alarming because I've spent a small fortune on chiropractic care since it first reared it's ugly painful head in October. Plus I noticed that the bundle of palm muscle between my pinky and wrist on my dominate hand is really sore today, and it hurts to close my fist. I just hope that these things are minor little flareups. I've had to deal with injuries this winter that prevented me from working, and the  depression that feed into it. I really want to make these paintings- I want them to work, I want them to be beautiful but most of all I want one less thing to be frustrated and bummed about. I need to catch a break. Maybe letting you all know this will motivate me to make my own fortune. Send a kind word or thought my way as I get through the next few days. I'm going to spend my birthday on Thursday and Friday in the studio and I'm very excited to have some big chunks of time. Fingers crossed that my body let's these aches go and doesn't start protesting again.

Projects from 2010 that didn't get blog credit until now

Rabbit skin glue experiment papers in a triptych frame

A thank you painting of a loon for my dear aunt, watercolor, color pencil and gouache on illustration board

 A collage thanksgiving postcard for a friend. The texts reads "gobble gobble" at the top and "heh heh" at the bottom.

This was the 2nd year that I've made holiday lino cut cards. The two lino cuts were carved on the same block, which made the edges more fragile than I like. The Frontier Mother and Child was inspired by a photo of women and children in Time Life: The Old West: The Women- on of my favorite sources for reference. I drew the image on the block and carved it out. The Lunar Mother and Child was carved a week or two after the frontier one. It started with a more complicated and geometric boarder, and I wanted to do something challenging and fun. Abstracting the spacesuits and lunar landing was a major highlight of the past few months art wise.

 

test runs of the blocks- I love how crisp they are in the beginning!

I sold a dozen Lunar cards to Lola Home which was very exciting. I haven't had a chance to stop by and ask if they sold well, but these are the ones I have left.

 Playing with the ink application was fun and a lot less stressful than planing a painting's color and compositions. I'm beginning to understand the thrills of printmaking, and feel more regret for not taking more print classes when I was in school.

 I love how over the time the ink stays on the block and it becomes a singular distinctive piece that creates multiples.

 I posted a few of these cards on TroubleFox, the Etsy shop Stephy and I are working on. Right now we're using this quick drawing of a fox as the profile pic.

 

 

 I've been covering this board with black masking tape salvaged from Devin DeKing's Senior show. I have two large plastic bags that have fused around the tape (14 roll's worth I think) and I like the challenge of untangling it. Devin is also one of my dearest friends- on a girl talk and a "let's get messy and make something" level. She's a solid source of inspiration and just as enthusiastic and in love with rabbit skin glue as I am. Devin and I also share the same madness for time-consuming and body effecting work. Will the work and its process make us ache, our joints stiff, dye our skin, bother the prissy and make our lazy art peers look bad? Then we will revel in it.
Devin has been teaching English to naughty and Über adorable elementary school students in Japan for most of the year. I miss her dearly, and this project has morphed into an expression of that removed excitement and missed kinship; it is slow, because it takes time and because I'm savoring it. I think eventually I will make this a canvas for a rabbit skin glue painting, because I know all the crannies and layers are begging for the ooze and sediment.