Category Archives: easy project

Lesta and Lyn – a half-day workshop exploring mixed-media surface design

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paper1

Finally! Lesta Frank, my much-revered artist pal, is coming to the Studio to pair up with me for a half-day workshop on Sunday, November 9th. It’s called Exploring Paper Surface Design, and it’s going to be amazing. We’ve been talking about doing this forever and now it’s really gonna happen.

Lesta and I go back a looo-ooong way (like, high school). She’s a popular teacher as well as a well-known watercolorist  – funny and innovative, as those of you who’ve seen her at the Show and Tell Saturdays already know. Here’s a very short sneak preview from one of those sessions – I love the part when Lesta says, “If you don’t like it, just keep adding stuff”! There are four spots left for the workshop at the moment if you’d like to join us. Have a great day and thanks for following SHARDS!

Talk amongst yourselves (and Friday Freebie)

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Hi, and happy Friday – I’m in the throes of class prep at Trinity, so I’ve found a little design video to inspire and amuse you while I’m off working in my spiffy new computer lab. It’s *hard* to switch an art brain for a tech brain – wahhh.

The finished Magnetic Shard Face pin

The finished Magnetic Shard Face pin

But I didn’t forget the Friday Freebie! A lucky SHARDS subscriber will receive a Face Shard Pin Kit complete with magnet, face shard, paper and beads (your choice of warm or cool colors) to create your own wearable art adornment that looks something like this – it’s easy and fun to put it together since everything in the kit is coordinated and cut to size.

So here’s the design project video by Pierre Lota of Lota Design – pretty cool stuff. Have a great weekend and I’ll be back soon from tech-land.

 

Workshop wowsers with household cleaner

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That Citra-Solv stuff just keeps on giving – it cleans up cat barf (personal experience), it’s organic and smells good, and it goofs up old magazine pages and turns them into art paper. I learned about it when artists Bonnie Davis and Rosemary Uchniat demo’d it at the first Studio Show and Tell (the next one is this Saturday, 2-4, so be there). Two workshops later, we’re having a great time combining Citra-solved paper with impeccable composition and inspired vision and turning it into lovely small artwork. Here’s a short video from yesterday’s collage workshop – look what these guys did!

If the altered paper process intrigues you, here’s a great tutorial from good old Cheap Joe featuring Cathy Taylor, who really specializes in collage with Citra-solv papers. It’s a lot of fun to play around with.

Gilding the wax paper – or whatever

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And now, for your mid-week creative pleasure, here’s a short tutorial about how to manage that pesky gold leaf. What you apply the stuff to is entirely your business 🙂

Feel free to share!

A wordle-y diversion

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You’ve all probably seen word clouds, those designs that are made from a selection of words in a paragraph. There’s a free online program called Wordle that I use with my students on the first day of classes at Trinity as an introduction. I have them write a little bit about themselves, then transform it into a design. You just paste the words into the Wordle window, choose your colors and layout, click Create –  and voila! Here’s one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, Wild Geese, as a Wordle word cloud (the poem itself is underneath the design).  Give it a try, and have fun Wordle-ing!

wordle

Wild Geese
 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
 

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver

Wax Paper Inkjet Transfer Tutorial

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I didn’t have a chance to demo this technique at Show and Tell last Saturday, so here’s a quick how-to. I’m showing this technique on watercolor paper in this tutorial, but it works even better on dampened white cotton fabric. (Because the wax-paper transfer is just ink-jet ink, it will need to be sealed if it’s on fabric or it will wash out.) Here are the steps – click on the pictures below to enlarge, and feel free to share.

 

Fun and free photo editing tutorial for you

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I’m teaching photo editing and web design right now in my Trinity class, and I thought I’d make a tutorial for you guys to show you how to use iPiccy, which is a free online editing tool. Click on the artsy-effect photo of me, below, which I just edited and fancied up in iPiccy in less than five minutes, and you can access the tutorial and see how to art yourself up too! Have fun 🙂

Colorado Springs, 2011

Colorado Springs, 2011

Freebies

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Happy Monday . . .quick, think of something you’re looking forward to today! Even if it’s cold and drizzly out there, remember what that great guru, Dr. Seuss, said, “Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.” And speaking of winners, the Friday Freebie Scent Shard goes to Terri Reyna – thanks Terri, for subscribing to SHARDS. Let me know how you’d like to claim your prize. Thanks, everyone, for subscribing, and in the spirit of the season, I’ll be giving away another Scent Shard this coming Friday. Yay!

xmaswrapHere’s another Freebie for everyone – remember the gift tags I posted last year? Go to that link if you’d like to print them out for your packages. I’m wrapping gifts in sheets of newsprint (the plain kind) this year. Plain newsprint is cheap and very biodegradable. I get mine from ULine and use it for all kinds of stuff at the Studio. I found some ivory ribbon at Costco, and with the gift tags and some leaves and feathers and such, the packages look great.. Bye for now, there’s fun to be done!

Air-dry clay

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If you read the Studio newsletter today, you’ll know that there’s a whole lot going on in September – if you missed it, click this link. But I’ve had some time to plan a new workshop on an alternative way to make shards and adornments even if you don’t have a kiln. Sherrill Kahn got me thinking about this (Hi, Sherrill!), and you know I’ve been playing with molding compound. Well, I’ve discovered that you can make molds with air dry clay which, with a few tricks, work just about as well as fired clay. Look at this photo and see if you can tell which ones are air-dry and which ones are fired.P1090280

It’s not easy to tell – and I used some air-dried clay buttons on the piece that I submitted to the juried FASA show (below). You can see how nice they look with an iridescent finish. So sign up for the October 15th workshop and learn how to do this stuff! TGIF, y’all . . . .

buttons

 

No-Fire Shard Faces – a how-to freebie

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So you can’t come to the workshop this afternoon? Darn! Well, never fear – here’s a how-to freebie on making your own shard faces and adornments at your own place of creative belonging. No kiln needed because this project uses air-dry clay, lightweight and inexpensive. I’m going to demo this process at the workshop this afternoon although we will be using actual earthenware clay today. But this is a fun option to try at home (yes, you can try this at home). Here are some how-to step-by-step photos. And if you click this link, you’ll get a printable one-page list of materials and directions. Happy molding! That sounds weird. Happy creating beautiful one-of-a-kind clay objects of delight!!