Stanka!

This weekend was pretty amazing - I got to take a 2 day workshop with the incredible multi-award winning portrait artist Stanka Kordic. It was such an honor to learn from her! Her paintings are sort of life-changing, I don't know how else to describe them. Please be sure to check out her website to see for yourself.

Image Copyright Stanka Kordic 2012

Each morning, Stanka did an alla prima demo. She approached the painting a lot looser than I'm used to, making seemingly random underpainting marks and then "finding" the contours and features of the portrait within the loose marks. In almost everything, she used a large brush - sometimes simple house painting brushes! She then layed in large flat planes of color - something that I would like to do more in my own work - and refined everything later. And suddenly *POP!* there he was.

 Amazing!

Here is my go at it:

This photo is a little dark, but you get the idea

 Thanks Eileen at BAYarts, Arthur the awesome model and especially Stanka for a wonderful weekend! Can't wait to try out these new techniques.

Let it Be Encaustic Process

My buddy Randy curates some awesome shows around town. This time it was "Album of the Year," which opened Friday at Studio Le Beau in Tremont (an adorable suburb of Cleveland, Ohio). For this show, we all created 12x12 tributes of our favorite album covers. We of the Rust Belt Monster Collective also used this for our Week 18 challenge topic.

Awesome Poster by Ms. Ashley Ribblet

  I chose to illustrate the Beatles' "Let it Be". 

To create my album cover, I first rendered the image in charcoal on Arches Hot Press 300gsm Watercolor Paper (right now, this is the only paper I use on for charcoal works).

The paper is attached to a drawing using drafting tape. I don't like this tape as much as my usual artist tape (which the store was out of) for 2 reasons: 1) It is lighter and not as sticky, which makes maintaining clean lines more difficult and 2) it is yellow instead of white, which makes you view the color of your work differently.

I spray fixed the drawing, cut it out of the sheet of paper with an x-acto knife, and grabbed a watercolor-paper covered 12x12 hardboard panel I had prepped earlier. This panel had to have an absorbent sheet of paper attached to it since it had come pre-gessoed and encaustic wax does not stick to acrylic gesso.

I then heated up some encastic medium (beeswax mixed with damar resin) on the ole' George Foreman and poured a layer of wax on to the panel. My assistant (boyfriend) and I then used a heat gun to keep the wax liquid long enough to let it soak through the drawing. This basically glues the paper to the wood and "fuses" the wax, making it stronger, smoother, and harder. It also is the most difficult part since the wax cools very quickly. Definitely a 2 person job.

George Foreman commandeered from the Boyfriend... Sorry Ron

Here is the drawing covered in Wax. I love all the cool textures we got! Notice how I accidentally cut it a little too small for the panel... whoops...

Waxy!

And then I painted over the wax in oils! Hmm... I bet you want to see that part. Head over to the Rust Belt Monster Collective site to check it out!

Here is a preview:

Pot Preview

Kiln Wizard Jeff sent these photos today of a few of my new pieces. Can't wait to see them in person! Although those brown bowls were definitely supposed to be greenish...

Pottery show THIS Friday!!

Painting Pots

I started creating pottery as an escape from working digitally every day and quickly fell in love with the feel of it. I am a sloppy pottery....but for me the thrill of playing with mud is more important than the end result. My fingers itch to get tactile again after hours of drawing imaginary lines.

My favorite part is the decorating. However, getting to that stage often takes a while, especially after a long break like this one. Sometimes it takes up until then for my obsessive nature to take over and I get hooked on pottery yet again...

Here are a few pieces I am working on now for the upcoming Sacred Vessels show at Bayarts (Opening May 11th, 7 to 9). I will also have some charcoal drawings in the show!

Large Woven Rim Platter

Small Textured Platters. These have the same floral motif as the bowls below but are going to be bright turquoise!

 

Time is Sacred Bowl Set.

Click here for Show information.

Goings On This Week

Suddenly May is here and my life got very busy again!

Here is where you can see me this week:

Ingenuity Festival's Ingenuity’s Bal Ingenieux • Friday May 4th, 6pm to 1am
We of the Rust Belt Monster Collective will draw a live comic strip over the course of this 7 hour event. This is not to be missed!

Artwork by RMBC's own Craig Worrell

Free Comic Book Day at Carol and John's Comics! • Saturday May 5th, 12am to 2am and 10am to 7pm. This event is a blast! The RMBC and many other local artists all submitted their own versions of Marvel comic book covers. Here is mine:

 See you out on the town!

Long Conversations

From my show "A Study in Wanderlust" on display at Kendal in Oberlin until May 9th, 2012.

Best of the West!

Every year, Northeast Ohio's "West Shore Live Well Magazine" holds a competition to find the very best local businesses here on the West Side of Cleveland. The grand finale of the annual contest is "the Best of the West"; a trade-show-like party where Clevelanders can vote for their favorite finalists.

I was honored with an invite to help with the "Rae-Ann Nursing" booth at this years event. Rae-Ann is a family-owned nursing and rehabilitation company with 4 local facilities and is a consistent Best of the West winner.  It is very easy to understand why -  The staff are all incredibly kind and welcoming, they have wonderful programs for their residents (including many community art ones!) and.... they have their own in-house bakery!!

At this year's Best of the West, Rae-Ann wanted to promote their many art programs, so they invited me to create some live art with the Best of the West attendees!

The idea was to get Best of the West Voters (A.K.A anyone who attends the event) to engage with the Rae-Ann Staff as they add their own personal touch to an on-going collaborative painting. My job was to get everything ready and to cheerfully invite people to draw... which might be one of my favorite activities anyway, so I had a GREAT time!

We decided to use a 36in x 48in canvas as the support. Since messes were a concern, we bought paint markers for people to use. What fun colors!!! Most of the markers we bought were Sharpie brand paint markers, Medium Size. The sharpie "Bold" size has a tendency to loose its felt tip - which is not so fun when you are trying to get fancy-dressed people to draw! I did like the Elmer's "Painters" brand as well, but the color choices were very limited.

Before the event, I used some of the paint markers to add logos and a floral banner at the top of the canvas.

To make sure everything was exact, I printed out the logos actual size and used transfer paper to get them on the canvas perfect. (FYI: Carefully tracing this way leads to not-so-fun hand cramps. Rest often!) I then outlined all my letters before filling them in (Ron the BF was a big help here!)

The pretty flowers at the top started out as pencil drawings, but that didn't last too long and most of them ended up free-form. They are VERY inspired by my Mexican-ish ceramics last year, particularly this collaborative piece (I painted, Sue threw, Joan Sculpted):

It took me 2 nights to finish all the canvas decoration.

I had a blast decorating this canvas with everyone at the event! I think it turned out pretty great...

The quilt on the right was made by local elementary school students and features Westlake city founders! I LOVE it. Can you guess which square is my favorite (hint it's orange!)?

It's amazing to see what people will draw or write when you give them a fun colored marker!
Thanks Rae-Ann for letting me hang out with you last week - I had a wonderful time. :)