Give Me Some Color!

My kitchen peninsula is my painting work station. Since I have to walk by it multiple times a day, I find myself stopping for a "minute" to tweak whatever I have in progress. I have to be careful because that minute  can easily stretch to an hour!

Alcohol Ink on Yupo Paper

Still a little more work to do on this tile

Last night I finally got around to experimenting with alcohol ink on ceramic tile. It's definitely a little different than the yupo paper. The inks really shine on the tile, although it is hard to tell in the photo. We have a tile attachment for our extruder and last month Jeff extruded a bunch of tiles. I applied white slip to a few and then glazed them in our translucent glaze. I applied the slip so that the tiles would be a bright white instead of the gray color of the stoneware we use. Commercial tiles from the big box store would be an affordable and easy option, but I sort of liked the idea of all of the components being done by hand. The tiles will need to be sprayed with Kamar museum quality varnish to protect the surface. You can use the same coating on yupo paper, but if you are framing under glass there really isn't a need for it. If you want to use them as coasters they can be coated with resin. The cost of resin is crazy and I am not sure I want to get into that... yet. :-)

art journal part II

Here are photos I took of some of the 2009 art journals. A few are my contributions, others are by the other artists. The first two photos are from the "New Beginnings" journal.

 This book came in the spring when I had made the decision to move out of the apartment that JZ and I shared. Once he was gone I could only focus on the negatives of living there. The windows are filled with representations of those things. On the right was my new beginning. A little house on Bow Lake. The windows are filled with the promise of starting a new chapter in life.

The next three are from the "Self Portrait" journal...

"Dreams"

 Above is my two page spread, based on a very vivid dream. After that dream, I knew I was never going to not have my hands in clay!

"Fairies"

 The cover of fairies was both cool and creepy. It appeared to be a paper pulp sculpture built up on the cover.

 "Color"

I had just read a biography about Georgia O'Keefe, and had seen an exhibition of her and Ansel Adams work in Washington, DC. Obviously this watercolor was inspired by O'Keefe.

It looks like I have recruited 7 participants for the 2013 art journal project... I am looking for 5 more people to join in. If you missed the details go back and read the previous post. If you know someone who you think would like to do this have them leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Happy Independence Day!

adding a little color

last fall after the Celebration of Seagrove Potters, we decided to put a portion of our booth into our gallery so that we have a display area with clean lines. displaying work in a log cabin can be challenging. 

we had to dismantle the gallery walls a few weeks ago because we needed the panels to take to the NH show. after spending a week looking at different booths, we decided it was time for a change. the last two days have been spent prepping and painting all the components...

the walls were black and white before... now we are this green and cream color.

the pedestals are two shades of an earthy color... all the colors were from Martha Stewart's "Potters Clay" collection... how fitting is that?! i took this picture in the evening so it is sort of dark.

these are the panels that snap into the Abstracta system... we painted one side the green and the other the cream color. this will give us the option of flipping them to either side so that the shelf will compliment the pots that are on it.

a friend of jeff's, who has retired from the doing shows, offered us some more booth panels (they are hollow core doors). the next time we are in NH we will bring them back with us. we will get them painted in our new colors and then we won't have to disassemble our gallery to go to shows.

today we should get everything reassembled and i will take some after pics.