When in doubt, skate it out

I knew it would happen!I knew if I came to the Cariboo I better drive around with skates in the car because eventually, I'll come to a frozen, snow-free lake.And then it happened.Driving past Williams Lake I noticed people walking and skating around.So I found the right street to the city park and parked up and laced my skates up.And then I jumped tenderly skated right in!So it took me a while to adjust to the wobbliness and the melt, freeze, melt patches of lake ice, but once I decided I'd just have to bulldoze skate over the frozen waves at a good speed, it was the most amazing thing in the world.Cracks and all.I took a good hour around that lake. I skated to the middle, I skated back and forth along the shore, I skated over thin ice and thick. Over cracks and thru slush.It was the best, most glorious feeling.My advice is to skate every day!

Adieu April showers, bring on the May flowers!

Hi everyone,This was going to be a hello from Sunday night post, but then I didn't think I had much to say (past the car boot sale on Sunday) and then I thought that maybe I wanted Monday to finish up some art to show you and that turned to Tuesday...and there you are!Typical me.Do you remember last post when I was at the Burford garden center?I fell in love with a few books, but they cost about $60 Canadian dollars each, so I looked for them on the UK Amazon where they were only about $15 each and I ordered two of them.They are the most gorgeous books. Complete house porn!I could live in each and every farmhouse in the Farmhouse book and not change a thing, (except for one which is decked out in purple and black Goth. The Goth would have to go,) and the second book has such stunning photography that each page is more gorgeous than the next.My sublimation printing is coming along really well and I'm getting the hang of the material.So far I've figured out that I love the blending of the dyes wet on wet in a semi-controlled manner, and I like a little sharper outline.I've also figured out that I love overlapping the prints for a deeper effect than I could ever get with paints.A few days ago I decided to deconstruct some flowers and try to print them back together.I got four flower petals printed and something else came up.But today I managed to finish this little piece of art.I painted more flower petals today and printed them on.It's always a bit deceptive to see the colours painted as opposed to how the colours turn out when sublimated, but I'm getting used to it.Here is my deconstructed flowers piece.I really like it.This is the first piece...after about seven...where I think I'm onto a style I like.In other art news, I ordered some oil based printing inks and I love, LOVE them to pieces.There may not be any going back to water-based inks for me!The downside is that the print takes a full three days for the ink to dry, so printing with oil-based inks will be a slow process.I also ordered three vintage piano rolls from player pianos and one of them I designated for practice.I carved this rather large moth from lino and printed it on the music rolls.There we are!I love it.When this idea comes together it will be a scroll depiction of the peppered moth turning from a white with black mottling moth to an almost black moth thru the pollution of the industrial revolution, back to a whiter moth post-revolution. Darwin's natural selection in art.I think I will incorporate some graphics and drawings on the scroll too.On Sunday I went to the first car boot sale of the season.I had so much fun running around the three rows. It was a small boot sale because it was just so darn cold and the wind chill made it even colder and the ever-present rain clouds kept threatening, but the reality was that an F1 race was on Sunday afternoon, and that just left 45 minutes for me to run around the boot sale if I wanted to get home in time for the start.And I sure did! It was one of the best races we've seen! Complete mayhem.Anyway, I did find some treasures and only spent about $11.First is this beautiful teapot.It's a vintage Aston Pottery teapot and I love to collect Aston pottery, (the bespoke potters in Aston village very close to us.) I have a whole bird series of teacups which will look lovely with this teapot. And, it has cowslips on it...which are growing all over the hedgerows and meadows right now. I love them.I bought this hand-hewn wooden bowl and five stone eggs about the size of goose eggs.I love crystals and stones and I love hand carved wood of all kinds.This little bowl needs a good cleaning and polishing and moisturizing with some lovely bee's wax, and it needs a little gold to fill a small hole in its side. A sort of kintsugi Veronica style.And the last thing I got at the boot sale are these two large burlap pillows. I loved them! I couldn't help it.Rule Britannia...or something like that. :DHappy May Day friends. I hope May brings you flowers in your little corner of the old globe.

Sublimation printing with disperse dyes...say that three times fast!

Hi everybody.I decided to do a little experimenting with art materials right now, and I ordered myself some disperse dyes from a dye expert manufacturer here in the UK.What these are are coloured powders which mix with water for a watercolour like consistency, or with water and a gum arabic type thickner for acrylic type consistency. Then you can paint a design on to paper and then transfer the design, using heat, onto fabric. The painted powders disperse into gas and resolidify onto the fabric. This is called sublimation.So here I am all geared up for toxicity (as per leaflet warning).To tell you the truth, I'm not sure this is any more toxic that my oil paints, but it is a complete unknown to me.And, as usual, I have very little idea of what I'm about to do.So let's just get our fingers gloves dirty, shall we?Here are 5 of the colours mixed with a little water.The leaflet didn't say how much water, but this looked pretty ok to me.The colour mix doesn't look anything like the colour it represents, so that was fun. I kept mistaking the brown for green and the blue for black. :DThe leaflet also didn't say what kind of paper, so I started off with a piece of Japanese printing paper and painted this moth on it.This paper turned out to be really absorbent!Then I tried with, (clockwise starting with the moth on the Japanese printing paper), regular, cheap sketch paper (grass), Yupo paper (woodpecker), tear-off palette paper (mushroom), and vintage onion skin paper (moth)Next step was to heat the whole thing up.Now I don't happen to have a heat press hanging around, so the trusty old iron will have to do.I also didn't have the required polyester fabric, but a piece of some synthetic white pillow case (maybe polyester or rayon or something like that) would have to do for this experiment.So, the sandwich went like this: cotton sheet on floor (not to make a mess), newsprint, painted paper, fabric, plain paper and iron on top.So look! Piece by piece I sublimated the paintings on paper onto this fabric!If you think they look a little fuzzy that's because they are! I didn't account for the wiggle caused by the iron and the edges are not sharp. Live and learn...huh? Either way, I'm super thrilled that the whole process worked.By the way, I managed to fuse several of the palette sheets together with the iron, so I may have to rethink that! LOL.And then, because there was still some time in my day, I mixed a couple of the watercolour consistency dyes with the thickner into more acrylic type consistency.Got that a little wrong too because it seems like you cannot stir a little in and try to add more without making lumps.But I still had plenty of paint to use, so...I painted a couple simple designs on paper and sublimated those.Hey, now I'm getting some more and deeper colours.There's no doubt in my mind that this was a useful and fun learning curve. And also that I'm bound to figure it all out.Right now I have visions of giant, colourful flags and curtain-like wall hangings.But maybe I'll start by getting some proper polyester material and figuring out these dyes. :DAcrylic prints are a rage these days and you could learn more about prints here.

What the hell? Yeah, I know!

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.I'm alive!All is well.When my mother mentions that I haven't written a post in ages, I feel vaguely guilty but don't worry too much.When Robert tells me that he loves rereading my posts I think aw, poor boy away from me, but we talk every day, so put off writing.When our neighbour pops round the cottage to make sure we're alive and mentions that I haven't written in ages, and when my sweet cousin in Slovakia starts emailing me to find out if all is well!!!!Then I know I've been putting blogging off for far too long.On of the major reasons I blog is to have a creative outlet.But when other creative outlets are briming over the top, I don't feel the need to blog.I know that's bad.But it's good in another way. It means I'm finding interesting, creative and fulfilling things in my art practice.But back to life...lol.Chloe's boyfriend Bryson turned 26 the other week, and Chloe planned, organised and executed the best surprise party for him.There were way too many 20-30 somethings in the house all having a brilliant time.And that very same evening, my daughter Kerstin and her family came into town to stay with me.Everyone stayed up way too late, (and our little ones slept in; which was fantastic), and the next morning we had a tea party in the living room.Weekend came and went and I retreated back into the studio because I'm working on some over-the-top expressive pieces to break out of a rut.These I had done and put them up on the dining room wall for my meeting with my art consultant.We had a really good meeting talking about the directing I might want to take my art.I know this is a quick catch up and doesn't make up for two month of radio silence from me.Life...eh?I'll be better.

Garage into an art studio project. Yeah, like we have all the time in the world!

HiHi. I'm back.I've had to take a few weeks days off of social media. Actually, I had my finger hovering over the delete button more than once. A few personal attacks on the ol' FB, the state of the world, not enough sunshine, and a therapy journal course, first one since I started teaching the therapy journal two years ago, where a valuable brush has gone missing and two of my hand carved stamps have broken pieces (a fox's ear and a bird's foot). Life...eh? So I slightly spiralled into a proper depresso funk and hovered over the delete buttons.Happily I talked things out with Robbie. I'm so lucky that he is GuruRob to me when I need him to be, and he talked to me of possibly chemo brain for my students, and how important my volunteer work is to me and to the people I work with, and reminded me that I can hide/delete/unfollow and gently drop out of conversations on my social media feeds.So I didn't delete everything to hell! I just jumped into a new project.There's been a lot of this going on round here.And also this:And I did something, perhaps a little unwisely, I signed up for the North Shore Art Crawl open studio on the March 4th weekend and took out a full ad in the brochure. I KNOW!Yes to commitment to my art!!But yikes if people want to come visit my little attic studio where the possibility of hitting your head at every sideways step exists unless you know the space.That, and I don't have room to paint big canvases in the studio, so never paint them unless I can do it outside.But I do have this beautiful, heated garage...loaded up with stuff, (and a slightly dusty red sports car which can be parked outside for an open studio weekend.)So, with Chloe's help, we did about five runs to the local Salvation Army and one run to the recycling stations and to the dump, two trips to Home Depot, one trip to IKEA and a little side trip to the Value Village out in the IKEA direction, (I mean, as long as we were out there anyway.)One thing that was bothering me are the five lights in the would-be New Studio space. Four are just light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.Now the ceiling is too low and the clearance of the garage door too close for most fixtures...and we looked and looked and debated and measured and looked some more. We had Queen city garage door repair charlotte nc come out to fix it for us and they did a great job. The sexy little ones cost so much money and the cheap ones are too long, too big, and too everything wrong.Then, at the quick Value Village hop, we found these rather lovely coloured glass covers at $4 each. Cheap!!! So I bought them. Might be a good solution for now and I love the quirky Bohemian feel. Only problem is there were only 3 and I need 4, but I'm sure one more will come my way and if not, they are for sale at Home Depot for about $20.Next step: paint for the raw wood shelves. I had a good convo with the paint people and chose a rather expensive paint with undercoat in it, and I painted those shelves......while C was set to work on our IKEA buys.For some reason she finds IKEA stuff fun to put together and for me it ranks right up there with...say...the dentist. Millennials...eh? As you can see, Morgan was the usual help.So, one coat of paint on the shelves and the legs of the work bench, and I called in my electrician Trevor to take down the chandelier, (which everyone but me hits their head on...OK, OK, I may have done it once or twice myself), and build me a new light fixture, the design of which I had as a vision in my chandelier bumped head, but no idea if it could be done.I said, "Trevor, could you please cut off the business end of these light bulb chords and wire three of them into the socket and leave a good 5 ft of chord hanging?"So after a little explaining and a quick run to Rona for the necessary ceiling plate, I have the beginning of my vision. Thank you Trevor.Can't wait to show you the next step.Hope this all works out!

Too many beautiful leaves too little time!

The other day I was walking in a rain-soaked park. I took a video and when I played it back, the rain sounded so loud and drumming and crackling on my umbrella. It felt so incredibly calming.I picked up a vine maple leaf and took it home.And I took an hour to paint it in my nature journal.The sun came out for two seconds together and I went out into the garden.And picked up some of the bronze beech leaves. They're next.What is everybody doing with all these glorious leaves? Pressing them, drawing them? making leaf garlands and wreaths? Tell me, show me. :D

Art Challenge: Return to Standard Time

I'm ever so grateful to our dear rosy girl Ariane for posting a new art challenge: return to standard time.I actually hate daylight savings time and think it's an out of date ritual whose time is definitely up.Spring forward, fall back. A sort of ridiculous, comical act of the world tripping over itself at various dates twice per year.And so appropriate for me right now, because you see, the UK has fallen back while Canada is still in daylight savings and so sprung forward!!! That's the bi-yearly story of my life! And messes something rotten with my daily 9am phone call to Robbie, which is now pushed to 10am. And while Kerstie and Jon are in BC, there's Chloe in Japan! We all end up negotiating times, missing dates, forgetting deadlines, counting backwards, and generally struggling by for a good week or two. It reminds me of a Dickensian novel.So to try to illustrate this I wanted to try to gather all our time zones into one piece.I decided to do a Dickensian collage of sorts, and so chose some vintage book pages.The floor ended up looking like this:(Oh well, gotta break some eggs to make an omelette, right?)And so here is what I'm offering today.A black and white collage of 37 pieces. There is a Japanese castle rising over an English village, next to a West Coast forest. There I am, in strong tiger form, holding everything central, together, holding my family together. There are children, there is whimsy, there is light, and there are butterflies everywhere, representing my butterfly brain...which tries to negotiate all these time zones.Oh, and there's a rhinoceros, because, if we're getting this silly already, there's got to be a rhinoceros.Art: The Rhinoceros, at Home and Abroad: collage of vintage book images, all pre 1906, loads of mat medium + imagination.Come pop over to Ariane's and all our friends to see how they deal with the return to standard time. (I'll tell you something though, I do appreciate the extra hour of sleep.) :DI love our little group of artists and really value our friendship. We may be, we all may be, all over the place and stuck in our time zones, but we've come to love and understand and appreciate each other and support each other in our art. And that's how it should always be. Come join us if you like. Any artistic expressions is so very welcome. :D

Leaves, owls and hummingbirds

So this happened!I dutifully removed the hummingbird feeders from the garden in order to give the Rufous hummingbirds a signal to migrate, but, like last year, an Anna's has decided to overwinter in my hood. So I made up some fresh nectar and put it out for him.The mountain of leaves is almost done. The ancient apple and cherry are bare, but there's more to come on the maple, Japanese maple, ornamental plum and giant bronze beech.That's a lot of leaves. Look at the beautiful tapestry in the shade garden.There are leaves everywhere and I know I have to get out there and rake/gather them and put them in the compost bins, but they're so beautiful right now.Morgan doesn't think so.In other news, I've submitted three owls to the anonymous art show. It's a major fundraiser for my local arts council.It's a brilliant show with hundreds of paintings all costing $100 each, and a great chance for people to expand their art collection.Hmm, I guess it's not that anonymous any more if I'm showing you guys my work...lol. But then, the kinds of paintings I do are pretty recognizable. I bet when I get there I'll be able to spot the work of my friends and fellow artists who I admire. :D These owls are painted on a 1908 advertisement page from an art's magazine, which has been carefully decoupaged onto the wooden support the arts council provides for the show, and then shellacked.Well, there's day three of Nanopoblano daily blog post writing. Hey, who said it wouldn't last...lol. ;)

Drawing challenge: Rhythm

Hi everybody,I'm so glad you could all come join, (or just pop in to see), this first drawing challenge of 2016We're all trying to find our rhythm.For me personally, it's not altogether that easy, and, spoiler alert, I haven't finished my piece of art as of right now, (Friday lunch time), so technically this will be part one! Although I will just come back here and edit later...but then I did set my heart on a totally new to me art form: making and printing a collagraph.Lats year in Art in Action I saw an artist do a small demonstration, and have wanted to try since then. Her name is Sue Brown and she prints the most amazing birds with her collagraph plates. So I set about to try to learn a little bit more, (I should have paid more attention at Art in Action!), and it seems that I needed a piece of art hard board to carve into.Armed with my hard board, a pencil and my sketch book, I got to spend 3 hours with C on Thursday evening, in the art school she works in, with no one around.What I envisioned for rhythm, is a small wild creature just picking itself up from the winter, ready to find its rhythm back in the world. This small creature turned out to be a wild hare, and the place it is picking itself up from turned out to be winter grasses.So I played with some grasses and weeds which I sketched on transparent sheets and moved around the composition, and when I was happy with it, I transferred the images and began to cut out the top layer of paper from the hard board.Guys, please remember that it's a bit of the blind leading the blind here with very little idea of what I'm doing. :DSo I worked quite late into the evening, and this morning...I had most of the rough cutting done and the plate was basically ready for fine work.So, as usual, I will tell you the great and not so great things I found out about doing this. The paper lifts off in layers, but the lifts aren't clean and leave fluffy, pilly, rags behind...and you're all probably shaking your head saying, "duh!"...but my thoughts are, will these pilly bits make a weird texture on the print? So we will take a deep breath and say what Robbie says, "Time will tell." :DWell here we are. In the strong morning sunshine, you can see the marked difference on my plate between the cut away part and the smooth original surface of the paper.One last thing to do before I'm off to my yoga class, is coat this plate with gloss medium. In my research I found out that it's imperative to use gloss medium to seal the paper and keep the ink on the surface.OK, I'm off to let this dry and work on it some more later this aft. Wish me luck. :DIn the meantime, please link in and let us see your rhythm. I'm so looking forward to new and fresh inspiration.[inlinkz_linkup id=599339 mode=1]

Winter colours for a willow wreath

If you can believe it, I slept till 11am this morning. Hooray for jet lag!And by the time I woke up, I only had about an hour with Robbie till he had to leave for the rest of the day.So alone for the day, I walked out into the meadow. You might not think it, but the colours are amazing right now. Some winter flowers are blooming and the willow branches have taken on that bare winter, skeletal beauty which glows among all the brown and grey.Oh my gosh, the vivid yellows and reds. I love it.I walked out into the meadow, past the skeletons of the teasel,past the fireweed,right up to the willow.I asked the willow and felt peace, so I took three super long branches. One for me, one for Robbie and one for the shmarko,and I brought the branches home. On the way I gathered thinner and more pliable willow branches from some of the smaller trees.At home, I took the branches up to my studio and closed Theo out, (mainly because he wants to kill anything moving and I'm not sure willow isn't toxic), and I twisted and bent and wove those branches into a wreath.I put the wreath on my dressing table because there is some strong light there, so I could photograph it and show you these beautiful branch colours.And here it is in my studio...with my typical art table mess :D (all better to be inspired by!)I love this willow wreath. Maybe I'll make another for the front door.And, because there's no way you're getting away without a kitten photo, here's the shmarko Theo. He's a bit calmer today. Hopefully the novelty of having me as his new play-buddy is wearing off.