Fabric Book Cover

Well, the cover itself is wood, but it WILL be the cover of a fabric book.  I mentioned in a previous post that I'm taking a fabric art book class from Kate Thompson, but I'm still at the stage of collecting fabric for pages, and covering some of them in plaster (they're all over the house drying, hubby is only complaining mildly though, so far anyway).   I'm excited about this project, which is a big relief as I've had the artistic blahs for a little while now.  And it definitely takes excitement lately to get me to come home from a long day at work, on dark cold evenings, and get to work in my studio rather than just settling down on the couch for the evening. 

On a 6"x 8" piece of wood, graphite, charcoal, paint, ink, and a new product I found from Golden called fiber paste. It's the brown part on the bottom and lower sides, it's like thick wet paper mush.  Makes for great texture, I definitely need to experiment some more with it.

I incorporated some cheesecloth and a piece of antique lace, to tie it in with the rest of the book which will have some lace and fabric showing on the sides. And of course I couldn't resist that salvaged rusty metal piece on top.

A Major Award

I'm proud to have been chosen by Kristen from krisatlarge, for this major award (I stole that from her post, and if you aren't chuckling you haven't seen "A Christmas Story" enough times). Although it's too much of a time commitment for me to fully participate right now, I wanted to thank Kristen and recommend her lovely blog, which I thoroughly enjoyed looking through. 5 blogs were nominated and I feel honored to have been included in the group.

Inspiration...finally...

I'm finally feeling artistically inspired, since signing up for Kate Thompson's fabric art book class on The Trodden Path.  I love her art, and although I don't usually work with fabric much, she combines it with plaster, which is one of my loves.  I haven't even started doing anything with fabric yet, I need to do some gathering, but just watching her paint has inspired me, so I created this piece this weekend, which uses some of her techniques, and some of my own. 

 

Paint, watercolors, image transfers, collage, stamping with gesso, encaustic on wood. Lots of layers this picture makes it hard to see. My fingers are twitching, trying to resist adding some kind of rusty metal bit somewhere. We'll see!

Feeling Rusty

I'm popping my head back up into the blogosphere, to see if I still remember how! Between Christmas vacation, illness, and just general post-holiday apathy, until this weekend I'd just been trying not to look at the messy chaos that was my art desk, not touched since mid-December.  But I had no excuses this weekend to not dip my toe back into the art world, and I feel much better now that I did. I'm going through a certain amount of angst about where I want to go with my art right now, what I want to focus on, but this weekend I just played in a couple of art journals. It's been a long time since I worked in one, and I'd missed it. 

I had some fun doing a couple of collages. The scan on this first one came out terrible, because the journal is so fat.  Plus, apparently I moved it while scanning, because I just noticed her face is all wonky.

   I finally did another page in my handmade art journal, which I tend to save for something special, so in other words I never use it.

I felt the need to paint a face on this piece of shopping bag I'd saved - I know you understand.