oil pastels on watercolor

I needed a quick art fix earlier this summer.... so oil pastel on top of Japanese watercolors seemed like the way to go.... i rather like making blotches of whatever color(s) I happen to pick out of my box. Then come back after it's dry to stare at the blotches to see what appears and finally to adjust it so that other people can see what I see. This time I used oil pastels on top of the watercolors. sometimes it's ink. sometimes it's acrylic. sometimes it's more watercolors.





I'm still researching digital cameras, so anything i post for the next month or so will be from my "archive" of pictures taken while "testing" a digital camera I borrowed from a friend. Most recently i've been messing around with straight up acrylics, trying to get bodies and body parts to actually look like body parts (instead of zombie people or distorted people or unidentifiable blobs). so far I have *1* that worked :) you probably will not ever got to see the zombie paintings. i try to paint over them as soon as possible. they're creepy.

Laima-doodles, take 21,987,266,001

More sketchy paintings by Laima....





I tend to sketch/doodle during most meetings at work.... here's an attempt to see what would happen if I took something from one of my many notebooks covered in black & white Laima-doodles and made them BIG (these are roughly 2'x3') and added color.... as you can see, I'm still working out the details.

Pyrex, take 1

i'm learning how to work with pyrex...
these are flower pendants...... they are also called 'implosions'.
If you click on them - the actual image is pretty big and you can see a decent amount of detail.

I need to get my act together and figure out a way to take my setup into the Vinery for a little help attaching the regulators and stuff that I don't remember how to do. yeah. i feel silly. i've been taught how to do it before... but suddenly, when it's my hosue we're talking about, I get scared about exploding my garage or something. That would be A Very Bad Thing.

cement scupting - the first two attempts

I've finally taken a few pictures of the new hobby! Cement scupting is neat-o. I will answer the most commonly asked question for you right off the bat... how do you sculpt the cement? With a spoon and a hacksaw!

another post-travel painting

this one was painted shortly after returning from Denmark.

And here's a painting I can't decide which way to hang.... incidentally, i am also having a hard time deciding whether to keep it or not.... it was painted while hanging out with a cute boy, but is that enough reason to keep it? maybe i should see if boy wants it. Boy doesn't have much stuff up on his walls after all ;)



okeee dokeee... #2 wins. I'm also painting on the back side of this... it'll be great!

three lithos

I'm procrastinating... so here, have a series of three lithographs to look at. This was one of my favorite projects in a class full of pretentious are students.... ok, that was a little harsh. Some of them were nice, and eventually the professor and I came to a kind of unspoken understanding. As far as I was concerned it was along the lines of: "if you don't ask me to art speak then in return I'll try every single one of the techniques you teach at least three times".

(By the way, this litho of mine is based on someone else's art work. I forget who did the original, but the professor was annoyed that I started with an image awfully similar to someone else's work. oh well. I still got an A :)

a series of three....

here are those three paintings I was talking about... my dad got a whole stack of foam-board movie posters (for gosh-awful movies) and so i've been somewhat slowly painting over all of them. I guess the actual painting itself has been going quickly --- these three took me less than an hour each and I painted them all in less than a 24 hour period (two saturday night and the third Sunday morning) - essentially on a whim. just to see if i could. They're about two feet by three feet big and they're painted with acrylics. Acrylics just got WAY more fun for me because I FINALLY tried out this tube of 'retarding medium' that Jen gave me as a gift. i *love* that stuff!

a series of other people's art...

I came across a fairly old copy of Southwestern Art (1997) which resulted in some of my favorite lightswitch covers, four of which are shown here. I traded a whole pile of my old magazines that don't have terrific photographs (like Time, Newsweek, and cooking light) for even better magazines! I think I'll start going to the library more often.

a series of flowers...

black and white light switch covers

it would appear that I need to work on getting my photographs straight in the first place (or else get a better photo editing program than Paint :)

a couple free-form mosaics...

Interesting.... I had the hardest time getting rid of the extra space at the beginning of this table.... but then it magically disappeared when i used a different tab of the blogspot post composer.... I wonder what html I'm missing.... I should probably get my hands on a html guide... but this is getting much closer to what I'd imagined doing with my picture posts...

a series of birds...

a series of butterflies...

On driftwood and garden sculptures...

Here's some interesting stuff that *I* would like to be able to do with driftwood... but it would just create more and more piles of *stuff* in my yard/garage/living room. That being said.. there are garden sculptures in my future... i have the portland cement... i have the vermiculite... i have 'spare' wood for making molds... i have oodles of tools for sculpting and shaping... and i also have oodles of materials for finishing the surfaces of said sculptures...

also... light switch cover photographs coming soon... i need to figure out how to do some nifty html formatting, but if i can't figure it out by tomorrow, i may just post them 'normally'...

Re-Store and Recycle --- Earth Day 2006

Tomorrow is an earth day festival at a local Habitat for Humanities Re-Store. I will be there, pretending to be a recycle artist. Noon - 4pm. The 'pretending' is there for the word 'artist'. Apparently i still have issues with beign called an artist. A good half of the things i make/do are in fact recycled. it's much more fun to be given boundaries and make it into a game to see how crazy/fun/beautiful/useful/outrageous/interesting you can make something within some pre-determined framework. Variations on a theme can be very satisfying. In the last 4 days I've made an extra 8 light switch covers and a couple of pairs of earrings in a new style (thicker wire, better designs). If I had more energy I'd post pictures. Maybe tomorrow.

in the hopes of keeping myself a bit more on task, here is a list of art-type projects that I have in progress somewhere on the premises:

• sterling silver jewelry
• light switch covers
• sand-blasted glassware
• a stained glass window (for my bathroom)
• a wall-shelf to be mosaiced (also for my bathroom)
• a bowling ball for my yard (to be mosaiced)
• styrofoam insulation blocks --- to be glued together, sculpted, covered with a ~4 inch layer of flying cement and then treated with an interesting surface treatment (mosaics, paint, and a few other texture-related plans) and sealed with envirotex
• a dresser to re-finish
• back porch to tile
• mosaic project for bathroom #2 (wall/sink/nook plan)
• a couple of other, smaller glass/mosaic ideas
• a number of fabric projects (some re-cycling, some quilting, some batik-ing, some just fixing things)
• a number of paintings (acrylic and watercolors)

and now.... now i think i see what my 'problem' is... i need to pick one or two to focus on and THEN go on to the others... i think tomorrow I'll photograph the things i've done for April 1st SpringFest and see if I can figure out how to x-post to TCEKU...

(I've figured out one of the reasons that I'm not so fond of blogspot... it only haphazardly sends me comments! arg. Maybe i did something wrong in my setup.... I'll have to investigate and maybe change the look of this page while I'm at it.... just because i can.)

EDIT: it was my setup, somehow the "email comments to" field had been cleared out. hmmm. interesting. it's been fixed now :)

I've been noticing that I'm not very good at keeping several blogs up-to-date...

anyway... let's try this whole posting pictures thing again....

here's what I did last weekend:

(although this is not a picture of me --- if the person who is in this picture wants me to, I can take them out of my post - but that would require actually *looking* at my blog ;-p)



in other news... the kittens are getting bigger and bigger..... and wow is formatting stuff on blogspot hard for some reason... i've had to edit this 4 times to get it to look *kind of * how I meant it to look... arg.... ok... that just means i have to update more and practice... so... maybe next week I'll try this again...