Worktable Wednesday…

Travel Journal

Thanks to this I have been making travel journals. I finished this one using scraps and things  just lying around. Lots of thread! All sewn by machine except for the buttons and signatures. Some pages are different papers sewn together to make the correct size of a page. Some pages are photographs printed page size (8 1/2 x 11) and folded. All the pages have things sewn on them including pockets, tags, and areas to write.

cover flap

inside front cover with antique pieced quilt block

first page

places for notes

security envelope pocket

pockets for pictures

photographs as background

wide variety of security envelope patterns and they come free in the mail!

lots of leftover, unused pieces of paper found a new home

inside back cover

back cover

This journal is ready to have photos, ephemera, and words stuffed in it recording journeys and places. Visit the blog of Mary Ann Moss. She goes places and takes a travel journal with her.

A Giant flower…

I tried to go to the Giants’ parade in San Francisco today. I thought I would have the perfect vantage point since Terry has an office on the second floor of a building overlooking the Civic Center Plaza where all the celebration would take place. As it turned out, there was absolutely no parking in the BART lots so I just dropped him off at the station. I don’t think he actually made it to his office, getting caught in front of the Asian Art Museum and being not able to move. I am watching the celebration on t.v., which is probably just as good although the excitement in this part of California is too cool and it would have been fun to experience history first hand.

So here is a Giant flower for celebration.

A collage made with DXP app on an iPhone, layering these two photos:

We’re the Giants, We’re San Francisco, We’re the World Champions. (As said by Mike Krukow, Giants announcer.)

Now September…

The August Break was fun and I saw lots of great photos by scrolling through the Flickr site as well as visiting new blogs. Such creative people out there!

Last Saturday I went to an art exhibit in Walnut Creek at the Bedford Gallery (at the Lesher Performing Arts Center). It was such an exhilarating experience that I must share some photos. The exhibit was called Unbound, A National Exhibition of Book Art and featured the book in multiple interpretations (I didn’t see any Kindles, though) The exhibit will be open until September 19, so if you live near, do not miss this show!

Sculptures From Books

a band saw and a book

Luz Marina Ruiz, tunnel book with a variety of printmaking techniques

Jim Rosenau, books and recycled wood

Lisa Kokin, mixed media

Sculptures that Feature Books

Laura Raboff, wood

Stan Peterson, wood

Stan Peterson, wood

Paintings of Books

Dickson Schneider, oil on panel

Trompe l’oeil of Books

Helen Stanley, oil on birch panel

Digital Photographs of Sculptural Books

Cara Barer, digital photograph

Cara Barer, digital photograph

and (could this be my favorite?) a Ceramics professor who made clay sculptures of her sketchbooks to demonstrate to her students concepts in clay and ceramic decoration

Clay Books

Nancy Selvin, clay

Nancy Selvin, clay

All this for a $5.00 admission fee! Such a marvel and inspiration…

Summerart…

Sunday/Summer

Kid artmaking, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Family Art Sunday, August 1, 2010, BALANCE, House of Cards, Charles and Ray Eames, The Fisher Collection. Fun, creativity, expression…nothing much better

The month of August…

I decided to join Susannah Conway’s “Summer Break” for this month. I have a badge at the bottom of this page but I was unsuccessful in getting it to link on its own to the site, so I will link it here and display the graphic again.

There are many other participants with their blogs listed on the above link and there is a flickr site here. The idea is to take a break from the pressures of regular blogging and to take one photo (can be more) to post each day of the month. Words are not necessary but can be there. There are more than 200 blogs to look at…

What do I hope to get out of this?

I feel the blogs I am drawn to are the ones that have a very strong visual point of view. I have been obsessed with learning about the iPhone over the last few months and what it can do with its photography apps. I have been trying everything in sight, but now I am ready to focus on my images and what they have to say. So I am hoping this month will help to focus me. I plan to use the iPhone mostly, but occasionally my Canon and sometimes Photoshop Elements. We shall see if I can tell a story without words…

Even though it is not August until tomorrow, here is a new image:

Family Art…

Last Sunday I volunteered at the San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art during their Family Art Experience Day.

My walk from BART to the museum included these shots:

MonoPhix app, antique filter

CameraBag app

It is such a pleasure to help with art activities where I do not have to collect and store the supplies. An even bigger bonus is not having to figure out the ins and outs of the lesson plan. The frosting is interacting with 4-11 year olds over the concept of creativity. When I got to the studio area, I couldn’t believe my good fortune, the topic of exploration for the day was Visual Blur. Wouldn’t you know, looking at art through layers. The kids got to make blur tools and then walk through the galleries of the museum and look through their filters. They could also check out a camera, take some shots in the galleries, and then come back to turn in the camera and print out their favorite image. I was so happy to be a part of “learning to see” at an early age.

Sparking ideas

Ideas

Tips

blur layer of an Ansel Adams tree

Wayne Thiebaud with blur layer

Near the children’s studio is a painting by Roy DeForest. A wonderful vibrant piece called “Country Dog Gentlemen” from 1972. The link (above) to this painting even has an interactive feature where the dogs introduce art from the museum.

"Country Dog Gentlemen", portion, Roy De Forest

An example of the texture in this painting:

physical and visual texture

I couldn’t deny myself the fun that everyone was having with blurred layers. Here is a section of Roy De Forest with an Ansel Adams blurred tree using an iphone camera with the DXP app:

Some kind of a nice abstract

The Art of the Decorated Page

I took an online course called Printed Patterned Painted Journal Making taught by lk Ludwig, over the past month. This coincided with my investigation of my “rivulets” pictures from Yosemite. I realized I wanted to dedicate the pages I was making to one theme to hold these particular images. Here are some of the decorated background pages before I put the images on top, and also the binding. I used Fabriano Artistico paper and it was luscious to work with, it just seemed to love having the paint scraped across it.

I bound the book like this:

Put my first Photoshop layered image from DJ Pettitt’s Photoshop class on the cover:

(I’m kind of liking the way these women are using their initials of their first names, I think I have just become LR Mead!!) At 63, one always needs new identities…

Took the book with me to show Chris Cozen when we went to Morro Bay. A few nights after we got back, Terry and I went out to dinner, only to come home to this (taken with camera bag ap on iphone):

This sweet thing had chewed off the bottom of the cover because we had just been leaving her alone too many times. Cliff does not cut it as a companion to a self-respecting K-9:

And now after all those years of being a public school teacher (when I would never accept it as an excuse, mind you) I can finally say “My dog ate my homework!”

Documentary of Interest

I watched a documentary (Netflix) a few nights ago that was terrific. Titled Herb and Dorothy , http://www.herbanddorothy.com, it is the story of a couple in New York City that are retired and live in a one bedroom apartment. He worked for the Post Office and she was a librarian before retirement. Also, they amassed a unique and vast collection of Minimalist Art, collecting artists before they became “really big.” The likes of Christo, Andy Goldsworthy, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle. (they got work by Christo because they took care of his cat when he went out of town!) They never sold any of this work, it was piled in their apartment, and they decided it should be donated to the National Museum of American Art for the American public. When packed up to take to Washington in order to evaluate it, we are talking five moving vans full. Eventually the museum had to put on a cap for how much they could accept (2,000 pieces) and above that the couple will give 50 pieces to a museum in each of the 50 states. Herb also collects turtles and fish, so it was a pretty jammed full apartment. Good thing they decided to collect art, rather than rubber bands and scrap metal, otherwise they would have ended up on the t.v. show Hoarders. I was in awe because I think Minimalist art can be hard to understand (let alone teach to Intermediate School aged kids). Herb and Dorothy spent a lifetime obsessively collecting it. The American public is richer because they did, but I had trouble understanding the piece of a section of rope nailed to a white wall. I must say Chuck Close is one of my favorite artists, I loved the documentary Rivers and Tides about Andy Goldsworthy, and if I ever had the opportunity to see a piece by Christo in person, I would take that chance in a heart beat. In the “about” section of the site above about the movie, it talks about the featured artists in the film. oops, I think I just reverted into my art teacher mode. oh, well…

A Rivulet Runs Through It…

I debated over the title of this post. Should it be movie/popular culture, or allusion to Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides as in “Rivulets and Tides”? Decided for Brad Pitt, to keep the fantasy alive. But, I diverge in a snowy wood.

A group of pictures from our Yosemite trip struck me as an easy group to push a little farther. They were not meant to be a scenic record of the trip itself (the easily identifiable shots of the views that tourists go to Yosemite for anyway) but they were shots that were personally interesting at the time and I realized after I started taking them from the bus window we were riding in (easier to take public transit in the park than warm up your own car) that every one of them had streams of frozen water down the bus window I was shooting through. I kept taking pictures thinking I would crop the rivulets out, but when I put them all into Photoshop yesterday, I felt it would be a nice exercise to play with light and reflection to see what happened. I hoped to turn them into an impression of the trip rather than a record of the trip. I like the exercise of not having a pre-conceived notion of how pictures should turn out and these seemed like a group revolving around a theme and ripe for exploitation. I also ended up using a filter in Photoshop called poster edges. It reminds me of old postcards that were hand tinted and since I was feeling the historical nature of the environment, I thought why not? You wll probably need to click on the pictures in order to see a larger view and be able to notice the effect.

This one kept getting cropped closer and closer and then became a fabric design

The rivulet made almost a calligraphic effect down the side.

A tree through the ice…Willows in the middle of a meadow…

A nice split rail fence…

Fern Spring

A more classic shot…

Reflections and light in the forest…

I put this photo in my original post about Yosemite, but here the light has been punched up and the rivulet takes on a larger role.

This image got liquified and will probably get turned into Spoonflower fabric…

When I got finished, I realized that I liked them so much I really should add them to a hand-made journal. That is their next stop.

Results

My trip last week to the Orinda Library, resulted in this photo of the the water fall:

Which then became this design in Photoshop:

And it has now become this fabric:

The difference is that when the image gets into Spoonflower, there is the ability to change colors in the design, and do mirrored repeats, and darned if I didn’t get swept away by the fun of it all. This time I splurged for sateen fabric and I am liking it! The goldish colors are so crisp that they almost look like metallic ink. Now, that is an idea. After all, a little glitz never hurt anyone. (An “art rule” according to Lois.”)