I am getting so excited about my SOAK adventure! Camping out was one of the great joys of my childhood, but I haven’t done it for about 30 years. The list of what I need to take keeps getting longer… snack bars, bug spray, batteries for flashlights, and, as a big change from my other camping experiences, the all-important jellyfish hat.
And, since there will be no internet and only limited electricity, I will need a Journal to record everything so I can tell you about it when I get back.
I want the Journal to reflect the colors of the SOAK “Electric Ocean” theme poster, so I dug into my collage boxes and found some good candidates.
I always start off with more bits than I need, winnowing it down as I get fussier about what goes with what.
I like the bird head at the top, but is that chunk of gold too much? Is it too jumbled? Do I need a jellyfish?
It got better as I went, and when it was just right, I glued it down. I even found the jellyfish, right there in front of me!
I thought it needed some gold dots on the top, to tie in with the bottom, so I borrowed Auntie Bridgett’s gold Posca marker.
I also have some leftover colored papers to take along with me, to add into the Journal as I go along. I will ‘show’ you all about my SOAK experience when I come to visit!
I like keeping garden journals. They let me keep track of what happens in the garden and when it happens, so I can learn from each year and get better year by year.
But I also like to make them creative, so I’ve used a different format every year. This year I am re-using a movie list book. It has nice roomy format which I really like.
However, re-using a book means I need to do something in each page to cover, obscure, or otherwise change the illustration that is there, unless I find a page with movies about plants.
This page came close. It was a watercolor from the movie “Amelie”, where the garden gnome goes on some adventures. I wanted to keep the gnome.
I cut some junkmail paper to cover the non-gnome parts, gave it a blurry garden-y paint job, and glued it down. The inside of a security envelope got some darker paint, and I had the basis for a decent page. I gave the gnome himself a little more yellow, since his blue didn’t go with my yellow-ish green.
I found a few nice greens in a handout from our Portland Art Museum, and cut leaves and stems. Not bad, but flat and boring. Auntie Bridgett brought some darker greens from her collage box. Better.
And finally, I cut flowers from some pink and blue paper from the same museum handout. Now the gnome looks right at home in his garden, and in my garden journal.
Creating and solving these artistic challenges everyday makes my brain so happy!
I am still playing in the journal Ruthie Inman got me started on a month ago. The cover is made of tissue paper built- up on fabric with thinned white glue, and has these pinks and greens.
I got quite a few of the pages done,
and then it was time to sew it all together. Using the awl and thread Ruthie sent me last year, I followed her directions and pierced and sewed the pages into the cover.
But I still had the center pages, the double page spread, completely blank. I wanted it to reflect the soft pinks and greens that are in the rest of the book, but couldn’t find collage materials I liked.
Finally, I painted them myself, using watered down acrylic paint. A sea green and a phthalo green gave me the look I wanted.
I kept building up layers of tissue paper, tissue leaves from napkins and such, trying for a sort of dreamy landscape look.
Then I made a mistake. I thought these pink worm-like bits of magazine paper would fit in, so I glued them down. The next morning, I realized that they were a bad choice. It took a few days for me to figure out how to fix it.
I got brave and used an exact-o knife to trim to awful pink bits away and repair the scratches with bits of deeper pink tissue. I like that every layer shows the layers underneath.
Now I have the dreamy landscape I wanted. I might find something else to add to it, someday. But for now, I love it.
Back in March, I got some books about Sister Corita Kent for my birthday. As you might suspect, Corita was a Catholic nun. She was also an artist and teacher at the progressive (as far as Catholic institutions go) Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles back in the 1960s.
I will not attempt a detailed biography here. There are dozens in print and online, by folks who have done their research.
What I want to talk about is how some of Corita’s “Ten Rules’ have affected me and my art.
Number 4. Consider everything an experiment.
I know Crazy Quilts are an OLD thing, but mine is a NEW thing, at least to me. Combining piecing, embroidery, beading and quilting in one totally original creation big enough for two people to snuggle under was a seven month expeiment. It worked out pretty well.
Number 6. There are no mistakes. There is no win and no fail.
This is comforting to me, after years in the classroom where I dreaded making mistakes in front of my students. Knowing I can learn from everything makes me braver.
Number 7. The only rule is the work. It is people who do all the work all the time that figure things out.
For the past few years, with help from Auntie Bridgett and Ruthie Inman, I have been reading, thinking and experimenting with art. The stitches in my Crazy Quilt were an experiment. Laying down layers of collage, then tissue, then ink. Three dimensional constructions covered in paper mosaics… all experiments. I like some better than others, but I learned from them all.
And, as Sister Corita promised, I am figuring things out.
Once we had the journal cover made, it was time for pages. Since this isn’t a journal for writing, but for doing art in, we were free to experiment.
I started gluing images down to scrap paper, which is always fun. Making THIS piece of junk mail look spiffy by sticking on THAT piece of old napkin is very satisfying.
When the pages were dry, I lined them up with the butterfly cover. I love the way the greens and soft pinks go together.
But wait a second! That cartoon dude is SO out of place! He looks like he got into the book through an unlocked window. He’s adorable, but he’ll have to wait for another project.
I kept looking, and more images kept showing up. This little girl and part of a watch face came together nicely. It needs something else, but it will come.
The Zoom Art group got together again this morning and I added this landscape over the splattered page. Not bad, but as it is here, it felt unfinished.
I put it aside and went on with the day. When Cousin Kestrel came over this afternoon, I asked her for advice. She suggested a setting sun with some rays, and I gave it a try.
I love it! Thanks, Kes!
This page of text strips goes with the color scheme and looks suitably cryptic. The splatters add a little character. As I told Ruthie, “Splattery will get you anywhere!”
My friend Ruthie Inman is always finding new ways to challenge our little zoom art group. This week she asked us to get a cream cheese box so we could cover it and make it pretty and useful.
The silvery coating on the box was very slippery and needed lots of gesso before it would take any paint. My first idea was to paint the whole thing bright orange and then collage over it. I didn’t take a picture, but trust me, it was awful.
I asked YOU and you said i should paint the whole thing black and figure out what to do next. So I did, and here’s what came next : really beautiful paper cut into teeny tiny bits.
I love mosaics, and black always looks good between bright colors. I got the top covered while Ruthie, Zoe and I chatted.
And to make the inside pretty, I found some gold foil (it came wrapped around pears at Christmas) and cut it to fit the bottom of the box.
This box still isn’t finished…. The black parts aren’t pretty and it needs a clasp to keep it closed.
And speaking of works in progress, I did another experiment with boxes… this time, a Yogi tea box. I was thinking of using it instead of the cream cheese box.
But as I held it, it felt too flimsy to be of any use. maybe I could reinforce it? I pulled apart the glued corners and laid it flat, laid tissue paper over the whole thing, front and back, with Mod Podge medium, then put it back together. It is stronger, but is still in its slightly-lumpy-tissue state.
But fear not. All will be well…and if it isn’t, I am only out a few cents of Mod Podge.
A while back I showed you the start of a collage book in whichI will try and illustrate all the stages of life. For whatever reason, the first page I did was close to the end…
So I decided to go back to the beginning.
Choosing what to call the stages was my first challenge, but I went with my first inspirations. From Preconsciousness through Puberty to Oblivion and Joy, I printed them out and put them on the inside cover. Because I was sloppy, the page didn’t come out quite like I wanted, but it will do for now. The beauty of collage is that I can paper it over and do it again.
For my first stage of life, I started with Preconsciouness, when we are growing but not aware of anything yet. I got the images from a Time Life book called The Body from the 1960s and added some tissue paper and paint speckles.
I haven’t done “Comfort” or “Cognition” because I can’t see them in my mind yet, so the next one I have is “Organization”, when we are figuring out how people and things are the same and different..
As you can see, babies can get some things wrong. They might think butterflies are flowers, or that a stuffed dog is a real dog.
The next page is about learning to talk, with jumbles of words overlapping each other.
The next page I have (almost) finished is Mobility. I imagine this is what it must have felt like, balancing on our own two feet for the first time. A precarious, dangerous step that we all needed to take.
Those are all the pages I have done for now. This is a long term project and I work on it as ideas come to me.
Once Ruthie Inman got us started on her May Flowers project, we had some more paper-collecting to do. White with black text, black with white text, and red with any color of text.
I started with the background, made of dozens of bits of white and off white with small black text.
I like the way the tiny lettering faded into the background.
Then the fiddly bits need to be dealt with. Cutting red, black and blue bits to fill in the bike, tire and some last minute orange for the basket tested my scissor skills. That done, it looked like a proper bicycle. Proper, but too plain.
I trimmed the flowers from weeks ago so they fit better, placed, placed, and re-placed them around the basket, and finally glued them down. I like the way they spill out! A few leaves cut from the same painted text topped it off.
I finished it by putting the spokes in the wheel, and was very happy with the results. Now, on to the next project!
I have fallen in love with keeping an Art Journal. For a long time, I was intimidated by trying to do ART that was good enough for a BOOK.
But now I see it differently. It is a way to corral my art of a certain period, so I don’t end up with a floating cloud of sketches and color experiments. It also can show my growth as an artist, like we used to keep student portfolios… baby pictures growing to better pictures. (With a fair number of screw-ups in between, of course.)
When I retired, Krista Sabaska gave me a large format journal as a retirement gift. I started using it in 2021. It started out as an “Art with Liza” journal, for drawings we did together during our Zoom calls. You would give me a phrase and I would draw it. This one was “The Paranoid Android is surprised.”
As time went on, it became a place where I could put ideas for other projects. I made a bunch of sketches for Cousin Kestrel’s Christmas present in 2021, then stuck them in the Journal so I would have them all together.
I got more comfortable with making art in the Journal as my insecure ‘student’ brain got used to the fact that I was not going to be graded! It is MY book. I used it for processing lots of ideas, like you moving to Denmark…
And me getting older, by keeping my birthday celebration alive in a collage.
And now, the inevitable has happened. This friendly Journal with a year and a half of art in it … is full. But I can’t stop keeping an Art Journal! It is fun, gives me a place to doodle, and makes me brave by keeping my ideas safe from prying eyes.
Fortunately, Auntie Katie gave me this Journal years ago, and it has been waiting for me.
I knew I needed to do some collage in it right away, to break the ice and introduce myself. The first two pages are very much where my brain is…
Dear Liza 