Tag: Making art At home

Not Quite Done Yet!

Dear Liza,

Every time I think I’m nearly done with your story, I trip over the next step.

It took about five months to get the story itself written. Research on Denmark and its geography took a while, then making up how to get around and what should happen next, as well as how to create coded clues, kept me very busy and were lots of fun!

Once the adventure was written, I realized that it needed some illustrations. So there were a couple of months of noodling around with colored pencils, paints and collage. I looked at my favorite illustrators for inspiration. I studied Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, and Dr. Seuss. I ended up with a combination of Henri Matisse and a clever third grader.

Since this is going to be a hand-made, hardcover book, I needed to come up with a design for the cover. It had to be like the inside illustrations but different enough to not give the story away.

Printing the pages took longer than I expected, as well.

Wrestling with Microsoft Word running on an Apple Mac was a test in checking every box and knowing when to walk away rather than smacking the equipment. I lost count of how many pages got printed too small, sideways, or just totally wrong. Let’s just say I have plenty of scratch paper for my next project. But it eventually worked out.

What’s next? Printing the illustrations, punching holes, and lacing the whole darn thing together!!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Seeing Things Differently

Dear Liza,

There is nothing like art to change your world. I don’t necessarily mean it changes the world on the outside, although that could be nice.

Shapes and reflections in Van Gough

I’m talking about when looking at art changes the way you see the world in general. Spend an hour or so in an art museum, staring at shapes and shadows and reflections. Then go outside, and what do you see? More shapes and shadows and reflections, art forming from reality right in front of your eyes.

It is wondrous, and it has happened to me many times.

Shales and reflections in a town square

Making art is a newer experience, but it has the same effect of altering my observation. It’s like my brain has created a new network that allows me to connect different parts, seeing a new whole.

My creation, “Paradisi Crow”

A few weeks ago I made a collage based on Julianna Paradisi’s “Quickened Towards all Celestial Things”. I wanted the shape of the crow to be just right, so I cut a prototype out of cheap paper and then traced that onto card stock for the collage.

Just being a crow…..

Then I had this perfectly good template. Just sitting there. Being a crow.

I kept looking at it over a few days, knowing I wanted to use it but not knowing how. Over the last however-many-months of quarantine I have learned that if I take my time, the right idea will come. Finally, it did.

Starting with watercolors and working up to acrylics, I laid down some patches of color and then used an old toothbrush to flick paint, layer by layer, around my crow stencil. It took days, flicking and staring and adjusting. And last night, it was finished. The background layers of crow silhouettes became dense enough just as the built-up speckles on the crow became dark enough. So I glued the crow in her final position, and …. done.

I wish now that I had taken pictures of each stage, but I think I was afraid of jinxing the process. This sort of creation is still new enough to me that it feels like a delicate magic.

Love,

Grandma Judy