i art a day.

This year I’ve found myself with the Christmas Spirit in FULL FORCE. If I sing another Christmas carol I think the boyf is going to end it. I’ve boiled it down to a couple of reasons:

1. I finally found the Muppet Christmas Carol on DVD (thanks Amazon). I’ve been looking for this for years, especially since I don’t have a VHS player anymore. Best Christmas Movie EVER.
2. I haven’t seen my family in a long time. TOO long. Like, a year and a half too long. I’m ecstatic to see them come Christmas Eve.
3. I already have my Christmas present (this gorgeous laptop!), which is a mood elevator every time I look at it.

To channel some of this glee I made a gingerbread house for a museum charity fundraiser, which was way larger than it needed to be, but came out alright. I have a little dough left over to make another (smaller) one as a gift. I’ve also picked up some household holiday gear have a little bit of cheer in every room including a couple of large holiday mugs perfect for coffee and hot chocolate in front of the laptop:

and a set of prep bowls from Pier 1 for the large quantities of cookies I’ll be whipping up over the next two weeks:

We’ve put a tree up and put lights on it (colored lights for the first time in years!), but can’t decorate it much more because the cat has climbed it a couple of times, and all of those baubles would probably just throw her over the edge this year. I’ve picked up some of my favorite holiday songs on iTunes and have played them on repeat (top 3: Wham! – Last Christmas, Judy Garland – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Mariah Carey – All I Want for Christmas is You) probably to everyone else’s distress. We even picked up a live wreath and hung it on the door today:

With all of this excitement Christmas itself is coming up on me pretty quickly, so I’d better get to gift making. Speaking of which – time to whip up a couple of “test cookies”. ;c)

Yesterday I was trying to figure out a way to send Halloween candy to my friends & family far away – without just popping it all into ziplock bags and sending it on it’s way. With a couple of things I had laying around the house I came up with these little Candy Ghosties and churned out a dozen of them while listening to the football game. Each one takes about 15 minutes to make (or less) and the materials are:

+ Sheer Fabric: I used an extra sheer nylon curtain from an Ikea pack. If you don’t have any white fabric try felt or computer paper – less flexable but still can be sewn.
+ White thread and sewing machine/needle. I stitched the entire thing on my machine, but all or part of it can be done by hand (if you don’t plan on making too many).
+ 7 or 8 pieces of candy per Ghostie. 2 for the head, 1 per arm, 3 or 4 for body & tail.
+ Markers to decorate. If you’re really into it it would be cool to try embroidering decorations on before sewing up.
+ Scissors
+ Iron
+ Pencil

Download the Ghostie Candy Bag Template to make your own!

Hope all of your plans for Halloween are frightfully fantastic!!!

First I’d just like to say a big THANKS to everyone reading my blog <3 I started this thing two years ago as a way to force myself into thinking creatively (almost) every day to try and re-light some of that creative passion floating in me somewhere. My 2 year blogging anniversary was earlier this month, and yesterday I had more blog reads than I’ve ever had! (and they primarily weren’t from search engines!) So again, thanks for reading! You guys are wonderful and really help me to push myself further!

On that note, earlier this week I sat down (after my sewing machine had crapped out again) and decided to get my hands a little dirty and made this little thing:

I love the tiger image, which is one I used on my window design project for a lamp and had a scrap of it left over. As a quick project I glued the scrap to a 9×12″ canvas board and used acrylic paints (red, yellow, blue & white) to make a sort of graphic collage poster. Nothing fancy, but it was a nice exercise to sit down for a couple of hours and just think about composition and graphic appeal within the constraints of a limited palette.

Sometimes it’s hard to motivate myself to paint, or even draw. I like to have an idea pretty well thought out before I even put pen to paper, which in many ways is self-defeating because often the best way to work something out is on paper. I guess I’m afraid of “failing” or creating something that isn’t a masterpiece, which is something I’ve been working pretty hard on getting over. Failure, especially in art is such a vague thing. It implies laziness or lack of talent or a poor idea, when it’s possible for even a master’s piece to fail (not that I’m comparing myself to a master by a long shot). In the gallery I work in I’ve seen some phenomenal artwork hung, and then taken down a month or two later because not a single piece was sold. Has the work failed? Or the artist? Or the public? Failure is perhaps a word substituted for an unknown – a proxy for an unexplainable outcome to a highly anticipated event.

The top 5 things that get me in the creative mood:
+ A warm cup of tea to focus me.
+ Cracking open a design book that shows artists’ sketchbooks and process drawings.
+ Browsing craft shows & art competition deadlines.
+ Thinking about the future and my hopes for it.
+ Sitting down with a piece of paper/canvas/pen & ink/brushes and forcing something to come out.

From a young age I’ve known that I should expect the very best from myself, and work up to that level at every opportunity. After all, if you can’t expect the best from yourself – how can others? At some point though the messages got a little mixed, because I was so busy looking around at others trying to find what “the best” was. Sometimes I kept up and sometimes I was behind. I went through periods of creative arrogance and creative self-loathing, before realizing that 80% of the time I should have been more focused on what I was doing and what I COULD do, and only 20% on what other people were doing. I look back now on a lot of the work that I feel like I could have done better on, if I had just concentrated a little more on myself and what was in front of me and a little less on the work other people were doing.

When it comes to my artwork, I know I’ve fallen short of my best in the past – by my own standards – even if I didn’t recognize it at the time. My intention these days is to recognize that as long as I’m pushing myself to try, as long as I’m trying to do something I like, and as long as I like what I’m doing, I don’t have to worry about failure.

Over the past week I’ve been pretty much glued to facebook, posting photos and tweeting about this project so if you know me through pretty much any social outlet you’ve seen it already. But, nothing’s official till it’s blogged about, right? I spent most of last week making geometric paper lanterns for a window design competition in Old City Philly, as part of DesignPhiladelphia. Each of the lanterns was printed with a vintage or colorful cheese label image, and constructed with a fancy-pants geometric pattern.

Each person/group was given a window to design, and I chose the Old City Cheese Shop window, because well – I love cheese! The idea started with a strand of christmas lights, then turned into travel and European photos, and emerged as cheese label lamps. Ultimately easy to make, just paper, printer, glue, Ikea hanging lamp and light bulb – it was really very Zen-like cutting folding and gluing each piece. In total I made nine lamps, but the largest ones are my favorites. 

DesignPhiladelphia runs from Oct. 7 – 13 (I think) and true to any competition, you can vote on which windows you think are the coolest! So, if you feel so inclined head over and VOTE! =)

It was nice to really get my hands dirty again. It felt a little bit like college again working late into the night and getting a board ready for a deadline, but this time I actually managed to get everything done on time and was mostly satisfied with the end result. If you’re on N. 3rd street in Philly sometime this week, go check it out and tell me what you think!

If you haven’t noticed recently, there’s still a couple of changes going down over here (if not – stop on by and take a look!), and today marked the beginning of the newest change to date. Today I finallygot the new Etsy shop and it’s partner business blog up and running - Library of Lost Things. Check them out at:

http://libraryoflostthings.etsy.com (Etsy Shop with new items to be added DAILY!)
http://libraryoflostthings.squarespace.com (The Blog!)

Recently, when I decided to make a stronger effort to update the shop with new items & ideas I wanted to give the project it’s own space. I started the i art a day blog as a place for my personal projects and experiences, which obviously includes building an online shop, but wasn’t exclusively intended for it. So from now on this lovely blog will be just that - my personal creative adventure blog, with a link or two over to the shop stuff when I’m really excited about something I’ve been working on for that. The i art a day Etsy Shop will also be phased out by the end of the month to make way for the new shop! It also couldn’t hurt to keep the shop front professional looking and my personal exploits a little more casual. To kick things off, the Secret Book Box was posted today and the new blog enabled for the public’s viewing pleasure! Yippie!

Over the past two weeks I was commissioned to paint up some backdrops for a children’s theater group and I’m here to report that they’re finished! (Yes, a vast empty white canvas was what my sweet turtle was crawling all over.) They were actually finished and delivered on Sunday but it took this long to get my life and apartment back together. Anyway, there were 3 sets:

1. 8′x6′ Classroom setting, original sketch and final backdrop:

2. 8′x12′ Kitchen setting, original sketch and final backdrop:

3. 8′x6′ Girl’s Bedroom setting, original sketch:

All in all, it was a fun project which I would undoubtebly do again. It was a little pressing doing all three of the rather large canvases in 2 weeks, but they came out mostly well. Hopefully I’ll get to see the show next week and get some photos of the backdrops in action!

Owl Teapot
Watercolor

Hoot Hoot.
With the warm weather finally here to stay and changes abound, perhaps it’s watercolor season. Sure, I’ve still got plenty of oil paintings to wrap up, but a little bit of light and easy painting is in order as well. This week I’m even using acrylics for a big project (more on that later) – acrylics! Maybe I’ll find the time between painting for work, looking for more work, and travelling to sit in the park and paint some. Hooray spring/summer!

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Have a lovely week!

Here’s hoping you had a great Mother’s Day and enjoyed a lovely weekend. Here’s a quick print that I finally got framed up and hung in my little entryway. It’s the first 4 color print I did, and while it’s not perfectly aligned I still like it.

Since it felt like such a huge undertaking (come on – FOUR COLORS!) I wanted to make a very simple image, simple word, simple shapes, basic colors. The idea of tangrams struck me and just kinda turned into this little hello.

Aloha. It’s nice to be back after some time away.

So what’s been going on in my little creative world? If you might recall I’ve been taking screenprinting classes (which is almost over unfortunately), and one of my friends gave me a chance to put some of the things I’ve used to work to make some t-shirts for his new little upstart landscaping business. They turned out alright:

Of course, cutting everything out by hand – yes, all of those tiny letters were hand cut – was by far the most time consuming part of the printing. The registration of the green over the black letters was the hardest part, and didn’t work out as well as I’d thought. Part of that is due to the fact that the green ink was obviously weaker over the t-shirt than the black ink. If i had printed that area with white before hand then printed the black and green it would have come out more even. But, since this was done entirely by hand with hand-cut stencils, the registration would have just about been impossible. Anyway, a couple of lessons learned and a couple of ideas developed. I’m happy to have gotten the chance to make them so I’ve got a better idea of the types of prints I can make in the future, and I’m mostly pleased with the results.

At this point it’s full steam ahead for the craft show coming up on the 26th of April! Can’t wait to fill you in as I work along =)

Last night I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long while. Remember being a kid in 4th grade art class, covered from head to toe in glue/paint/clay/paper/marker and the teacher says, “Okay guys – it’s time to clean up!” – and all of the sudden you rush to make just one more finger painting/ash tray/paper snowflake because you’re loving it all so much you just don’t want to pack it up? Well it was just exactly like that. Last night was the first class of the long awaited  silkscreen printing class that I’m finally taking! I’ve dabbled with it in the past – and come up with some decent results – but thought it was time to really learn about what I’m doing and how to do it properly. We started with a little demo and then got messy with stencil prints, and of course I took a couple of photos.

{note: this next part outlines some of the process we went over last night, mostly so I can remember how to do it in the future.}

Silkscreen Stenciling:
1. First we sketched out a simple design on Freezer Paper (seeing as to how I’ve never used freezer paper before, it’s paper that’s plastic coated on one side – who knew!?), but something like contact paper/shelf liner can also be used. Then used an X-acto to cut out the design.

2. Next we taped the designs to the bottom of the screens (plastic side facing screen – paper side facing table) taping along the top on the paper, and just a little tab on the bottom to hold it on; the stencil sticks to the screen after running the first print. Also a scrap piece of freezer paper is taped (plastic side up) to the top of the screen to cover the unused screen from ink and serve as an ink collection area.

3. From there we chose colors (I chose a bold red) and mixed to perfection with transparent base, which is supposed to help with consistency, volume, and of course make the ink slightly more transparent.

Next, screwed the frame into frame hinges on the table like these:

{note: the screen needs to be lifted ever so slightly off of the table and act like a trampoline – only making contact with the paper where the squeegee is pushing on it. this will help to avoid a “halo” like effect and help to keep the bottom side of the screen ink-free. the little lip of the hinge clamp that the top of the screen rests on accomplishes this.}

4. Place paper under screen, pour ink onto plastic above design, position squeegee, and pull a print!

I probably made about 10 or 15 prints – and most of them were incomplete in some way or another, but one came out well enough to be proud of:

All in all this particular procees seems pretty straight forward. There’s still quite a bit to learn, and I can hardly wait till next Wednesday’s class! The classes are 2.5 hours long, and at 9pm I was dying to make just one more print.