Printmaking and Painting and My Art Staycation

Today officially starts my week-long  ART STAYCATION! Unofficially, it started Saturday morning. I pulled out most of my art supplies and scattered them around the living room in organized chaos. Saturdays seem to be the day when I just create a mess, painting backgrounds that don't look like much, pulling prints off my new gelli plate, cutting, measuring, mixing and splattering. On Sundays, I am more rested and often manage to figure out a way to pull the unrelated art bits into some kind of unified piece. Sometimes it is just a little edge of a print that becomes an ATC or a tag.

Collage with Gelli printed deli paper and stencils, assorted papers,
vintage royalty free images and printout of original drawing

Collage using vintage magazine ad, stenciled
Gelli printed deli paper and assorted papers

For my staycation, I have a few plans. One is to work on my faces using the Jane Davenport method. I have a vision of doing something bigger than an ATC, incorporating angels and wings and Medieval illuminated writing on it. I have sketchbooks and journals full of ideas that I scribbled down in moments of inspiration, so I will pull them out and see if anything turns into a solid idea.

Layers of Gelli-stencil deli paper prints, thermofax prints and assorted papers

I hope to pull my 6x6 series from the Julie Balzer workshop into one piece, maybe even hang it on the wall. Strangely, our walls are kind of empty, and my husband keeps saying: "Why don't you hang some of your work up?" Why indeed? Well, much of it is in art journals--can't hang them very easily. Some pieces are too personal, too in-your-face and I don't want to look at them every day. Some of them remind me of where I have been, emotionally, and looking at them evokes feelings I don't really want to revisit.

There's a couple unfinished projects on the horizon: my finishing the hand-quilting on my grand-niece's handmade fabric piece, repairing broken jewelry--some commercial and some handmade. Then there's the canvases...I made a "junque journal" in a Julie Balzer class, which is now so fat it will hardly close. So, I need a new one. I had some painted canvases that were intended to be covers for the first journal, but they weren't quite right. So, yesterday I gessoed over them. I had used some fiber paste through a stencil, and the gesso didn't cover it, so I used molding paste on top. Still didn't cover it. So that's a back-burner project in two parts...making the canvases look okay, and putting them together into a new journal.

Here's the 2"x3" printmaking experiments from yesterday. Two will be traded, one is a "keeper" and the rest will go in the nowhere land storage bin and either be reworked, added to another project, or used for an emergency greeting card.