I have been casting a few small works; these are now out of the mold and painted. The beetles are intended as gifts, but I may have to make a few more for myself. I may have the seed of an idea for a larger artwork, with beetles, that will be for my own amusement. Beetles certainly do lend themselves well to iridescent and metallic paints!
I cannot resist arranging and posing my new bits on older surfaces. I see all sorts of interesting combinations as I snap photos in my studio…
I am revisiting foil: real aluminum foil with the addition of a digital foil plus the usual fixing & fussing.
The time has come to sort through my old printing plates, now that the Blick Etching press has a new home in Anacortes. I sold the press, and have not been a member of the local Printmakers Guild, Corvidae Press, for many years now. I don’t plan to much printing, but I have kept a number of “permanent” plates that still amuse me. Yesterday I shuffled through a set of mat board & aluminum foil plates, which were used for a “low tech etching” technique.
I colored three of these plates, using various marker pens. Then I scanned these, for the record… After the scan, I digitally foiled the images, of course! Here are the two that I like best. Not my favorite works, but fun nonetheless.
Goodbye my lovely home studio printing press!
My 18″ Model 999 Blick press has been semi-retired for years now, dormant under a dust cover. It had become something of a spider habitat in the corner of my garage workshop space.
Today I SOLD it to an eager new printmaker in Anacortes, who was very excited to get it. She also purchased a small fortune in clean unused zinc plates, along with 10 large sheets of Rives BFK. I sold these at half the Blick Art Materials listed price, with no tax or shipping charges. Of course I am happy to get some cash in hand, and my price was a bargain for my “customer”.
I wish her much satisfaction and excellent results! Happy printing, LisaMarie!
Flora, fauna, and man made objects all leave their own ghosts: shadowy traces and remains that echo like ghosts of the original. I love these reminders of what has been. These images are derived from the ghosts, shadows, and echoes on a well-used outdoor table. The top of this table has magic for me.
I especially love the dark magic in the last foil below, and could not resist a little extra enhancement of some of the imagery and detail in this piece.
Exquisite finds for digital enhancement can be found at low tide on the right beach! I took so many photos that it will be impossible to process them all, but this barnacle encrusted salt water washed remnant of an old corduroy road or railroad bed, now on tidal lands, is too good to resist. The iron stains and barnacles make my digital enhancement tools dance!
And sometimes I see animals and people in driftwood, as well as in clouds. So the beach today produced an illusory whale vertebrae and a rabbit sitting up at attention.
Nest Eggs is complete on the flip side of Table Dancer now. “Nest Eggs” is the interim title for the second painting on the center section of my flip-top art table. I hope to come up with a better title for this new painting though!
I used a digitally transformed and enhanced photo of a real bird nest (with stone “eggs”) as my inspiration. The nest with eggs is recognizable enough with the title as the hint. Clearly some eggs escaped the nest however, and the shapes and shadows have little basis in any reality we know.
I am finally making some further progress on my art table with table dancer and nest! This is my project to transform a damaged flip-top game table into a flip-top art table. The top of this table features a large inset square that you can lift out and flip over. My finished table will feature a choice of two different artworks. I suppose I will have to restrict myself to 2-dimensional work here; although there is actually space for some modest relief carefully placed. However we might find that to be pretty annoying when actually using the table!
So far I completed the painting on one side of the reversible square section that is set into the table top. Side I features the “Table Dancer” in deep blues and greens. I just painted the surrounding fixed border section that frames the inset images, using a subtle variation of muted light greens. There is a just a tiny hint of iridescence and metallic gold. The goal is for this border to look “right” with both paintings. The greens work with the Table Dancer side, but are very light and muted, to work with my plan for the second painting.
And now I have a running start on the painting for the other side. I expect the nest painting will be more abstract, and will feature lighter tones. The concept is loosely based on an a digitally transformed photo of a real bird nest with stone eggs. I am not ready to show any realistic photos of this side yet.
Here is a digitally transformed and enhanced version of a photo of my early draft, which is not much more than a background so far. I enjoy the digital fun, and this is quite lush and rather gorgeous. It is much too colorful for my table, and I would struggle to put that much saturated color on any painting! It is a bit reminiscent of Chinese Brush Painting perhaps?
Anyway I have made further progress on my art table with Table Dancer and Nest!
Lately I have been foiled in my attempts to display my Fat Baby Bird in a couple of locations, so I turned to digitally foiling my fat baby birds here. And as you can see, I have gone into a little “mass production”. I make and sell a limited number of cement casts of my limestone carving. The stone original is the unpainted bird shown above, which I display on a cement “honeycomb” base I designed. The painted birds are two of my limited edition casts. So far I have made my original carving plus eight cast cement birds, each painted differently. I plan to limit the edition to 25 or less.
I want to keep track of the order of these casts, and where these baby birds go, but I may be confused already. I failed to note the order and the location of their new homes as I worked. The numbered list below is my best reconstruction of the sequence of my cast birds.
I hand chiseled my fat baby bird from a small block of limestone. You can see it in the first photo above. I cast the original, making a silicone mold with a plaster mother mold, and it is my very first stone carving. I plan to keep the original carved bird for myself!
