I have impulsively scheduled an artist Open Studio soon: on the weekend of February 17th! It will be a casual meet the artist, see the art, and that’s all folks!

ARTIST OPEN STUDIO at PT Studio 314

Saturday and Sunday February 17 & 18

314 33^rd St

between 10 am & 2 pm

Meet the Artist and Enjoy the Art in her Studio / Gallery

I may try for a bit of an after event party on the Sunday, with some food & drink, but I am not sure yet. I might need a bit of help with that idea!

A new friend, Carolyn Lewis, does interviews with artists for the Port Townsend Leader, and she visited my studio recently for an interview. If all goes well this will be published in the paper on February 14th, and my Open Studio will take place the following weekend. Fingers crossed though, as Valentine’s Day fillers may fill the paper and crowd out the interview. That would be very disappointing!

But I had to make a commitment, so I posted the event to the community calendar, and will announce it on Facebook, etc. in the next day or two. So like it or not, I will hold an open studio soon!

The past week or so in my area has been cold and somewhat wet; so this came with ice and snow. It turns out that 13F is really really cold for this town surrounded by water, protected by warm ocean currents, and shielded by mountains. Most winters we do experience a few consecutive days below freezing, but rarely below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and rarely with snow so cold and dry, remaining on the ground for days just evaporating so slowly. It has been quite lovely, but also hard on those unprepared or experiencing power outages!

Enjoy the ice and snow here: so many delightful icy puddles posed for my camera!

Online classes can be useful: very useful! After the disappointment of failing entry to a juried show, it was time to take a class and move on! I am temporarily stalled on one new project, so I decided it was time to move on to the next one. So I found and I took a short Domestika class in creating cardboard sculptures.

I struggled to watch even these short and useful videos, and I jumped in to start my project right away. Often working ahead of the lesson, I made plenty of mistakes, but it was fun, and I have a fine Egyptian head to show for my efforts. Cardboard is cheap, but it took a lot of hot glue, and quite a bit of paint!

I do plan to follow up with a second project. If I can be more consistent with the cardboard, and neater with the hot glue, I may varnish it and skip the paint. And after that, who knows! I may take a class and move on again!

Here are photos of the almost final & final read to hang result:

I took photos of some of the steps along the way, per the course instructions. I did not track all the final detailing, or the work on the headdress which I built separately. The dimension of the final piece is approximately 20″ x 15″ x 10.5″. Currently the headdress, which is about 2″ deep, and the 8″ deep head are separate, but I may just attach them together.

I made a small plaster head with embedded wire mesh, and it is now coming into its own. I started to enjoy it after I placed it on another art scrap, and arranged an extra bit of wire mesh with it to amuse myself.

Now I have these various parts mounted into more plaster in an old picture frame.I am embellishing the plaster base with low relief carving. I love whittling away at the still damp partially cured plaster using whatever tools are working best. It is all another experiment, but it may prove to be a finished piece with some merit, TBD!

The carved base is not pure white Plaster of Paris, but actually a patching product called Fix-All. It is off-white although not really the distinct tan that appears here. I rubbed some light yellow and pale green pigments on in a few small areas, and there is flesh tone pigment on the much whiter plaster face. I expect to add more colors as I go.

I am adding more wire to secure the head, and this will give it the effect of bindings or chains. A plaster head in my hands is not for sissies!

I posted the center photo of this piece with a request for comments, and I did get a couple of suggestions that I followed up on. You can see some changes to the left side of this work on the final photo above right. I reduced the potential for reflective glare next to the face, and extended the silvery grey to the background plaster. Now I think enough is enough… it is finished.

It is winter, I still take many photos on my walks, and it is time for the return of the foils! Foils are just about fun, and can be quite lovely. A simple photo with good contrast, with fewer and more subtle colors, generally results in a better foil that needs little tweaking. Here is a sample photo, with two foiled variations. I did a bit of lightening & darkening small areas of the original, but did not modify the result of the foil effect, just choosing different colors and direction for each.

This photo is an over painted white stripe of a school crosswalk, but I see a playful puppy running with balloons!

For the image below, for the “original” photo image at left, I did boost the leaf saturation slightly, and I added a narrow shadow to the right side of the leaf to help it stand out from the background. The right photo, which has the colored foil effect applied to the leaf only, also has a shadow on the right side, but has the saturation slightly lower and the darkest parts lightened a bit. I love the original photo, a wet leaf back on the roadway, but the foil has beautiful colors and just pops!