Comfortable Shoes Studio

30 in June

A few months ago I came up with this plan, I called it 31 in May. It was a good plan to get me producing art on a daily basis and then requiring me to list it on etsy. When the plan hatched from my brain I assumed that my last few weeks of DayJob would be uneventful, sadly I was wrong. So 31 in May becomes 30 in June. I’ll need to come up with a new drawing for it, but there you have the idea in a nutshell.

The reasoning for it is that I’ve gotten out of my daily art journaling habit. I journal but not daily and I miss it and let’s face it, I need it. So the plan is that I work in my small coil bound Stillman and Birn Beta journal everyday for the month of June. When the page is finished to hold myself accountable I load that page to etsy. Each page will be a real journal page. Sometimes with writing, but not always. I’ll work this coil bound journal just like I’d work any other journal, keeping process to the front of my mind. Each page will get a blog post and possibly a video. (The video portion will be harder due to video editing constraints. Editing a video a day is way harder than it sounds.) Anyway, that’s the idea, thirty 5x7 inch pieces in June, all loaded up to etsy and my blog.

It's a Process

I’ve been sick, in more ways than one. I’ve had a sinus infection. It’s knocked me on my ass. I’ve also been dealing with disappointment. Abject utter disappointment. Disappointment so deep it hurts. I let myself wallow in it and be consumed with the feeling. The feeling making my sinus infection seem a hundred times worse than perhaps it was. Or maybe it was just that bad* that it could make me feel so helpless.

The cause of the disappointment is not important other than to me. I’ve spent the last few days in a fever induced haze of misery, scribbling in my art journal and watching TV on my laptop and sleeping.

My scrawling and scribbling in my art journal don’t reveal much to me. It chronicles my self-centered misery, my sadness and my sneezes.**

Except one page, a meditative page I did in a sort of mandala style. It’s also self centered, in that there is an image of me in the middle of the page. Radiating out from the center of the image (at the sinuses interestingly enough) are layers of circles filled with various patterns, alternating colors, lines, rays, circles, sheep, and gears. All of this done on a hot colored background in cool colors.

Though I had not planned the imagery it matches the evolution of my thoughts over the last few days, from useless rage and helplessness to being able to think clearly on the problem at hand and coming up with a plan that may work. It’s not done yet, but I like where it’s going

random

I keep writing about the JF365 Challenge over on AJ ning. I keep writing about it because it's a pretty awesome exercise in keeping an art journal and it's not an easy series of prompts. The techniques are different enough that I'm getting a good artistic workout. I highly recomend the book.

Here are a few teasers:

Brief Hiatus

I took an unplanned and brief hiatus from blogging. I've been doing a lot of stuff just not here on the blog.

Jane and I started the JF365 Challenge over on AJ Ning, go check it out. We're working our way through the Journal Fodder 365 book in a group. It's a tough book on journaling but I'm forcing myself to work with the ideas and styles suggested in it. It's interesting to work in a sort of new to me way. I'm adding a lot more random to my pages than I usually do. Which is fun. I'm also writing a lot more. The monthly questions are great for introspective pondering. Good stuff.

As a result of working differently I've bought a few supplies I hadn't used before, so I'll be doing a few reviews soon. Yay!

I'm wokring on translating some of the experience of working the JF365 into posts here and in the next issue of Put it on Paper.

 

Plastic Laminate with the Provocrap Cricut

I picked up a few laminated signs from old sales at the DayJob. Of course, I grabbed them out of the trash, well, sort of, they were on top and clean. These are 1ml thick hot lamination material over card stock. They are thick.

The cricut did REALLY REALLY well with them, cut the plastic like it was butter. I was surprised. The only issue I ran into is that I need the deepcut housing. Even on 6 and the highest pressure setting I could not cut all the way through the bottom layer of plastic even though I cut it on a blade setting of 6, high pressure 4 times. It did score the bottom layer enough that I was able to sort of pop it out.

So it’s off to Amazon I go to buy a deep cut housing. Though I’m tempted to see if I can just sand off the bottom of my current housing...

I’m going to see if I can snag a bunch of these old signs, I know some of them are much larger, 14x17! That might be cool to play around with... They also have some in lighter weight plastic... Probably the stuff they call 5mil (actually 1/2 ml thick) would be easily cut on the crapcut.

I’ve got too many ideas and not enough time.

Tomorrow I'll show you what i'm doing with these super simple stencils.

Back to the Past and the usual corporate shenanigans

Instagram dropped this little nugget of garbage on us earlier this week. The ToS were insane. So people left in droves, quite literally overnight Instagram lost thousands of users. Then in the afternoon they released this nugget of double speak and whatnot.

Let me translate that for you, Instagram and Facebook Legalese to real English, “Dude we thought you wouldn’t notice that we’re taking your pics and we’re going to turn a profit. How could YOU not know we were planning on making money on this? Nothing in life is free forever. Basically we thought we’d send out an update give you some good new filters plus the ToS and you wouldn’t notice. We didn’t plan for Flickr to release their app this week.”

I’ve been expecting something like this since the day they were purchased by Facebook. These ToS are not so different from the ToS on facebook. The big difference- not being able to opt out.

The reality is that things like Instagram need to turn a profit to stay viable. How do they stay viable- think facebook’s ad system. How many ads do you see on the sidebar of your facebook feed featuring your friends? I see plenty of them. I opted out of them.

As of right now, I can’t opt out of Instagram’s ToS, unless I delete all my pics and leave. Which is kinda crazy. I don’t plan on deleting everything yet, I’ll wait until the new ToS come out to see if I still want to leave them entirely. frankly I’m already using the new updated flickr app and I’m content with that, it’s a service I’ve used for years, trust and will continue to use.

You can find me on flickr.

More Cutting Stuff

Occasionally I'll get an idea, an idea that seems so good, I can't help but to follow it down whatever rabbit hole it takes me, and that is what I did X3 this weekend.

Rabbit Hole #1

Bookmarks. I saw these super cool book marks on someone's web page somewhere. Small, about 3 inches by 1.5 inches with a flap to grip the page- genius! I designed a quick piece in Make the Cut, slapped some of my painted bristol on the Crapcut and yeehaw, bookmarks! The came out neato.(I'll write about how well the crapcut did and didn't do in another post.)

Rabbit Hole #2

Secret Santa Gift Exploding Box. A few years ago I found a template online for a box with an attached lid that sort of screwed down on top of the box. I cna't find the one I made years ago. So I searched and searched and searched. I found a template for "wedding boxes" in the Make the Cut archive. It was pretty in accurate. I made 5 copies with tweaks to the file before I made 1 that worked properly. Also it doesn't help that the provocrap crapcut can't make accurate cuts. I ended up making a 3.25x3.25x4 inch box with lid attached. Ilike exploding box better than wedding box. After I made the 4 mock ups I made 2 in colored paper.

No,, I'm not going to tell you what's actually IN the box, not that my workplace secret santa reads my blog, but I'll tell you it's local and cute.

Rabbit Hole #3

X's and O's. Or my handmade Christmas Paper. If you've been following me for any period of time you know I make my own Christmas paper. Usually I scrounge up packing paper and what not, butthis year has been pretty thin on the packing paper front. So, I bought a cheap pad of newsprint for about $5. I then started to design a variety of stencils. X's, O's, some cool squares and what i'm calling black eye'd peas. I don't have pics of all of them since I spent 2 days designing them and not cutting them.I certainly didn't have time to use them making paper, go figure. This weekend Christiw and I will clean off the kitchen table, get out the paint and sharpies and attack some newsprint to make our own wrapping paper. (I have to say I've also convinced a bunch of my friends to do this with their kids, or so they claim.)

Recycled Stickers

As a compulsive hoarder and trash picker I have many of my coworkers trained to bring me goodies- things they know I'll use in a creative recycled way. I had a coworker who used to send my way out of date and unused marketing stickers. I have rolls and rolls of them. I often use them to secure packages in lue of tape. I mean, after all, tape is expensive. They work well for that purpose.

Those stickers are all paper, meant to be torn and not last a long time. She also gave me 60 small 2x2 inch vinyl stickers, which are meant to last and last. I've been randomly sticking them all over the place- planners etc, as is. Randomly I thought to myself, "Supposedly the provocrap crapcut can cut vinyl with ease, I wonder if I can control it well enough to cut one of my shapes out of these little stickers?"

Lo and behold, hell's yeah, I figured it out, and I have 30 of these little sheep.


And then and untold amount of these. I'm telling you, making this work has made me unbelieveably happy.

So far I've only stuck these to my sketchbooks and my coworker's computer...

This led me to think, what could I do with those round paper stickers? Since I'm on a sheep kick lately, I cut some sheep out of them...

Not my most inspired thoguth. BUT! Now I'm thinking what IF I painted those round stickers? I know the crapcut will cut through paint as long as it's dry and a thin coat... So maybe I can paint and spray some stickers and get totally custom sheep. (heh< comment if you get the irony of that statement.) This may or maynot be a plot for me to go to Michael's and use my coupon to buy some liquatex spaypaint...

(Also if you haven't snagged the new flickr app for your phone, DO IT NOW, better than instagram!)

A Little More on Flack

This article is a beautiful one about self censorship. I think that at some point we all lose our way toward our personal voice/vision for our own art. Call it authenticity or whatever, but we have to fight to get back to it. Fight for our unique and personal vision to come through.

In the past all you had to fight was yourself, the expectations of critics and your own inner critic. Now we have the machine of the "art" industry pumping out tools and toys for us to use, straight off the shelf.

For me part of the joy of art was learning to make do with what I had and adapting other tools toward my needs.A little gumption and an idea was all I needed to stoke the creative fire already buring inside.

Cutting Stencils

I've gotten a million questions about how I'm cutting my stencils. First I start with an idea then I decide how I'm going to make that work- do I draw it and then shoot a pic or do I create the image in Make the Cut? It all depends on how I want the resulting stencil to look. If I'm going for a wonky slightly off or not perfect look I generally sketch the idea out in a thick ink pen. Like these:

If I want something that is smooth and mechanical looking I'll create the image completely in the computer from either the idea or an photo. Like this:

Then I've got what I call my focal stencils that I create with a combination of hand work and computer editing. These take a lot of time to create.


The easy answer to how I'm cutting my stencils is that I'm using the pixel trace setting in Make the Cut to create a stencil or diecut and then using my cricut to cut.

Please be aware that I'm using a hacked version of Make the Cut. If you purchase a new version of Make the Cut you will not be able to use it with your cricut. Please see this post for why it will no longer work. Though it could be said that Provocrap is a controlling manipulative spouse and that would tell you all you need to know.

 

Flack

I've gotten flack for being more of an arty art journaler than a writing or cute art journaler. I don't do pretty faces with cutesy quotes. Instead I write my heart out and cover it with paint. I let my writing become part of my finished pieces, even these faces that I've been painting, they have been born out of my art journaling process. Not all of these pieces have deep writing behind the paint, but I learned this process through my art journal.

My art journal is my greatest tool in my art making arsenal. Without it, I'm not sure where my art would be today.

In the images below you can see the words peaking through the layers of paint. Sometimes my journal contains simple lists- like the lists of things I ate during a road trip, a list of purchases made one weekend, beers I tried. Other times it's long paragraphs about influences, things I've read, people I've interacted with, gripes with life. I hang my paint on top of these words, not needing to add a quote or make it pretty. My art journal is a place of no fear. I don't always show it, sometimes it's too raw.

My art journal influences my art and is influenced by my art, it's a never ending circle.

Facebook

Facebook changed how it's pages interact with the people who like a business page. We were all good doobies and made our business a page instead of conducting business on our personal profiles or just using a personal page for our art. So FB put the screws to the pages. If I want to reach all 402 people who have "liked" my page I need to pay $5 per post, then they guarantee all 400 people on my page will see it, if I don't pay $5 then only about 130 people see it. Additionally if I go ahead and schedule updates they meterout the number of people who see the posts across all the posts per day so the maximum number of people who see the posts totals 130. Pretty god damn sneaky if you ask me.

I won't be eliminating my use of the Comfortable Shoes Studio page but I won't be using it as much and I'll probably use my blog more. Hopefully I'll be writing more over this winter and spring.

Somethign I can't wait to share with everyone is that I have scored a wall at a local cafe to hang my art. It's not a big space, a spot for 10 or so paintings and the ability to have an opening night. So I'll update you all more on that. It's a long way off, August of 2013, but that's good, I'll be able to get a lot of ready for it.

More Details

I'vebeen painting a few more faces. These are nearing completion. I need to add a few more details and some stencils to the background but for the most part these are done.

New Blades

The new blades I ordered for my cricut let me cut through painted papers. I really like how the cuts look.

More Stencils

I ordered a few roland blades for my provocrap Cricut machine. They are sharper and work better than the Cricut blades. I got 10 for $20, free shipping from this guy on the 'bay. No affiliation, just happy to get blades that work and are cheaper than $5 to $10 a blade.

This is letting me make more cuts. I've done a new series of ovals and circles, much like punchinella, or sequin waste. This time I've been smarter and saved them all, so I can cut them as I wish instead of redoing them again and again.

I also picked up a couple of EF Montana paint pens and replacement tips. I've been filling them with liquitex acrylic ink, awesome, awesome stuff.  You can see their work in the images below. Full review to come.

In other news, I got braces. They hurt, like a lot. More than I expected. A great thing about them is that I can see results already. I had this one tooth I called the "snaggle tooth," and it's already straighter and closer to my other teeth than it was before. Soon enough no one will be asking me on my YT videos if I'm missing teeth. Which, has to be the worst youtube comment I've ever gotten.

More Process, All the Steps

Above is the intitial drawing. Done with a Pitt pen in black. I messed with doing these drawings in gray but like the effect of the black better.
Then I block in light and dark with titanium white and unbleached titanium white.
The layers of warm glaze come first, then I add a layer of blues.
Then a layer of unbleach titanium white glaze. I am missing a step after this, I would add a layer of very very transparent warm and cool glazes on TOP of the unbleached titanium white glaze.
Final details, like the eyebrows and hair with a liner brush and color of the lips are put in last.

Related articles

Glazes

Stencil Process

Roots

More Process of the Glaze Portraits

More Process of the Glaze Portraits

I start with pages like these. I build up a textured base layer of bright vibrant colors.

I look for spots that have interest, like these.

And then I add an area whre my paint will stick, using a mixe of white acrylic and gesso, sometimes just white acrylic.

Sometimes I add more stencils, so they overlap the whtie area.

Stencil Process

I've been using heavy cardstock for my stencils for the last few years. Previous to that I would cut my stencils from thick pulpy paper that reminded me of super thick construction paper. The cricut does great work with cardstock, I've not looked into plastic, I like the way cardstock stencils handle.

I start out with a clip art image. I pull that into GIMP remove  a lot of the detail and adjust the light and dark. I then print the image and thicken lines with a marker. I also add bridges, so that every area that needs to be connected to another is. The last thing I want is an island that shoudl have been connected not connected. This process takes quite a bit of time. After I'm done with the manipulation of the image it looks nothing like the original I shoot a pic and adjust the light and darks so that it's a crisp black and white line art image.

That image gets cropped to size and then pulled into MtC's pixel trace setting. I manipulate it in pixel trace a little bit and then import the image.

Here are a few process shots:

Above you see the scanned in image, below the actual stencil. This stencil needs a little work, some of the areas are too small to be effective and will quickly clog with the thick paint I'm using. I'll probably import the image again and see if I can thicken those.

Brains

I've been wanting a good brain stencil for awhile now. Back in the late 90's I made a series of large sized internal organ stencils, all handcut and all bassed on old school medical illustration, but highly modified.Over time and moves they were lost to the shuffle and I miss them.

For this project I printed off a mid sized medical illustration of a brain. I highly adapted it by whiting out areas and thickening areas and creating bridges so it would work as a stencil. That took the most amount of time. I then used my new ScanBox to snap a perfect clear picture of it, uploaded that to my computer and then pulled it into Makes the Cut's  pixel trace setting. A few clicks and whirs here and there and in a few minutes I had a background brain and an internal detail stencil cut. There are a few areas where I would probably simplify it a little bit if I had more time but as is I like it a lot.

You'll probablly see a few more internal organ illustrations show up.

New Stencils

I've been using my cricut by Provocrap to cut more stencils, Makes the Cut still kickin' it. I just ordered myself some fresh Roland blades to further hack my cricut.

I wanted to add some alphabet stencils to my work, so I cut stencils form the stencil font. I started out with letters and numbers but pretty soon I was looking up words in binary and cutting those out. One of my favorite songs has a word sung in binary in it. So I cut that lyric out in several sizes. Of my new stencils, it's my favorite. I'll be looking into cutting out more words in binary.

These are backgrounds, nothing exotic going on here, just loads of stencils, over stencils and scraped paint to create loads of texture. I need to transfer this technique more to loose sheets of paper. Totally digging it. Totally digging the capability of hiding messages in the work, in plain site, while not hiding them.

More Faces

I finished the last of the Chipin images ands now I need to wait for the thank you cards to be delivered and I can finally get everything out.

Roots

Sometimes it's good to get back to your art journaling roots. This past week I grabbed a cheapo journal out of the bin and started at it. I'd written some rants and ravings on the first dozen or so pages and I wanted to draw on them, so I had at the journal with acrylic paint.

I started out with pages that had been written on in waterbased ink. I scraped a layer of paint over that, allowed it to dry, then added another color.

On some of these pages I doodled. Others I wrote.

After i got past the written on pages I collaged on pages from a telephone book. Once the gel medium was dry I tore the edges and pulle dup the bubbled areas. Then scraped more paint over those.

On many pages I stenciled.

The final layer is a smooth thin final coat of titanium white. Super thin, the colors and ink still showing through.

After all that I will draw and write on the pages with sharpie and a variety of ink pens. I might add more layers of paint, or stencils.

I've chosen stencils with shapes I cut and designed that have meaning to me. Mostly they are simple designs, gears show up.

 

Weekend Process

Life happens and then stuff takes longer. This was the first weekend in a long time I was able to concentrate on the chipin camapign from the time I left work on friday until I went to bed on Sunday. It was pretty great to spend a full weekend doing art and art related things. I was in the zone.

An interesting observation of the Chipin Campaign is that my life seemed to do anythign it could to derail me. Couldn't get the weekend off that I wanted, then I was sick, then death. Its interesting how life seems to fight the good and then when you are ready for it, it comes at you in waves.

Anyway, I wanted to show some of the process of the art. Before I get to the good paper with my fine point pens I do some studiesw and practice pieces. These are quick studies done with whatever I have at hand on whatever sketchbook I have around. This weekend I was working in a Piccadily journal that I'd written in and then scraped ink across its pages. Honestly I'm loving the look of that as a background and many use it in the future for more art. So much texture, and it's definately back to my art journaling roots.

So before I even touch those fine point pens, I do a bunch of warm upsketches, larger than the final piece and usually in Sharpie or some other marker. I work fast and loose, moving my hand quickly from one side of the page to the pother, mapping out the lines and features of the face.

After I map out the darks I add in the lights, sometimes with white paint pen more often with white china marker.

Only after I've done a bunch of these do I move onto finer point pens and good paper.

Sketch it Out

Sometimes the best thing is to grab a few pencils and a sketchbook, and simply draw.

Start to Finish