I know this blog seems dead and gone but it isn't. I have been traveling...moving...for a year now. Actually more than a year. I started packing my house back in Jan 2022. Since then I have been moving from place to place, often with only two suitcases. Most of my things are scattered in three different countries. Some I will probably never see again.
Just this last month I moved into an apartment I hope to be in for the next year. I spent the last few weeks getting my area set up to create, and I started making things again this last week. I hope to have my shop up and running soon, within the next few weeks if possible.
I have been playing a lot with my acrylic drops as you can see from this photo. I love these little swirls of color and I have trays of them all around me to pick and choose from as I create. I invested in some nice jewelry trays back in France and made sure they were one of the things I packed to bring with me. I am not sure if I will be able to find replacements when they run out so these may be a limited item. I love how good my drops look in these.
I have also been experimenting with my resin wings, using different methods to make a variety of styles. Each time I make a new set of wings I feel I get closer to perfecting the process. I now feel very confident I can make good, solid pieces that are worthy to put into my shop. When I first made my wings for my flight-of-dreams collection I made so many duds I had a whole box full of them. Now I rarely make a mistake.
I hope to write a post on the making of my wings soon. And I am not only making wings, I am also going to add other whimsical items.
After finishing Pomp & Circumstance I found myself still yearning to pick up my pencils. I was thrilled with this as I have let them lay dormant for many a year with no desire to visit them at all. That I would find such satisfaction with them again was an exciting thing for me. I quickly set about with a new idea. My daughter had told me she wished a drawing of a fairy some day so that is where the idea for this drawing came from. I decided to draw a fairy but not just any fairy, a steampunk fairy. I wanted her to be bold and yet beautiful also. So this is what I started out with.
I didn’t really like her face yet, I wanted something more angellic. I finally settled on this face and I am much happier with it.
After I settled on the face I went into a little more detail on her hair. She is starting to shape up!
I am really looking forward to this piece. I think she is going to be a lot of fun. Keep posted to see her come to life.
This is a post about my recent rediscovery of my love of pencil drawing and the results of my experiments in colored pencil. When I recently did the graphic sketch of the colorful feather I realized just how much I loved drawing and missed doing it. When my son made a comment that he had none of my art to hang on his wall I started mulling over the idea of doing a drawing for him. He has a painting of his father’s on the wall and it is of our old angel fish. Well I love angel fish and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a fish also, then he would have one in each of our styles?” So that’s what I decided to do…
I started out with this peliminary sketch of the fish.
I wanted to do an angel fish but one with lots of swirly very colorful fins.
After I finished my sketch I inked the body of my fish.
Then I began my first layering of color. I have never really done any professional work with colored pencils so I watched a lot of videos on different methods for layering color, etc. I started out with my lightest colors, lay the color down and smoothed it with turpentine. It made a nice painterly effect and I really liked how well it covered this way.
I then slowly started building up the color. I found this a fascinating process. I always used only graphite when I worked in pencil when I was younger and I was missing out on a whole world of beautiful colors. The Prismacolor pencils I use are rich and soft and layer beautifully.
Once the body was done, then the colors really came out. Now I am starting to play! This was such a fun project. I really just let myself go. I found the pencils themselves made me even more creative. The vast amount of color effects I was able to achieve just encouraged me more. I think I spent more time deciding the colors and designs I would use then I did with the actual work but it was all a very fun project!
I was so happy with my rainbow feather piece that I wanted to try this method out again. I loved how the rainbow feather turned out but I felt it was just a bit too detailed, so I set out to simplify the design. I started out with a sketch of an initial D.
I really loved how this sketch turned out. I didnt add the color or fine details in the sketch. I chose to wait until I put it on the plastic. I made up two pieces of the film and tranferred the design onto them for shrinking. I wanted to do one piece with the sharpie markers and one with the prismacolor to compare the two. I immediately made a mistake by tranferring the design onto the wrong side of one of the pieces. I went ahead and finished it anyway though as I wanted to see how it would look with it done on the wrong side. The piece done on the right side is with the colored pencil, the wrong side is the marker one.
So here below are the first two pieces. The one on the left is the one done on the wrong side. As you can see the colors are very muted. I guess this could be used in some applications but I felt it wasn’t suitable for this application. The second one I thought turned out great. I was so excited about it that I set out to wrap it right away. Silly me! I totally forgot to seal it before I started and before I was even halfway finished with the bezel the ink had rubbed off the front of the piece. The bezel also didn’t work so two fails in one day!
So I went on to do two more pieces. I was determined to get this piece right. I again repeated the same experiment, one with marker and one with pencil. This time I inked them both on the right side. This time they both turned out great so I went on to seal them. I decided to use the spray sealer to eliminate the brush stroke that were somewhat evident on the rainbow feather. Boy was that a mistake. I am not sure if it would have worked if I had used a lighter touch but what happend was a reaction with the ink and the sealer. It leaked into the background.Two more pieces regulated to the scrap pile. One good thing though, I can use these with the resin experiments I want to try out as soon as it gets a bit warmer. It is still way too cold up on this mountain for the resin to cure well without using lots of heat in the room.
I was still determined to do this right. I made one more piece. This time with the pencil as I had decided from the previous batches that the pencil looks just a bit better than the marker. Though really it is a close call. They both look quite good in my opinion. So here is the final piece inked and then shrunk.
Finally a good result! I am still not crazy about the background and would probably be more likely to use this with images that fill the whole piece. I still have to play with this more. What do you think? Do you like the results? Would you wear something like this?
I wrote recently on my experiments with alcohol inks. In my last experiment, I used the inks on shrink film and I was very interested in the results. I looked at the wings I had quickly inked and I suddenly saw an opportunity to use my fine art skills in jewelry. I love making jewelry. It does satisfy something in me but I am constantly trying to find ways to bring my art into my jewelry. The wire is lovely but popping colors? Even better!
So I set about on a trial to see just exactly how much art could I bring to a miniature medium like this. Here are my results and I think you will be quite pleased as I was.
First off, I wanted a nice intricate piece with lots of colors. Feathers have been on my mind a lot so I did a sketch of a feather in pencil. I didn’t take a lot of time on this piece but I ended up loving it. So I will definitely go back and redo this in a larger size and ink it properly. This is definitely a sketch, not a finished piece.
This is the piece I am going to do. This image is only about 4″ tall.
I did a lot of reading on this subject before I started. I wanted to know the pros and cons and to catch the little tips people throw out in forums, etc. I learned that a sanded surface works great for colored pencils. Since I had no colored Sharpies or other alcohol markers, colored pencils it was.
I had already did quite a few test runs on my oven and slowly took the temperature down till I found the good temp. 140c seems to be just about right.
I did a test with my colored pencils. I have many brands and wanted to see which pencils would work the best. I decided that the Marco pencils seemed to go on much nicer than the others. Later during the coloring of the piece I actually found the Stabilos going on much smoother.
Here is my little color chart I made for reference.
The brighter side is the unsanded side, as you can see the titles are backwards.
While I was at it I made a ruler too. This is a great little reference tool to give you an idea of how large your piece of plastic needs to be to get the proper size.
As you can see, I still hadn’t figured out my oven temps with this piece and the colored pencil templates and they cooked way too fast. I could probably put it back in the oven and flatten it a bit more if I wanted to
After doing my pencil test I sanded down my film. I took my jewelers sanding blocks in gradient grits ranging from P60 to P600 and set about sanding the whole surface area. I tried to make it as smooth as possible and eliminate as many lines as I could.
Many people had talked of sanding their paper but only with one grit and in a back and forth motion. This didn’t seem enough to me so I sanded it as I would a piece of jewelry. It came out with a pretty good smooth surface though there were still some scratches in it.
Next, I taped my film over my pencil sketch and inked it with my fine tip sharpie on the unsanded side. Having that one sharpie on hand sure saved me.
After it dried I turned it over to do the pencil on the sanded side.
Here is the piece with the colors finished. The shiny side is shown.
Then it was time for the oven. I was so nervous and thinking that maybe I was just a bit crazy to put so much time and effort into a shrink plastic piece!
By now I was used to the shrinking process and sat right in front of the oven. I opened it often to help the piece along when it curled too much. They can get hot but I don’t find them too hot to touch quickly. I just open the oven door, reach in and help it unbend a bit when it seems to be curling too much. Sometimes if they curl too much they stick together and I didn’t want that to happen.
It melted down well (with a little help) and then I set my bench block on top of it to flatten it further. It is nice and heavy and does the job perfectly!
Here is the finished piece and I am in love once again.
THis project made me so happy. Not only did I remind myself of how much I love to work with pencils and draw I also found a fantastic way to bring my fine art to my jewelry.
Now my next job is to figure out how to wrap this in wire to make a pendant so that it satifies me. That itself might be a monumental task.
I have come to the realization that I am terrible at blogging. I’m not sure what it is. The time it takes to upload the pictures, sort them and make the post maybe? I know I get lost in my studio and say to myself ten times a day, “I should blog about this!” But then it doesn’t happen.
I think I just need to make myself blog no matter how quick and unpolished just to keep a journal, even if only to myself, of what I have been up to. So I am going to try to be better.
I am really busy in the studio and I am accomplishing a lot though it doesn’t show here. I want to post real quick about what I have done the last few weeks with the alcohol inks. They are not the only thing I have been playing with but I am still very excited about them.
They are just so bright and playful!
My next experiment after the shells was with the flower beads. After all, this is what I bought the inks for. I made a small ink stamper by gluing a piece of felt onto the end of a small tool I had.
I have since realized that it would have been better if I had glued a piece of velcro on the end so I could change the piece of felt and made a better tool. Learn as you go!
I loaded my stamper with three colors of ink and stamped away with the ink.
I think the results speak for themselves.
I am so excited about how they turned out. I absolutely adore them.
These blue ones are my favorite so far but I have only started playing with these. I can’t wait to try more color combinations.
I went on to try sealing some of these with resin. Although I am fascinated with resin and plan on doing much with it, I found that I prefer the matte finish on these flower beads. The pictures of the finished resin beads did not turn out well so I wont be including them in this post but here is a picture of one pair of earrings I made with the resin ones. As you can see, they are much shinier and the resin made the inks run together. I could probably alleviate that with the sealer and I may try again next time I pour resin.
Since then I went on to play with shrink plastic. I haven’t done anything with this medium before except play with shrinky dinks when I was little. I had no idea what I was doing! I started out by inking a nice wing on the plastic and then proceeded to paint it with my inks. I loved how it turned out.
I still had to bake it though and really had no idea how this would go. To start out with I am fairly sure I had the oven too hot. It curled up quite bad and wouldn’t go back down. When I took it out the inks looked almost black in places. It was dark dull and ugly I thought.
Holding it up to the light you can still see the color somewhat but even that was minimal.
So I spent the afternoon experimenting and realized that:
1. I was using too high of a temperature.
2. The inks intensify when baking.
It is much better to apply them afterwards.
3. It is better to apply a weight after bringing the piece out of the oven to help keep it flat as it cools.
So I made a few smaller pieces. Inked the outline as before and baked them without the alcohol ink. Then I applied the alcohol ink afterward. Much better! I also cleaned the ink off the big piece and reheated it and flattened it with a weight (my bench block worked perfectly)
All in all, I am in love with the alcohol inks. I still have a lot to learn about them but I think we have become fast friends. The shrink plastic is also an interesting medium. You can do quite intricate works of art on it and then shrink it down to have a nice piece in miniature. I am sure I will also be playing with it a lot in the future. What I really want to do is wrap it in wire.
