I did better at making these when I was taking the borosilicate class in February. Somehow I forgot most of what I learned in four months. Some of them are rather amorphous.

The black-and-brown woodcut pattern is from wrapping paper from my favorite stationary store in Prescott.  I did the outline of the leaf by gessoing over a pressed watermelon leaf.  The sparrow linocut I did myself.

In addition to learning about what looks good and what doesn’t, I’ve had to learn how to photograph 2-D pieces.  I tried scanning it, and that works, to a point, but the file sizes are huge and I don’t like the way it pixelates when I resize it to something managable.  I have a fairly decent photography area set up for photographing my 3-D art, but it’s not suitable for flat pieces.

My solution was to tack the picture to a piece of white matboard, and then set it up on an easel.  The easel isn’t very good, and it takes some finagling to get the tripod and the easel to align with one another.  The colors never come out exactly right either way, so I just have to choose one and know it’s not exact.  It will never be exact, anyway, because I use metallic and iridescent and interference paints, and they shift with the angle of the light.

One surprise is how much better they look with flash.  I endeavor to disable the flash when I photograph 3-D pieces, pottery especially, because I don’t like the reflection and the glare.  You can see on the songbird collage piece the difference between a scanned image (which resembles a flash-less image) and the completed one that was photographed with flash.  I thought that with three spots the light would be sufficient, but it turns out that more is better.

One of my great joys in life is learning more each day about something I thought I knew well.

I’ve been trying my hand at collage lately.  I’m so impressed by the beauty of a lot of the collage artists I’ve seen, impressed enough that I want to duplicate everything I see.  This is my first time using gesso for anything other than priming a canvas.  I saw the technique in Cloth Paper Scissors, and I like the layered opacity of it.

I started with the test canvases from the mural.  There were three of them painted orange with the outline of a black crow and two maple leaves on it.  First I took my Clarion notebook from last year where I’d written out the first draft of a short story.  I enlarged it 200% on my scanner and printed it out.  I didn’t change the color; I often write with sepia ink.  I wanted to use two pieces, so I traced the outline of a crow’s wing (also from the stencils I made for the mural) and cut around that. This canvas has the negative around the wing; another one has the wing itself.  After that I layered white and green-tinted gesso over it.

Next, I cut out the bird image from some paper I bought. I really like birds, and don’t mind making all my pieces themed around them, but after I was done I decided that I really didn’t like using others’ art.

I’d pressed some garden leaves flat to use for printmaking, but I got involved in other things, and by the time I got around to using them, they were too brittle to use for printmaking.  They are still suitable for stencils though.  I painted bronze acrylic over the leaf, and then lifted it.

It looked pretty good, but it still needed something.  I decided to trace around the bird with sharpie, to make a dark contrast as a focal point, and to make the bird more my own.  I think it was the wrong choice.  I sketched the crappy little birds in the upper right hand corner to create a second, smaller focal point, but it didn’t help.

To salvage it, I cut a linoblock and printed the design over the image, to scratch the other art out.  I don’t know if I saved it. With abstracted art, it’s hard to tell if something is ‘done’ or not.

In the future, I’ll avoid using anyone’s art but my own.  Just because I don’t like to draw, doesn’t mean I can’t do it.  I’ve already started cutting linoblocks with bird images on them, and I just bought more acrylic paint.  Also, if I do use photographs or art, I’ll make sure to cut around them more carefully.  It takes a little more time, but it doesn’t have so much of the ‘pasted’ look.Â

The design was made by painting wax resist before dipping the pot in glaze.  It’s a technique I’ve used frequently at the Empty Bowls bowlmaking-sessions.

I made the horizontal lines by dripping the overglaze on the side while the pot was tipped. I’d made one like this before, but foolishly gave it away.  Of course, now I have the pots and nothing to put in them.  I think I’ll put cactus in them, or something else that does well with neglect.