New Things

I've been working on a variety of small things this week.  Above are two little gift books, 3-1/2 x 5-1/2 inches each.  The covers are watercolor paper painted with acrylics and spray inks.

I sent in my first entries to Mail Me Some Art, an ongoing mail art exchange run by Karen Isaacson in MA.  These three are for the upcoming Orange exchange.  Incoming entries are posted on the MMSA blog as they're received, so there's always new stuff to look at there.  Karen is one of several artists I've met online recently who are running in the same class and blog circles as I am.  I'm loving making new connections through mixed media art.

Tomorrow I'm going to begin Tammy Garcia's 2013 Index Card a Day challenge, where for the months of June and July, every day, I'll create art on an index card.  Actually, I'm using some cool recycled cardstock that I've had for eons (since 1992), which I've hand cut down to 4 x 5-1/2 inches.  The max size for the challenge is 4 x 6.

As planned, I worked on several of my recent Gelli prints this week, but nothing to show.  I added just one element to two prints, and I removed paint from four of them.  In Carla Sonheim's class she shows how to remove fresh paint from watercolor paper by running the print under water in the sink and rubbing paint off with your hand.  I discovered for myself this week that with a bit of elbow grease you can also get well-dried paint off a print, using a sponge scrubber, wet/dry sand paper and/or even a copper pot scrubber.  The result is a more distressed look.  The four prints that I scrubbed in this way had had too much paint on in their final layer and I wanted to remove some of it to give them a more ethereal look.  I already know that I rarely like the first print off from the plate when I'm printing (vastly preferring ghost prints), so in the future I'll know I can use the kitchen sink method to remove some of that initial layer before adding more layers of paint to the print.

Despite all the things I've been working on lately, it still feels to me like I'm dragging my butt in the studio much of the time.  I'm looking at the ICAD challenge as a way to use a lot of techniques in a short period of time on a small, seemingly insignificant level, to jumpstart my creative energy.