What I Learned This Week

• Sometimes a week is clearly defined by one, simple overriding principle: "What was I thinking??!?"
• Attempting two shadow puppet, ad-libbed productions of The Wizard of Oz in three weeks' time definitely rates several "What was I thinking??!?" moments...maybe a lifetime's worth...
• Attempting said production with 45 middle school monkeys with rather sketchy memories of the Judy Garland classic is even crazier...
• "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is hilarious when sung by a middle school boy who doesn't know the lyrics...
• When allowing students to improvise, be prepared say "Keep it appropriate" about a billion times.
• Ghetto scarecrows, zombie tin men and cross-dressing lions may show up during improvisation...stay calm...  
• Post-teaching beverages should have an alcoholic content of some kind...sigh!

Happy Is As Happy Does

It is day 5 of Art Every Day Month and I'm cruisin' right along.  In between four loads of laundry and a kitchen full of dirty dishes, I am doing some journaling on Zetti pages that I've completed otherwise.  These pages have been so much fun to do but I have to keep reminding myself not to over-contemplate things and just clip, glue, go!  The borders seem to come together in a jiffy but constructing the characters is a much more tedious process.  So much material to choose from...so many options...so much digging around in the stash for the perfect image.  I guess that the more I do it, the faster I'll get but for now it seems to take forever for a character to form. 

According to the weatherman, there's a big rainstorm is rolling in off the Pacific and I hope that's the case as I adore the sound of rain.  I sleep better, I work better, I feel better when a little bit of precipitation falls down around me and I can stay inside with some coffee, a good movie, and uninterrupted art time.  Sigh!  That sounds absolutely delicious!

Happiness is a Warm Journal

Wow!  Welcome to Wednesday!  The week is almost halfway over and not a peep from me since last Friday!  Those of you who care may ask yourselves "Now what has that girl gone and gotten herself into?"  "What is shakin' over at Lost Coast Post?"  Well, this year's Art Every Day Month started out with a bang on Sunday, November 1 and thanks to Miz Teesha Moore, Hand and Soul Studios has been rockin' and rollin' ever since.  As you may know (the art journaling world seems sort of abuzz about it), Teesha has posted a series of videos over at her blog and on YouTube showing how she journals step-by-step.  FOR FREE!  Talk about a gift!  As a long time fan, I am thrilled to pieces and am completely enthralled with journaling all over again!  Do these pages I've been creating follow and mimic Teesha's stuff?  Yup.  Am I worried about not having my own voice or look?  Nope.  Do I care?  Nope.  Not one teeny tiny bit.  'Cause I'm having so much fun!  I figure Teesha isn't worried all that much about it either.  I have about 12 journals in varying stages of completition (besides the one above) and those journals are very much "me."  Hell, I think that even my "a la Teesha" pages are "me" as my eyes, brain and hands assembled them.  My heart gets poured out onto the pages.  I'm not out to teach a class in the techniques I pick up from Teesha nor do I plan to sell my work.  I plan to play my brains out.  I want to slip into some sort of collage trance with bits of paper softly drifting down down around me, remnants of a paper clipping blizzard.  I plan to lose all my pens a thousand times in the disaster I now call my studio table.  I intend to find them again and doodle, doodle, doodle until my fingers stiffen around the barrels like claws.  Then I'll take my paint-splashed self and collaspe, exhausted, wrapped in the sheer bliss that follows a fabulously frantic day of art-making.  And then I plan on doing it all again tomorrow...   

What I Learned This Week

• Handing sharp instruments to squirrely students does not have to spell "B-L-O-O-D-S-H-E-D" and in fact, can result in cleverness and creativity galore.
• Handing sharp instruments to said squirrels DOES mean much worry and sweating and stern guidance.
• While classroom chaos does not occur in carving class, it DOES erupt during a lesson on paper folding...go figure!
• Perhaps having 45 students fold and race paper airplanes was not the best idea if the goal was a soft, reserved, dignified lesson plan on origami.
• It was really fun watching the middle school monkeys and their creativity take flight, no matter how chaotic the air space.
• Spending a lot of time working small can result in a nearly wild urge to work HUGE! 
• Large, prestretched canvases cost as much as dinner at a nice restaurant.  Box mac & cheese it is for me!

Dem Bones

Well, we had studied design elements and principles to death so it was finally time to give my high school squirrels some sharp objects and hope that no blood letting (unintentional or otherwise) ensued.  I am very happy to report that my first day of stamp carving with the students went well (and bloodless).  There were constant reminders of "Don't put your fingers in the carving path!" (she shrieked) and the occasional "Don't use the gouge as a pointer!" but all in all, they did just fine.  We are studying Mexican printmaker and social commentator Jose Posada in conjunction with our stamp carving, using Posada's famous calavera (Spanish for "skull")illustrations as inspiration for our own carvings of playful skulls and skeletons.  Yesterday, students started out by carving something small and simple so they could get a feel for the tools and material.  Over the next three or four class sessions, we will advance to carving a full skeleton and then learn how to ink the carvings and pull prints.  The kids have done some deliciously wicked skeleton sketches and I can't wait to see them translated into carvings.  There are skeletons dancing and skeletons skating, royal skeletons and warrior skeletons.  Drawing even a simplified skeleton with clothes and accessories is no small feat and the squirrels have done a fabulous job.  I'm off to carve my own skeleton to use as a demo piece.  Hope everyone has a terrific Tuesday!

Art in the (Itty Bitty) Round

My weekend was soft and quiet, filled with tiny art-making and here and there, some vigorous house cleaning.  These are some "rinchies" (inchies in circle format) that I made for a swap of such itty bitty things.  There is something oddly meditative about creating art on such a small canvas.  When I sit down to work on miniatures, the world sort of melts away as I focus on finding and clipping just the right size images, gluing down the practically microscopic pieces, figuring out my theme, adding the words, and finally edging the circles with a little bit of Staz-On ink.  You may ask:  What in the world do you do with such little things?  Inchies, rinchies, and other art in a mini format (typically under two or three inches in any one direction) are perfect for use in mixed media jewelry projects, greeting cards, small artists' books, and gift tags among other things.  I like to use these as mini illustrations in my journals where writing is the primary focus as opposed to those journals where ideas are mainly communicated through images and journaling is secondary.  I am finding that the process of creating minis, the intense concentration that develops as I hunch over my creations, is the most important and refreshing result of a tiny art session.   

What I Learned This Week

Welcome to a new Friday feature here at Lost Coast Post...

"What I Learned This Week:"

• Tiny, tiny art can fill the need to create something without feeling compelled to create a major masterpiece...
• To pick up all those bitsy clippings off the table with a fused hand, put a little bit of poster putty on the end of a paintbrush and viola!  Works splendid for found word poetry work as well...
• My kitty princess, Miss Tuscany Jane, likes to play tag but my ankles are getting the short end of the deal in this game...
• Aforementioned royalty is becoming a bit of a bed hog...
• Blackberry honey and peanut butter sandwiches make the best breakfast in the world...
• Monkeys will climb down off the bookshelves and light fixtures if the ole cartooning lesson plan is dangled in front of them...
• Monkeys love, love, love to model funny poses for each other during said cartooning class...
• I love monkeys!

Two Twinchies and a Mini Mona

After making those Paris-themed inchies for a swap, I realized how much I've missed working small...really small...and so after a cup of coffee and toast at 4:30am, I managed an inchie of dear, sweet-faced Mona, and just to spice things up, two butterfly "twinchies" (2-inch square art)....all before my son crawled out of bed at 5:30.  If I didn't have an intervening physical therapy appointment, I think I'd play straight through to evening.  I've decided that I'm going to make a bunch of these little pieces of art and then color-copy them at Staples to make my own collage sheet.  Won't that be fun?  I'd also forgotten how much I love to make up my own collage sheets and so I'm on a mission to create a Hand & Soul Studios image collection.  Anahata Katkin had these themed collage image books some while back (she discontinued them last year or the year before that) and while I coveted them, I never made the investment because I didn't want to use so much of someone else's stuff in my own work.  But if I make my own???  Too cool! I know exactly what types of images and symbols I like to use over and over again in my work and I'll be able to tailor my collage sheets directly to what I'm always looking for in collage material.  And going through the process of making art for collage sheets will ensure I have plenty of little projects to do when AEDM starts up in November.  Wheee!  Off to hunch over my work table some more!

Parisians & AEDM

Sometimes, all I have time for is a tiny bit of art, what with all the dishes, laundry, kitty snuggling, parenting, teaching of monkeys, and necessary self-care so I don't crash and burn.  And I do mean tiny art:  here's 6 Paris-themed inchies (one-inch square art) I managed to create this morning in between getting the boy out the door for school and lunchtime.  I used to do inchies all the time before my hand surgery and now, with my wrist fused, it can be quite a challenge to pick such little things up off the table.  But, as always, I managed and I love the results.  I have a feeling that when Art Every Day Month starts up in a mere ten days, I'll be playing around a lot more with inchies.  They are a great way to get in some art time without a huge commitment.  And on that note...if you are joining me for AEDM in November, remember that you do NOT have to start and finish a piece every single day.  The guideline is just that you work on something artsy each day in the month.  As the coordinator of AEDM, Leah Piken Kolidas states, this is a "low-pressure challenge."  Art is how you define it and could range from painting to knitting to a home-cooked meal to singing in the shower.  If you miss a day, just start again the next.  Besides making a little art every day, I'm planning on using November to live loudly and proudly as an artist, something that is really hard for me.  That'll mean wearing handmade jewelry, brightening up the wardrobe, using the purses and bags that I've made, artist dates...just coming out of the studio, so to speak.  What will committing to art every day inspire you to do?

Pretty in Pastel

More simple playing around...I'm still dealing with fibromyalgia fatigue so I'm not as productive as I'd like but still managing to create a little something every day and that's a plus.  Every so often, I get the urge to make pink and girly and romantic things and so this postcard piece arose out of that sort of compulsion.  It used to be that all I did was pink and pretty but now my palette is dominated by hot pinks, lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange.  It is good to take a break from all that screaming color every now and again and take a breath.