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By Jackie, June 10, 2010 12:15 pm

That’s how I would describe my new computer. Yes, a new desktop computer. I’ve had a few customers requesting 8ft banners or projects with twenty high res photos and everything must have drop shadows with gradient fills. I’m happy to build whatever they want but the little laptop was starting to become not so accommodating.  So we got a sweet deal on a cute little PC that is only twelve inches high and really powerful. Weee!

Where’s the artwork, you ask? Collecting dust at the moment. I’ve been buried under several graphic design jobs with big deadlines for the past few weeks. All very good for business, but I’m rather tired out by the days end and not feeling creative. I’ve been feeling guilty about this but there just isn’t a whole lot I can do about it. But I may have a very welcome break this weekend. I’m hoping to dive into several projects and make some sort of progress.

I did work on a little fun thing Lynn asked me do last week. She is working on selling thermofax screens and she asked me (along with a few other artists) to make some designs. So here’s the only new photo I have at the moment.

My little laptop (before the new computer) set up on my work table, drawing tablet attached, a glass of wine, surrounded by neglected art tools. I have some other ideas for thermofax designs stuck in my head, the plan is to get those worked out very soon.

Oh! West Winds Studios Flickr page is up and running. I have lots more things to add to it but there is a lot there to look at now. I’ve been reading letters and articles from Irene’s papers for a few weeks now. She was quite a character and she had an amazing life. She took a life study drawing class (yes, naked people) taught by an old man who was an artist in Paris with the original Impressionist artists. Seriously! How cool is that! We still have all of her drawings from that class. They are on my list to photograph, but that list is pretty long at the moment. So be patient.

Hopefully by Monday I’ll have photos of some of  my artwork for you.

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By Jackie, May 30, 2010 5:01 pm

The weather has been lovely lately. Perfect for gardening and that’s where I’ve been for the last two weeks. I had massive amounts of weeding and plant relocation required for creating new veggie growing space. We have one lovely flowering tree that loves to seed other little flowering trees. So I moved no less than six Althea trees, sacrificed a few more, moved three Trumpet vines and butchered a lot of ground cover that was way out of control. I then put up a new fence around the new garden space to keep doggie dear from not only squishing the plants but doing his business on them. I also weeded out my raised bed from last year and put a new fence around that space. Along with tomatoes and yellow squash (or squish as the boys like to call it) I’ve been adding several honey bee attracting flowers. This seemed be an issue last year so I’ve been researching, purchasing and planting lots of pretty flowers. I am happy to report that it works! Now I am not a  fan of anything that stings, but I’ve found the honey bees to be very docile. They usually fly away when I walk up to the garden. My brother-in-law (the bee keeper) taught me that fuzzy body bees are good and shiny body buzzy things are mean. So hurray for fuzzy honey bees!

Here’s the garden spaces all planted up for the season:

Also have lots of flowers in full bloom around the house:

Since I’ve been outside so much there hasn’t been as much of creative juice for the artwork as there usually is. But I’ve managed to get a few things in here and there. Still been messing around with the deconstructed screen printing. This one below has been printing twice. I want to incorporate stitching and whatever else comes to mind, when I get the itch to work on it again.

Then I made my first Flip Journal. Thanks to Kate in my art group for showing us all how to do it in a great demo!

Here’s the pages I did for the round robin journal exchange. This is Lynn’s poetry themed journal. One poem is by William Blake and the other my son. He was really excited to see me make something out of one of his poems.

Then I finally got to reinforcing my fabric box. I was given some old welding rods by my next door neighbor. So I metal embossed them, cut then glued then stitched them into the interior of the box. The box is now looking much more box like. Then I stitched my box top hinges into place, because gluing them never really worked. I may or may not do more, it’s kind of a mood thing at this point.

Still working on photographing Irene’s artwork. The flickr page should be public soon. I’ll keep you posted.

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By Jackie, May 12, 2010 9:34 am

Seriously, no more rain please. My back yard is turning into a little jungle. I would like to start getting it into gardening shape, but these 40 degree, windy, rainy days just don’t work for me. Oh, the sinus infection that was turning into bronchitis has finally started to move on thanks to my doctor and many wonderful medications. But thanks to all the pounding, blowing rain all my pretty lilacs have been blown away, leaving me little to smell now. Oh well. Just needed to vent there. I feel better now.
Once again, the actual money making work has taken over my free time and unfortunately that isn’t the fiber stuff. I have lots of ideas and a growing pile of ufo’s. I’ll get to them, it just doesn’t give me a whole lot of exciting photos to post and blog about, sorry about that.
I had a great Mother’s Day weekend thanks to Victor, even though I was coming out of sinus infection hell. He got me a new scanner that can scan medium format negatives. Doesn’t sound that exciting but to me it is. I have several roles of 120 film from my Holga and vintage Diana cameras that I want to digitize and now I can!
West Winds Studio now has it’s own Flickr.com page and soon I will be uploading everything and we will start organizing it more. I’ve started photographing the sculptures and they are just as cool. It will be worth the wait, I promise.

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By Jackie, May 6, 2010 10:03 am

That’s what I plan to do with my artwork today. I have a couple pieces going to Perrysburg, Ohio for a show in June. Another piece is finally heading to South Dakota as a very, very belated wedding present for a cousin who is expecting her first baby next month. Yes, I included some baby essentials as gifts. I did get two pieces out already to the Plymouth Art Council’s current art exhibit “Music in Art”. My Muse Box was juried into a show called West of Center at the Northville Art House in June. I am very excited to have four pieces in the new book 1000 Artisan Textiles. It’s the first time I’ve had my work published.

So I am trying really hard to stay out of trouble. Still photographing artwork at the in-laws and working a couple graphic design jobs. Everyone in the house is sick in one form or another. I have a Spring cold from hell right now. We have all these beautiful Spring days that I should be out enjoying, but no, I’m inside snuggling up to a box of tissues instead. The artwork producing for the last week or so has slowed to a trickle, if not stopped completely.

For the time being, I think I’ll just get the rest of my work shipped out and enjoy the fact that I’ve managed to get some good stuff done so far. I’ll get back to the blogging in the next few days, but right now I need a tissue.

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By Jackie, April 17, 2010 4:44 pm

When I haven’t been photographing vintage artwork, doing laundry, making dinner, cleaning the house or chasing the kids I’ve been playing the deconstructed screen print relief rubbings on fabric. There is way to much fun to be had with this method of printing. I had an idea of using musical instruments for a design. And luckily my house is chock full of instruments to pick from. Don’t ask me to actually play any of them unless you are looking for a way to torture someone. But Victor and the kids seem to be rather gifted with musical talents so I leave the music to them. And no I didn’t use Victor’s way cool electric guitar hanging on the wall or any of his keyboards. I went for the far more inexpensive and replaceable toy guitar that was collecting dust on a shelf. But I confess I did use the 100 year old antique, hand-carved piano. The Neocolor Crayons are water soluble and the piano is now cleaner than it’s been in a long time. So it’s a win-win there.

I spent longer than I did before on refining the drawing on the screen than I had in the past. I think this really paid off. I also went back after I did this initial rubbings and used watercolor pencils to work more definition into some of the lines. The use of white was also new for me.  It put in a nice contrast with the mass of dark colors. So here you can see the screen and the print for the first print called Impromptu.

That one came out so darn well I had to try it again with a slightly different design but similar to the first one. I called this one Reverberation. The second one is a photo of it drying, hanging on it’s side.

In the midst of this creation (over several days), my friend Lynn invited me to a Golden Paint Demo. I’ve been using their products since my art school days and I love them. I learned so much and gathered oodles of information in just that little session, my head was buzzing for hours afterwords. I really wanted to try and screen print with some the Open paints. They take longer to dry, hence they could make a cool screen print. Victor happily took a quick break from work one day and ventured over to the Dick Blick store in Dearborn to pick up some of these for me:

Aren’t they pretty!? Deep, rich earthy tones just waiting for messy printing fun.

So here was my idea. Every time I do a print I will usually do two or three pieces from each screen because I can’t stand to let any leftover crayon still on the screen go to waste. Problem was that only the first print was really usable and the second and thirds were pretty washed out. Hence I pretty much just wasting fabric and matte medium. So last night I mixed up some Open paints with fabric medium, did some quick designs on the screens and overprinted the washed out second and third prints with the paint mixtures. I tried to match my crayon colors to the paint colors I was going to use, with some variations. Are you following me so far? Maybe the photos will help.

Here’s the screen ready for printing. I’m using faded prints from the Impromptu design mentioned earlier.

Here’s the paint mixed and ready to go. I didn’t mix as much as a would for first time print. This stuff ain’t that cheap, but the colors are very strong, so I didn’t want to over do it. I used a brush to add in one other color, just to see what would happen.

Here’s the first one: (yes, it’s upside down)

It came out really cool. But I realized (duh) that the surface isn’t going to be soaking up the paint like it does with a first print so I got some globby type marks when I pulled the screen up. But it kinda looked good, so I left it for the first one.

For the second one, I got a similar type glob but I decided to take a paint brush to it. That was fun too. Got a totally different effect that was just as interesting. Sorry about the glare here.

So all-in-all a pretty successful experiment. I’m hooked. Onto the next print!

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By Jackie, April 17, 2010 3:31 pm

87. That is how many paintings we are up to so far. We are done with most of the ones in the house, aside from the ones framed under glass. Those ones are a bit troublesome for me at the moment, due to the reflection of the glass. I have some ideas on how to deal with it, I just need to do it. But we still have a few in our own house to photograph as well. Then there is all the sketches. That will be a different setup. Next week we start in on the sculptures of her husband, Leonard. He is the mastermind of the Sparty sculpture up at MSU.
I also brought home a box of her stuff to try and sort through and figure out how to organize. She saved every newspaper clipping that ever mentioned her, and there were a lot over her lifetime. Then there is a little box of wondrous delight. It holds handmade artist Christmas cards that Irene and Leonard made to send out to friends and family at the holidays. Some are photos, some are prints, some hand colored, some not, some even have the original sketches. It’s a little treasure trove of vintage art.

Here’s some photos of my organizing and the Christmas card box.

And here are just a couple more of Irene’s paintings. You can see them all on the Flickr site. This is Marionettes in Rehearsal and The Prophet.

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By Jackie, April 6, 2010 8:48 am

Life continues to get in the way of doing somethings like blogging. I’ve been pretty busy with kids, family, holidays and business details. It’s all good, just kind of crazy some days. Allergies have run amuck in our household and everyone has been stuffed up. A chaos of toys, clothes, papers, and pet hair has taken over the house and I really don’t want to deal with it. I am dealing with it, but I don’t want to. I went to an art retreat with my art group a few weeks ago and I have yet to unpack. All the above mentioned things have left me with little motivation to clean and settle my art supplies back into their homes, hence no art has progressed. But I have managed to shop for some really cool items. One of them was a board like this one. Nope, not from QVC though. I knew Costco had them a few months ago and I really wanted one but we didn’t have funds for anything extra at the time. So this last week I managed to get over to the store and went straight to the shelves that housed the boards and found one, the floor model. I didn’t care. I grabbed it and pulled the tag off the shelf that had the price on it, for the cashier. Then I got over to our local bead shop on Saturday and fed the bead monster inside me. It was needed.

But with all that I have been visiting my in-laws once a week to photograph paintings. Irene’s story continues to unfold for me and I am loving it. Her story would make a great novel. Maybe someday it will. Her self portrait was pulled out of a second ‘Paintings Closet’ and I could stare at this for hours and still not see all the symbolism. Silent Shrine was in memory of the bombing of Hiroshima and it is an amazing piece of work.  The Mystic creeped me out, but so far that is the only one.

I head back this week again with both the boys in tow. The older one is off for the week. So they get to have some quality fun time with Grandpa which will probably involve some water balloons and/or water guns. I’ll be sure to pack a change of clothes for them.

At some point this week, I hope to reassemble my work area and get back to work on something creative.

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By Jackie, March 22, 2010 10:56 am

I got through the first batch of photos of Irene’s paintings this past Saturday. We hooked up a flat screen monitor to the laptop so I could actually see what I was working on, and thank you Lord for RAW data and Photoshop! These came out so darn good. Right now we are displaying them on my Flickr page (click on the West Winds Studio set) but eventually they will have their own website and flickr page. Eventually, we’ll get them in some sort of order as well. Right now, these are the ones from the middle and bottom shelves of the ‘paintings closet’.

Here’s “Luna Moths” and “Devil’s Paintbrush”,

We looked briefly through a few boxes of her things on Thursday and there is such a treasure trove of amazing stuff. I had to put it away or I wouldn’t have gotten any actual photos taken.

I’ll have more of my own stuff in the days to come. Deadlines are next week, so my goal is to get stuff done on time.

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By Jackie, March 15, 2010 1:52 pm

Yesterday we began the task of photographing Nana’s (Victor’s Grandmother) paintings. I knew there were a lot of paintings. I heard stories of ‘the closet of paintings’ yet in the ten plus years I’ve been around the family, I had never seen this closet. Then there are more paintings on the office shelves and in almost every room of the house, the walls are filled her paintings. They have never been cataloged. But when I finally got going on this and started to see the amount of paintings we had to go through I realized that whatever I got done this first day was just a drop in a very big bucket. With that being said I love this project. I love seeing all these paintings that span most of her life and all the different subjects she explored. I find it all fascinating. The goal is to eventually have some shows displaying her work, but we have a ways to go before we can talk about that.

So I worked all afternoon and got nine done. Yup, 9. I knew there would be some trial and error, learning curves and all that, so I kept my expectations low. The last one, I took it totally crooked and didn’t even notice until I had on the computer. Next session I’ll bring a pot of coffee.

The other thing on my mind of late has been setting up an Etsy shop. The graphic design business did well last year but not so much this year. I know this year is still getting going but getting clients to pay has become a giant issue. These are good clients that I have worked with for several years and have just hit hard times. So I can’t really be mad, just very frustrated. It has made it impossible for me to keep up with some of my stuff. I can’t continue to supplement my fiber art (and other hobbies)  needs from our regular income. Usually the graphic design would keep that afloat. So I need to at least try to sell some of my stuff. I don’t know if it will work, but I have to try. So I’ve been reading lots on the Etsy community, learning all I can. With my experience in marketing, I want to have some things thought out -packaging, labels, cards, logos and so on. But I have to careful not to get hung up on it all, because that is something I would do. Sometimes I’m just a little too cautious. I’m working on that.

I pulled out some items this weekend to add to my box. These were pieces of craft metal that I embossed with use of a stamp and clay tools. I then painted them with some glass paint, added the embossing powder and got the heat gun out.

Now I need to go finish my journal page. The due date is quickly approaching and I keep getting distracted with things like laundry and dinner for the family. Details, details.

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By Jackie, March 11, 2010 11:04 am

I would prefer to post my projects when they are done but that won’t be for probably another two weeks and that would not help my goal of posting more on the blog. So in the spirit of all that I’m working on three projects, two of which I actually have photos of.

First is the art journal exchange I’m doing with my art group. Each person picks their own theme for their journal and each person will make  page spread for that theme. This particular journal is about books. I had to think about this for a little while. Came up with retro cover art. Being a graphic artist and having designed a few covers, I love a good design. So with a little Adobe help I put together this and did an image transfer:

It has already been cut down to page size since I took this as well as had some interfacing stuck to the back. I’ve started markering the pages and we’ll see what else soon enough.

Then there is the fabric box challenge also with my art group. First time around with a fabric box project. I tried to keep it simple and use what I have in the stash. I knew I was going to do a lot of hand stitching so I had to get the foundation built. Here’s the beginning assembly.

All hand dyed fabrics from last summer. Stamp pad and Shiva stenciling. I’m getting to know my sewing machine a little better. Thank you Mary.

And here’s the box looking like a box. I know I should have waited sew the sides together but I was quickly getting board with it’s flat shape and needed to see it in box form. It needs more work and a lid (challenge requirement). But it looks like a box and that helps.

This weekend is the first photo shoot of the cataloging project. I got the photo umbrellas yesterday. Little nervous about getting it all done correctly but I’ve been reading up on my camera operation. The darn thing even tells me when my manual settings are going to take a bad photo and how to fix it. Yup, love my camera.