Florence Turnour's Blog

I got a Glowforge for my birthday. It's got so much potential I don't even know what to do first.  So, rather than debate about it, I decided to make the first thing that came into my head, which oddly enough was a vegetable advent calendar for my mom. Here are the veggies. Up they go! Here's the backboard, with and without vegetables. This book binding is called Secret Belgian Binding (without the pages). You can see step-by-step binding instructions  here , but I learned it from Nathalie Kalbach's Time Travelers mixed media online class.  First, I drew the vegetables and the gardening tools that you see on the backboard, drawing some on paper and some on my iPad (using Procreate). Next, I uploaded them to the computer, and used Adobe Illustrator to create the cut line around the edge. Then, I put the Glowforge to work. First I told it to engrave the drawings. Then I told it to cut them out. After quite a bit of trial and error involving no fewer than four little w...

My Tree Overfloweth - Florence Turnour 2020 This project started with a palette of collage paper.  I chose a palette of colors, then I painted thin lightly waxed Sandwich Paper (deli paper) using these colors, using a gel plate and some of the stencils I designed. I created a large tree stencil, painted a black rectangle on watercolor paper, and sponged the tree onto the background. Then I started designing animals. I drew the animals in pencil, and used the photocopier to resize them until they fit nicely on the tree. I cut the drawings out, and traced the shapes onto my collage paper. For the small details like eyes and ears, I assembled the shapes before cutting them out. Here they are. I worked on this one type of animal at a time over months, between working on other things, and not having time to do any artwork. I posted the individual animals on Instagram as I went. I made a few animals that didn't go on the final tree. These rhinoceroses were too busy, and ended up in a s...

 I think this is my favorite of this series of landscapes, which I made at the end of 2019. Most of my projects begin with a palette.  I like the iPhone app iPalette, that lets you choose colors out of a photograph. This one started with a photograph I took at the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona del Mar. I used a gel plate to (somewhat) quickly create a set of papers with about 3 or four sheets of each colors. This paper is Southworth 32 lb cotton resume paper, which I got at an office supply store. I decided to texture this paper using texture plates made from found objects.  I applied the textures to the colored paper, using the same set of colors, to make a too large collection of collage papers. I used these for a set of landscapes.  I figured out that even though the colors of the buildings contrast with the hills, the size of the buildings and trees were too close to the size of the texture marks on the hills. I tried to correct this in the last two of t...