Florence Turnour's Blog

I love making stencils, but stencil designs are limited in that they have to be one piece. For example you cannot have a stencil top print this shape because the inside white bits in the leaves would fall out. The white part, which is the stencil, is not one piece.  Stamps do not have this issue, but if you are cutting them out of foam, and gluing them down to make a stamp, lining up all the insides of the leaves, for example, would be tricky. Another option is to use a screen. Here is my first one. You can see the screen, taped to a cardboard frame in the top of the image, and some patterned paper I made with it at the bottom. I had the best results screen printing onto a Gelli plate, and printed from there onto paper. The screen suctioned itself onto the Gelli Plate, so there was very little leakage, and I could use the brayer to spread the paint, as there was no longer a need to push hard. I loved how it worked, so I made some more. These I mounted in mat boards, whi...

I took Julie Balzer's Make Your Own Junque Journal on-line class and made two journals. I loved this project.  It's so great to use up a bit of my huge stack of printed papers, and to find a home for some fairly finished artwork that I did as part of various on-line classes. For sure this is just the beginning of a new adventure in book binding for me. In the class, they encourage us to video a "Flip-through" of our journals to other participants. I made this little video showing off both books. Here are the on-line classes and teachers I mentioned in my video, in case you are interested in checking them out. Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's Make Your Own Junque Journal on-line class Carla Sonheim's Gelli Plate Plus Carla Sonheim's Cats Creative Jumpstart 2016  workshops from Birgit Koopsen Michelle Ward Julie Fei-Fan Balzer Dawn Woleslagle's Watercolor for Card Makers, Intermediate Techniques Thanks for looking!

Last week, in my continuing effort to squeeze as much art as possible in before school starts, I attended a two-day workshop with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer  at Studio CRESCENDOh  in Santa Ana.  In it I started two large collage paintings, one of which I finished today. Look how big it is! Goat! by Florence Turnour For this canvas, Julie directed us to draw a large half-face, but I decided I'd rather have a half goat face.  She reassured us that almost anything with a mouth and eyes will be recognizable as a face, but it occurred to me about a quarter of the way in that this was not necessarily true for goats.  I used a snapshot from my phone, and worried over the minimal drawing on my canvas for a while before diving in.  (I was finally spurred forward when Julie's mother, Eileen, passed by my table and said, "Oh, a goat." Sometimes even goats need validation.) I was super excited to learn how to glue.  Collage has always been one of my favorite med...

It's day 2 in  Creative Jumpstart , the  the online workshop I'm taking. Here's my project. The lesson by  Julie Fei-Fan Balzer  was to work with watercolor sticks, trying them dry on dry, dry on wet and wet on dry.  In this assignment we chose a painting and copied it using the water color sticks.   I chose the painting by Henri Matisse called Lorette with a Turban and a Yellow Jacket (d'ya think?). From: The National Gallery of Art One of the things I really love about Matisse's work is his use of pattern in the fabric and wall paper. The painting of Lorette did not have any such patterns however, so I decided to add my own. I made the background wall paper using one of my foam stamps and Distress ink. I like how the stamped image brought out the texture of the cold-press paper. Thanks, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, that was fun .