Florence Turnour's Blog

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 .

I signed up for an online workshop called Creative Jumpstart  in which 25 artists post technique videos inspired by various artwork. Check out the link to see the class; I recommend it (and though the name had me concerned, it is not a self-help through art thing). I don't think I'll manage to do a project each day, but at 11pm last night I decided what the heck and dove into the first one. In this project by Rae Missigman , we layered color and white paint to make a background, and dropped acrylic ink into white paint to get texture and color. I enjoyed using the acrylic ink this way.  I'm mentally shopping for more colors as we speak! I used one of my foam stamps  in the background, stamping with white over a colored background. I'm not sure how the cat feels about having a fishy background. He looks a bit nonplus. Thanks for looking!

I want to make some foam stamps to use on my Gelli Plate, for texture. The rubber stamps are not fabulous for the acrylic paint (it's too thick maybe?), but the foam works well. Cutting it is a bugger, though. So I googled "tool for cutting fun foam" and found a lot of information about cutting styrofoam and that flower arranging squishy foam. The tool was a heat wand like a wood burning tool. The wood burning tool we have actually came with a knife blade for cutting foam core boards. So I gave it a try on 1/4 inch thick fun foam. It worked well, but was a bit on the stinky side. I have a well ventilated spot with a big window and an exhaust fan in the ceiling, but I think I'd rather be doing this in high wind. I'm going to get a big fan for my next go at it.  The tool sort of squish/melts the foam, so it is not precise. I tried each of the tips I have, and didn't love any of them. What I think I want is a short knobby tip like an embossing tool. I th...

I did a web search for Ukranian Folk Art , and had great fun sketching from what I found there. Inspired by my sketches, and this post from Julie Fei-Fan Balzer , I carved some rubber stamps.  Then I went to town! Stamping is so satisfying. And then I put my elbow into the ink pad. Time for bed! Thanks for looking.

Carla Sonheim (author of Drawing Lab for the Mixed Media Artist -- support the arts; buy from the author  http://www.carlasonheim.com/books/) published a short video tutorial called Crazy Birds. On a whim, in the middle of the night, I gave the exercise a try. Here is what I made. Here is the Crazy Bird Tutorial:  http://carlasonheim.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/crazy-birds-tutorial/ I liked the bird very much, so I made him into a stamp, following the guidelines in the book Making an Impression, by Geninne Zlatkis (http://blogdelanine.blogspot.com/). In this impression, I colored the image with my colored pencils.  I've never thought about coloring on my stamps with large solid areas before, but I am delighted with the gradient and texture. Carving rubber stamps is going to take some practice, but I'm so impressed (ha ha, or should I say lol?) with Geninne's work, that I'm sure I will keep at it.