Florence Turnour's Blog

We have a 3D Printer. It's a Makerbot 2, if that means anything to anyone. Here's a vine I took of my cutter and the 3D Printer side by side working away. On Sunday, I drew some fish with a pen on paper. I scanned them into Photoshop, and edited them a bit. Here's one. I changed it into a vector graphic in Illustrator. Then it looked like this. Next I exported it into a 3D drawing program called Sketchup, which I got for free on the internet. I thickened the fish into a 3D model. I exported it to the appropriate format for 3-D printing and sent it to the printer.  It took about 2 hours to print, and cost me $0.87 in plastic. Voila! It's for block printing. I attached a knob to the back with velcro so that it would be easier to pick up without getting paint on my fingers.  Then I used a brayer to roll on block printing ink for fabric and printed my fish on a piece of cotton. How much fun is that? I'm rather excited. I'm going to make a cat and...

In the workshop  Creative Jumpstart  that I am doing, yesterday's lesson involved acrylic spray paint.    Michelle Ward  demonstrated spray painting through stencils using layers and masks.  I tried it with spray ink, which was fun, too, but it was much more interesting to work with the opaque spray paints.  I wanted to do it outside, so I had to wait for a break in the rain. It came this afternoon, and I took over the garage floor. I spent some of the rainy days cutting new pattern stencils on my Sihlouette Cutter. I draw them in Adobe Illustrator and then use a plugin to cut them. The pattern in the images above is my favorite.  I also painted my hands, just a bit.   About the colors, Michaels had an odd selection of their paints on sale. I bought 7 colors, but they were not the ones I'd have chosen if I had not been trying to be frugal. For example, here's a series in lemon and tomato. Here's a close-up of th...

In the workshop Creative Jumpstart that I am doing, yesterday's lesson involved acrylic spray paint, which is (no I'm not kidding) an art supply that I didn't own (yes, I got some). The video by Michelle Ward made it look like so much fun, I thought a little spray paint could be fun to own.  It was actually on sale at Michaels; I think they are downsizing since only the weird colors were on sale. I got a few but I haven't used them yet, since, in an odd turn of events, it is raining making my well ventilated (back yard) work area soggy. In the meantime, I decided to try the activity with Dylusions sprays.  I cut fish stencils out of printer paper and then sprayed them with a waterproof sealant (since I was pretty sure I'd be drowning them in ink).  Some of my prints worked well, without much leakage under the stencil, but I like the bright colors you get by soaking the paper so I chose this one, which was not an excellent print. After writing on it with Permap...

I made some new stencils to Gelli Print though. On this one, I drew on the print with black and white pen. I like the tree stencil, but I'm enjoying using the cut-out portion of it as a mask more. And last, here are some birds. I know many people use their Gelli Plate prints for collage, so this isn't revolutionary, but after printing with my stencils for a while, I notice that the masks look like they'd make great collage elements. Does anyone cut and then print on the little bits? Or does everyone print and then cut? I make my stencils from overhead projector slides. These are the masks Thanks for looking!

Inspired by a little trading rack at Studio 626 , in Corvallis, Oregon, I made some ATC's to trade. I didn't take a photo of the ones I traded there, but I was on a roll so I made some more. The background is a Gelli Plate print on multimedia paper, and drawings are done in ink, and colored with Prismacolor colored pencil. Thanks for looking! Mean Fish and Barn Mean Fish and Barn (front) Mean Fish and Barn (back) Lip Fish and Orchid Lip Fish and Orchid (front) Lip Fish and Orchid (back)

We recently went to Oregon to visit my parents, and attended the DaVinci Days festival. For $5 you could get a square of sidewalk leading up to the show and a box of chalk pastels to do with what you liked. We got two. Stuart (age 5) wanted to do a landscape and Benjamin (age 7) wanted an underwater scene. So be it. My mother and I joined right in. It was a little hard to photograph, especially since I was sort of trying not to touch my phone while taking the picture, since I was so covered with chalk. Here are some close-ups.  I love Stuart's trees and dolphin, above, and Benjamin's eel, jellyfish and octopus below. The four of us must have colored for a couple of hours straight and used nearly all the chalk in both boxes. It was a great time. Maybe we'll host such a thing around here some day. There were about two blocks of sidewalk artwork in this project. 

I'm visiting my mother in Oregon, and thinking about dying some fish fabric for her to use in a quilt. Do you like anchovies?