12 posts tagged “art”

To bring everyone up to speed... my brother-in-law Dave had a stroke... mid 50's, no warning, lives an extremely healthy life and had no major health issues that he knew of. He threw a clot, causing a major stroke. He is paralyzed on his right side, and cannot speak. He works for Adobe Software so his employment has always been very mental, reclaiming everything that he can is vital, the window for doing so is limited. Of course his frustration and depression levels are through the roof. His therapist said his extensive therapy would include PT, speech therapy, plus intense visual, sensory and tactile stimulation. He has a rough road ahead of him. I immediately thought of art, and the healing potential of it. I also thought of fiber and fabric, because you cannot get more tactile or stimulating that that in my book. I have to say here that Dave is the most loving, kind, sweet man you would ever meet, he has always done for others who needed help and now I want to help him all that I can, but I have limits on what I can accomplish alone.

Knowing my limits means I have also asked not only close friends, but also total strangers in yahoo groups I am a member of, and any artists who stumble onto my blog to please send any small art pieces they have laying around doing nothing to be used in his therapy and to help cheer him up (he loves textiles and fiber and art made from them, he is a collector of ATCs, he adores funky multimedia art, collages and assemblages). Things like this can provide great visual and tactile stimulation. We want to stimulate his brain so he can reclaim as much of his pre-stroke life as we can. It does not have to be a huge effort for anyone to do something special but special is nice if you want to take it to the next level. I want to surround him with color, texture and hope. Art heals, and I know if you get artists working together we can prove that it does.

So if you do miniature paintings, small water color pieces, fiber art cards, ATCs, make funky pocket shrines, small whimsical assemblages or art dolls, or anything that can used in his therapy, things he can keep in a small rehab room, I want your help... I am asking you to add to the effort....and I am asking you to ask your friends to help out too. Please share this call for art with everyone you know, no matter where they live. For a little bit of effort, and very little postage we can all help Dave... and encourage him at the same time.

Most of us never know if the world notices we are here or that we struggle. I want Dave to know lots of people are pulling for him to recover by sending small pieces of artistic stimulation to help encourage his recovery efforts. Those who send art, please be sure your return address is on it, Dave may not be able to thank you himself for awhile, but if he can't someone will send you a thank you and acknowledgment so you know your art contribution got to him okay.

My personal thanks in advance to all of you who decide you are willing to take time out for a total stranger, who care enough to send him art stimulation and well wishes for a speedy recovery.

Dave's mailing info for at least the next 2 months is:
David Valiulis
Room 933
c/o Palomar Medical Center
555 East Valley Parkway
Escondido, CA 92025

Can you even imagine what it would be like to wake one day unable to do what you have always done, without warning.... and unable to say what you want to say? I can't...

Please help me fill Dave's room with art, encouragement and hope! (And spread the word).... I want to make his therapist speechless....

EDIT:
Virginia Spiegel just emailed me and she is very kindly asking those on her Fiber Art For Cure list (http://www.virginiaspiegel.com/NewFiles/ACS/FAQ.html ) to help out. Virginia has raised a ton of money for cancer research with the help of fiber artists worldwide donating their work to her auctions and art sales. Her Collage Mania II sale (http://www.virginiaspiegel.com/CollageManiaDetails.html ) is the one I am donating my sun face collages to. So a HUGE thank you to Virginia....and if you love collages you want to watch her sale, every piece is a fine art bargain at only $40.

Since Christmas I have turned out 5 art purses, they have been packed up for their new homes, but I do have pics on my camera and as soon as I figure out how to get them off there I will post them.

I am also painting a small cigar box style purse my daughter bought for me to paint along with a bunch of other stuff, she seems to feel I need to keep busy. Not sure if I am going to line the inside with fabric or just paint it, but the purse in general is coming along nicely. It will be going up for sale on my website as one of the first listings featured when the site goes back up on the new host in a week or so. Also going up it the memo board shown next to it below, an exact duplicate of the one I made for my own kitchen that everyone tries to talk me out of. The site is going to be a mix of things both painted and textile, plus some of the wearable art clothes I design and make. Neither of these cell phone pics is great, but they give you the general idea.

The memo board is done, the sunface purse is in progress, still lots of detail work and outlining to do yet on it.

In other news, I stumbled upon www.stumbleupon.com and I love this web search/ bookmarking site. It's free and I have found a ton of stuff I might have missed otherwise, the web is getting too big to search it well all by yourself  anymore. Some of my best recent finds are these:
A great tutorial on building your own EarthBox for gardening in.

A pictorial blog of links to recipes that made me gain 50 pounds just looking at it

A great "How to draw" site with tons of tutorials, lots of illustrations & it's free.

Susan Lomuto's blog Polymer Clay Notes... which happens to be about a whole lot more than Polymer clay.... in fact it is one of the best art blogs I have found in quite awhile.

Canadian Textile sculpture artist Miles Lowry who casts the human form in cotton and paints it.... his work is absolutely amazing!

Seattle bleach artist Deborah Gwinn

Paper Mosaic Fusion artist S.A. Schimmel

The absolutely amazing art of Tina Blondell

That's it for now, back to painting the purse for me....

With joy,The art piece I bought from Julia Sisi, came... and it is gorgeous! It left me breathless, truly. In case you forgot what it looked like.... here it is

  
The framing at 28"x55" is gonna be beyond spendy, I may need to get creative about it... but this is one piece of art that will be cherished by me for a very long time to come. Pics simply do not do it justice, we drew a crowd at the frame shop when I was getting an estimate on the framing.... (the framing quote left me rather speechless AND breathless....gasp)! The quote at Michael's Craft store was not much better even at 50% off....  it was over $200, anyone have any ideas?

Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase Clay Short

Follow the link, it is only up until Tuesday... it's a VERY cool clay video by Joan C. Gratz
This beautiful Academy Award winning film is a beautiful, painstaking crafted series of animated clay paintings that evolve from one to another, giving the viewer an emotionally vivid tour through the history of art.

This is my latest find on ebay, by my favorite outsider art artist Jessica Rudy.Her stuff is simply amazing, and she sings too. I cannot explain why I like her paintings, I just do. This one mixed collage and painting, the more you look at it, the more you see in it. This is the second piece I have bought from her.

I am also on a ACEO collecting kick, and have gotten some great cards by talented people on ebay. I am even working on doing some of my own...

What do YOU collect?

I just love ArtRage, the trial version is limited, but not greatly, and it does not expire...but as I said  with Photofilter, I suggest that this shareware is worth the $19.95 they want for the full version and then some...so if you download it, like it and plan to use it, please pay up when you can, it's the only way the developers have motivation to develop more great affordable programs. The best feature  is the trace option. You can load in any picture and trace over it, then remove the original...so for art quilters this feature takes the struggle out of converting a photo to a sketch when making an art quilt, it would also be useful for people trying to learn to draw, while learning to contour and make features. The following is my latest dabble with ArtRage. Original photo of my oldest daughter is on the left, my ArtRage painting is on the right... I am teaching myself to blend and shade with it. I should mention, what I do with it HAS been a bit of a struggle, I use this program with a mouse ( I do not have a special drawing pad or pencil). It's tricky, in fact at times it is downright frustrating but practice helps, so does a stiff drink and the undo feature ;)  Ramie this one is for you.... it took me almost a month of working at it very part time, I finished it tonight. The shading is a tad off, and the mouth is under defined but I am pretty pleased with it anyway

The end of January I posted  a tutorial  to the Naughty Quilter's Club Group on how to make an art quilt portrait pattern from a picture. Lat night I converted the Catsitter picture into a pattern, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I can hardly wait to start it, I am using it as my motivation for finishing up the house cleaning project... I am allowing myself no  new projects or quilt starts till the cleaning is done.

It's the best picture I have ever taken of Keegan, it just has to become an art quilt sooner or later....

If you work with pieces to create a whole, please join...

I dabble, and I like free stuff I can use. I posted quite awhile ago about how much I love Photofilter, a free download photo edit program...  much easier to use than good old bloated Adobe Photoshop, and it does what I need it to do for free  Download it for free here). (If you like the program, and I believe you will... I do encourage users to pay the $35 to upgrade to the pro version and show the guys who made this program some financial support while getting some extra features because it is the right thing to do if you want to help motivate them to continue to turn out low cost software).

Anyway, with the free version, open your photo (one of a family member, the love of your life, your dog, or your cat), because everything starts with an original. Here is the pic I used of my grandson Keegan:

Isn't he cute? He loves being the star of this tutorial.

Okay so what you do next has variables in it, you are going to Posterize the photo, using the "posterize" option under the adjustments tab. When you hit this, you are going to decide the percentage of adjustment. This is truly a matter of personal choice, I tend to use between 35-55%. Be sure the image is big enough using the "+" zoom, that you can see what you have going on as far as details go. If you change your mind go under edit and hit "undo", and start over.

Below are two samples, the one on the left is at 39%, the one on the right is at 50%,  the degrees of changes this difference makes in the number of details in the picture you are using and it  will vary from pic to pic, I could have used either of these and been happy with the resulting pattern pieces.

I have left the pics used here large enough for you to see the differences when you click on them for the full size version, but made them small enough to load fairly fast on a dialup, I hope.

So , next you want to go into the filter tab and under "artistic" you want to hit "comics strip", this takes your picture to the next level, and makes it easier to trace the pieces for each section when you place the pic under a piece of tracing paper, by defining the edges of each color more clearly. The pic on the left is the one at 39% the one on the right is the 50% pic, as in the last illustration:

 

If you cannot see the sections clearly, you can either outline the color sections by hand or go into the filters, under the artistic tab again, and hit ink outlines. You may not use all the lines this produces, but it beats doing them by hand...so edit the ones you do use as you go, clearly, some sections will need to be simplfied on some photos, some of the lines will need to be smoothed out for use in a pattern.. I work at about 5'x7" and the scan the final outlines and blow the final version up to make the pattern, this makes  the outlining much easier.

Decide on the size of the finished art quilt. I usually work 16x20 or so, but you can make yours big enough to cover a king sized bed if you want to. To flex your picture size, and for a hundred other pic enlarging projects,  I suggest getting a software program I found on ebay called "Big Picture" , It runs under $10, and is wonderful for enlarging pictures fast and simple. You need 3 tissue paper copies of your final pattern, one will be cut up, you need a back up in case you screw up a piece, and the third copy is used to transfer your outline onto a master fabric piece of fabric using dressmakers carbon paper and a pen, ( this fabric will be the background)  transferring the portrait pieces to the background acts as a guide telling you where to adhere them, all of these lines will be covered with pieces when it is done. Now, pick your fabrics, and do not forget to look at the wrong side of your fabrics when doing shading... the wrong side is sometimes the right side to use in the higher end fabrics that have been dyed clear through. If you are doing your portrait for a room where the colors are purple... or if the person loves the color purple, doing the picture in shades of purple might be a cool option to doing skin tones. 

Apply "wonder under"  or "heatNbond" (or any light weight iron on adhesive you prefer to use) to the underside of all the fabrics you have chosen to use except the background piece and start cutting out your pieces. Peel off the backing paper from the adhesive side and lay them carefully onto the master you made on your background fabric, making sure that none of the background fabric shows between the pieces ( I baste the smaller pieces slightly so they do not shift during ironing).... you can do what I do, I work the picture in sections and the iron sections in place as I go... there is less chance of unwanted shifting of the pieces this way....be sure to work sections that are next to the section you just did. Some portrait art quilters do all the ironing at the end....I find this much trickier to do without shifting.

After it is ironed into place I top stitch each of the pieces close to the edge of each piece. I use a straight stitch, because I work smaller, and zig-zag would be too big, but on bigger sized portraits a zig-zag would be more durable. I would not mix edge finishes within one quilt if it were me, you can do this is you want, but I think mixing it mucks it up. Once the top is done, lay it on top of the backing and batting, baste and quilt. You can get some interesting textures in the skin in this phase, or just quilt around each section and use texture quilting in the background to make the figure pop. Bind the edges and you are done.

I am currently working on this pic of Keegan. when it is done, I'll add the finished picture to this tutorial.

You HAVE to see these videos if you have a single artistic bone in your body!

This painter in Las Cruces NM is having too much fun... and my mixer now has reason to be worried....

This beading artist is freaking amazing!

Yup, I'm surfing...drinking coffee...and slowly approaching my day. I'm sure there will be more links later today, but for now this is enough...my coffee needs a reheat, I got sidetracked by the videos above and it went cold on me.... I am now pondering how use those techniques on fabric with dyes and textile paints.....