Don’t forget to visit this post and enter your guess for what my choice of flooring is in my new studio for your chance to win something from my Etsy shop!
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book author: Steve Meltzer Paperback: 160 pages I have been struggling for years to find a good resource to help me not only understand how my digital camera works but how to use it to take high quality pictures that I know it has the ability to. This book is a fantastic guide to taking photos of of artwork created in any medium whether it be jewelry, sculpture, wall art, fiber, glass or wood. The book opens with a nice easy to read and understand overview of digital photography. Types of lenses and cameras are followed by an explanation of image types, aspect ratio’s, focusing systems, white balance and more. The chapter on light and the digital studio covers everything from the fundamentals, color temperatures, direction and quality to types of light, light modifiers, measuring light and what color background to use when. Then the book moves into how to set up and take your photographs with separate chapters for both two and three dimensional artwork. Artists who make 2 dimensional fiber art will find the section on lighting fabric as well as photographing quilts particularly helpful. The chapter on 3d objects covers ceramics, glass, sculptures, jewelry, wearable art and objects that light up. Learn the best way to light and photograph tall objects, short ones and pieces with shiny surfaces. This book is an invaluable guide for any artist, no matter what medium they work in, who wants to take better photos for juried show submissions, their website, portfolios or brochures. I highly recommend it! Because I’ll tell you, it hasn’t felt like that lately! My laptop died expectantly last week. I was in the middle of doing something when some of the keys stopped working, the screen went blank and it started emitting a high pitched beep and then nothing. So I had to get a new one which was easy enough but what wasn’t easy was trying to re-load all my software most of which is incompatible with Microsoft Vista so that meant hunting for updated drivers and upgrades and so on and so on and then I lost my internet connection for a couple of days. But the good news is that I’m back up and running! So first let me apologize to all of you who left comments on my previous post who I did not respond to. In and in the midst of all the computer chaos all my emails went unanswered so I apologize for that. I did manage a little studio time in the last week or so. I had picked up some small 6″ square canvas’ the last time I was in the craft store and decided to try to apply my textured silk technique to them…
These look great hanging on the wall. They’re so textured that the make you want to reach out and touch them. I might try doing a few of these on a larger canvas in different colors. I think they’d look great hung together as a series of color explorations. and it’s been a long time since I did any book making so I put together a couple of new hardcover books…
These books along with several other new ones are in my etsy shop here. I have some really exciting news to share with you all. I’ve been accepted into Jane Dunnewold’s Mastery Surface Design program! I can’t even begin to convey how excited I am about the opportunity to study with the master of surface design. It’s a 2 1/2 year program with 2 trips a year to San Antonio to work with Jane in her teaching studio which you can see on her website here. I was very happy to find out that Judi is one of the 11 other artist that will be going through the program too. Since the first set of assignments for the program don’t arrive until October 1st I am continuing to explore creating textured silk surfaces. The one that I created for the vessel in this post was done using a stiff interfacing which worked well for the vessel but for my next project I wanted something with a little less body.
This is a really large piece, 45″x72″ and I’ve used Lutradur as the base for this one so it’s got a bit more drape to it than the one I used for the vessel. There is some really great texture on the surface of this:
The surface of this still needs a bit of color altering but I’ll wait to do that after I have the pieces cut out. You’ll find a couple of new free projects to the 3Creative Studios website today, check them out here!
Paperback: 128 pages In her introduction the artist writes ” The ideas, processes and methods contained in this book are intended to act as a stimulus for the textile artists who like to use found materials as part of their experimental working practice”. Indeed, once you start flipping through the pages of this book you’ll find it hard not to look at everything from the contents of the recycle bins to old textiles, coffee filters and other seemingly mundane every day objects as a potential art supply. The book opens with an overview of processes and methods using paint, ink and dye along with found natural and man made objects to create marks on the surface of paper and fabric. This chapter gives the reader a library of potential techniques and ideas to refer to when considering how to alter the surface that they’re working with. The second chapter gives advice on where to search for found objects, how to recycle previous materials and gives the reader a guide on sorting found textiles and papers . You’ll also find ieas for presenting work with a section on creating unusual frames for displaying the finished art work. The author also discusses working with found containers and boxes, altered books and provides directions on creating simple journals from folded paper. The “Magpie of the Mind” chapter talks about observation and recording as a way to inspire your creative muse. Using the camera, keeping a sketchbook, elements of design and a discussion on Notan are followed by some helpful advice on what to do if you feel stuck or uninspired. Finally the book closes with a chapter on Sharing and how teaching and working with the community can help enrich the artistic process. This book does not contain any step by step projects. You won’t find directions for recreating any of the beautiful pieces showcased in this book. It is meant to be a guide and source of inspiration for those who want to incorporate found or recycled materials into their artwork and stretch their mixed media wings. p.s. Don’t forget to check out my giveaway post here and enter to win something from my Etsy shop! I managed to get a couple of full uninterrupted (well except for doggy breaks) days in the studio and this morning I put the finishing touches on the silk vessel that I’ve been working on for the last week or so…
Silk fabric, paint, Mistyfuse, glass beads Close up:
around here? well I’ve been in the studio working on that project that I mentioned in my last post. No pictures of that just yet – maybe next week when I get a little further along on the project. I’ve got a new book review written of Gwen Diehn’s new book: You can read that on the amazon page here (scroll down to the review section) It’s a beautiful book. All of Gwen’s books are in my personal library and I recommend all of them. and I’ve been spending a lot of time with the newest member of the Bleiweiss family:
Is she a cutie or what?! She’s a year old, a bit underweight (won’t take long to fix that) and she is a sweetie. We adopted her last weekend through the Cocker Spaniel Rescue of NE. They’re a wonderful organization and we’ve adopted from them in the past. Nina is settling in quite nicely and gets along great with our other dogs Lilly and Sherry but has taken quite a liking to Sherry.
who she follows around constantly when she’s not nibbling on her ears or chewing on her tail. Luckily Sherry has a sense of humor about this and is taking it all in stride. My local region of the SDA is having a juried member exhibit next year. Submissions for the show are due November 1st so I have been doing a lot of sketching and brainstorming about create a new piece of work to submit. They’re encouraging 3d works so I’m planning on doing something that will be displayed on a pedestal rather than hung on the wall. Since the organizers of the show are okay with posting photos of the work on the web I thought I’d post the results of some experimenting that I did this week in preparation of creating a piece for this show. The first thing was to decide what fiber I want to work with. My first thought was to work with brown paper bags but I feel like I’ve done that to death at this point so I decided to work with 12mm habotai silk for this project. My plan is to make a vessel of some sort and I want it to have an aged metal look and feel about it.
So here’s the result of some experimenting I did this week. This is silk bonded to lutradur with Mistyfuse and then painted, painted again, painted after that, painted once more and then painted again using a variety of acrylic and textile paints. I’m pretty pleased with the way this looks at this point. And you know I can’t stand having small sample pieces laying around the studio. I have to turn them into something so I used this sample piece to make a book:  6"x9" I used single sheets on the inside aged with coffee and bound together using a modified coptic stitch:
Don’t forget to check out my giveaway post here and enter to win something from my Etsy shop! The fall issue of Cloth Paper Scissors Studios is now available for pre-order!
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Follow my 4 part article series on building my custom studio!
cover image by Steve Ziegelmeyer
cover image by Debbie Patterson        |
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Copyright © 2010 Sue Bleiweiss - All Rights Reserved 
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