News — experiments

Alright I'm on a two week stretch of actually writing about the week's studio adventures! (Last week is here, if you want to catch up.) Progress!  I was able to finish one of my Seasons series last week: I have had this round watercolor paper for many months, but struggled to find a good way to use it. I was excited when I stumbled upon this idea last week. Then I struggled with how to differentiate between spring/summer with just color, since in general I associate green & blue with each season. I think the addition of yellow helped brighten up the...

How do you decide what to focus on? I want to do ALL THE THINGS! Lately I’ve been following a ton of printmakers on Instagram. I’d seen some beautiful prints from artists such as Kim Herringe and Sarah Matthews, so I recently asked for and got a gel printing plate for my birthday. I was hoping I could use watercolor paint with it instead of my beat up old baking sheet...but that was not to be. I tried it first with watercolor of course, but it took a ton of paint to get what was not even a smooth layer (shown...

With my abstract art style, I tend to go through a lot of paper. It's easy to go through 6 or 8 pieces of 5x7 paper in a warm up session for me. To keep my costs down, I'm frequently buying full sheets and tearing them down to smaller sizes, because precut and blocks of paper tend to be a bit pricier per inch than full sheets. (Yes I'm that nerd and I really did the math once! Don't tell my mother or my former math teachers either.) I'm gonna harp on this again: paper is suuuuuuper important in watercolor....

If you're tired of painting on paper, watercolor ground is for you! I tried watercolor ground for the first time and filmed it for my little baby YouTube channel. It took a lot more time to prepare since you have to paint it on your surface and let it dry a few times before you can even paint on it. It behaves a lot differently that watercolor paper, but that also means there were unusual effects. It was exciting to go through the process and I totally nerded out while watching the actual paint move on the ground. Get notified...

How did a beat up old, nonstick cookie sheet become a permanent fixture in my art room? "Billowing Clouds" was created with an old, battered baking sheet and experimentation with a non-traditional painting process: monotype. Monotype is actually a printing process, where a single print is taken from ink or paint spread on a flat surface. For this one, I squeezed pure indigo (always a favorite of mine), gold ochre, and maroon perylene pigments onto an old nonstick baking sheet--also a bit of a break from tradition since monotype is usually done on glass or an etching plate! Next I...