No, I haven’t taken up smoking…

July 7, 2008

…but I’ve been collecting retro melamine ashtrays that make great brush/water holders for painting. And they come in great colors (I have bigger yellow and green ones at my studio.)

This is a small one, which is good for travel, especially on a boat where your brushes might roll overboard. The watercolor pencils roll also, but at least they float when they hit the water, so you have time to dive in and retrieve them.

Also for travel, I like using old watercolor tins to carry small brushes. They work better than anything new I can find, and add a nice flavor to the process.

Filed Under journeys, painting, process | 6 Comments

Acrylic Ink Sketches

June 30, 2008

Doing some sketches for new ideas. I love using these acrylic inks by Daler-Rowney, especially the pearlescent ones. And who could resist with great names for colors like Waterfall Green, Galactic Blue, or Hot Mama Red?

Filed Under drawings, mixed media, painting, process | 2 Comments

Open Space, New Projects and Fear

June 28, 2008

When I redid my office, I wanted a blank slate — with big project tables and open space to think up new projects. Then I saw a documentary about the architecture of a traditional Japanese house, and I understood what I had been striving for. There is no assigned function for rooms. The objects that are brought into the space define the function of the space.

Here’s one of my project tables, a little cluttered, but flexible space to work. Glass shelves held up by glass bricks, a piece of rusty metal for a magnet board. I’m thinking about painting the wall with magnetic paint (actually it’s not magnetic, it just makes the wall metallic so that magnets stick to it. Anyone tried that stuff?) But I don’t want to hang art on it. I like the white wall, like cloud, like a dream that hasn’t yet developed.

On the other project table, I’ve brought in a small pin board to study my research. The internet is great for research, I especially am loving Flickr for inspirational photos. Photos like this or these. I don’t copy the photos into my art, only use them as inspiration for things to draw.

Working with new ideas is fun, exciting, but also scary. I wonder if I can really make my crazy ideas work… they seem pretty good in my head, but when I try to write about them or make them real, not sure how well that’s going to work.

Filed Under Inspiration, process, studio | 3 Comments

Monoprinting and Dye Painting

February 21, 2008

Maybe everything happens for a reason. That week that I laid in bed and read dye painting books really soaked in (my brain, not the bed). So I got out the dye powders I had ordered last year, and weird tools I don’t remember ordering, and started to fool around. This was done with a sponge brush and syringe.

I have an old chipped glass table top that I got cheap at some auction, and it worked really well when I started to try out monoprinting with dyes as per Melanie Testa’s inspiring article in this month’s Quilting Arts Magazine.

Actually this one is part monoprinting, and part mistake with a lopsided sponge roller, but a happy mistake.

Once I got a feel for working with the dyes and the right music (jazz is best), it became really fun. My biggest mistake was not letting some of these cure long enough, and when I washed them too soon, some of the intensity was lost. Oh well… live, learn, and happiness through chemicals!

Filed Under dye, painting, process | 13 Comments

Entering Shows: Breaking it down, Step by Step

January 10, 2008

This is a drawing of my in-basket. I guess I’d rather draw it, than do it!

For weeks I had on my to-do list an item “Send images to Curator.” Actually it was one of several items that have to be done for an invitational show at the Lux Center for the Arts that I’ll be part of this April.

Sounds simple, why was I procrastinating? When I actually did get it done last weekend, here’s some of the nitty-gritty details:

Filed Under drawings, exhibitions, process | 11 Comments

The Design Ramblings of Pam RuBert

November 8, 2007

Haven’t done much creative work in the last couple of weeks other than draw my brain with my sewing machine. Then I drew/painted it with my new Caran D’ache watercolor crayons as recommended by Joanie (actually she recommended the crayons, not drawing my brain.) I was thinking of calling this “Radioactive Brain” or maybe “Thinking of You.”

So since there isn’t much new material here, sort of like when the screenwriters go on strike, we have to either go to reruns or do a highlights of last season recap. Well, Gwen Magee has done it for me. Amazingly, she waded through my blog archives and interviews and complied a big selection of my design rambling she calls The Design Process of Pam RuBert on the Textile Arts Resource blog. She also links back to my forgotten slide-show of a quilt in progress. She’s got a lot of other good stuff there too, so check it out. Thanks Gwen!

Filed Under drawings, painting, process, quilts | 19 Comments

Traffic Jam

October 11, 2007

Yay, I finally got this monkey off my back! I don’t know why was so hard, being it’s a simple concept and similar to this quilt that just went together like butter, and I consider to be one of my best quilts, technically speaking. (maybe that’s why it got into FiberArts International 2007).

Maybe part of the problem was all the starts and stops. I started it for this TV taping, then had several interruptions. Or maybe because I had artistic doubts about my work during the process and decided to recklessly experiment.

Or maybe it’s the maze mentality. I wanted to put a maze pattern on it because of the traffic theme, and the project did become a series of starts, stops, and wrong turns.

If you’re wondering about the solution to my background problem, I used oil pastels to adjust the color. These are cheap school kid oil pastels by Colorific, but what I had on hand. This is not recommended for fabric.

In discussions on the QA list, I learned oils in oil pastels may eventually destroy the fabric. Maybe not for a few years, but in terms of 50-100 years which is how conservators think. Here’s a link to good explanation about Shiva Paintstiks that could be an alternative.

Meanwhile, I had a great time using the oil pastels on the background, using predominantly purples, but highlighting with a blue. I love this effect, so will have to try the Shiva paintstiks in the future. And I was thinking, since there are really only three main elements in the quilt, I could cut them out and sew them to a new background. Or better, I could just move onto new projects!

p.s. Here’s a couple more process shots - click to see bigger. Squaring up the quilt is always difficult for me. I leave lots of room to crop after I’m done quilting, and try to use a t-square or laser-level to chalk the lines. This quilt is only 3′x4′ so the t-square worked pretty well.

Here’s why I covered the background with pastels. I had quilted it with a light-colored thread, then when I stepped back, thought it had the unpleasant look of being covered with hair. Which is how I felt too. When things aren’t going right in an artwork, I feel like I have hair growing under my skin. Ever feel like that?

Filed Under media, process | 18 Comments

Unsewing

October 10, 2007

If this were a happily-ever-after blog, I would only show you the good stuff. But that was never my intent. My intent was to write a creative-process blog. So this is a picture of the creative process gone wrong and frustration.

The frustration is not the traffic jam of cars, but the gnarly mess below the cars, something that’s called unsewing. I had done many samples with different threads for this area, but then halfway into the real thing, I realized my final choice was wrong. It wasn’t the effect I had hoped for, and ripping out machine stitching is a terrible slow thing that I try my best to avoid.

In the end, trying all these threads was like poking my finger into the bottom of every chocolate in the box, frustrated that I couldn’t find the right one. But then I realized, it’s because I wasn’t hungry for chocolate, what I wanted was a lemon sour.

Usually complimentary colors of thread work well, but this time, I found it was more interesting to use a color pulled from somewhere else in the quilt for a subtle contrast of colors for the maze-like pattern I was trying to create.

Emboldened by this new idea, I happily charged ahead to finish off the final part, the background. Now I have a new problem. ggrrrr

While this effect is interesting, it’s not in the best interests of the overall piece. Now the background stinks. So today I have new choices:

1. Rip it out
2. Live with it
3. Burn it
4. Paint it
5. Start the whole thing over from scratch (probably would take less time than ripping out the stitches)
6. Or something I thought of in my sleep and now am anxious to get to the studio to try

Filed Under process | 16 Comments

The Quilted Line

October 1, 2007

Today I finished up the quilted sky, smoking camel on a billboard, hero sandwich, animal eyeballs, and the 90-minute binding. I’ve decided to call this The Food Pyramid: Another Mystery of the Not-So-Ancient World.

The problem with my quilts I’ve recently realized, is they are big and hard to convey in photographs. Everyone says they look better in person, so I’m experimenting with a new idea for how to take some detail photos. I got this idea from something I saw in a magazine — see if you can figure out what it is.

June has recently started an interesting discussion about the quilted line on the Ragged Cloth Cafe and the Art and Perception blog, so I thought I would post some bigger photos to show what I’m doing (click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image.) Here’s an example of the cryptic hieroglyphics that I was experimenting with in my last post.

I’m a little superstitious when I quilt — I don’t change my music in case it changes my “handwriting.” After the eightieth playback of U2’s Vertigo, I realized that the music selection wasn’t really arbitrary after all. Long ago when I went to Egypt on a college trip, I listened to U2 on my walkman almost the whole trip. Listening to their music again helped me on my meditative journey of quilted lines.
Inside the food pyramid, I echoed the shape of the foods, except occasionally I put decorative elements on the dishes and an M on the french fries. By the time I got to the filler part of the pyramid, I remembered that there were mazes inside some Egyptian tombs, so I stitched those in the background. They were fun to do, so may try this in a bigger way on my next quilt.

The real trick with the hieroglyphics was to find the right balance between the patterned background and the colors and weight of thread. What I wanted was for the hieroglyphics to be subtle or to appear and disappear, so they were secondary to the main figurative elements of the quilt. I don’t know if you can see it in the photo, but a bit of blue pops in and out because of the variegated thread.

I think the most difficult part of managing the quilted line is to control it and make it a part of a bigger whole. Like any other art form, it may be easy to master different segments of the craft, but difficult to put it together into a cohesive statement.

Filed Under process | 16 Comments

Thread Experiments

September 28, 2007

This project had to be mostly done by Thursday night because we left Friday for a big family wedding weekend. My initial thought was to quilt lines that would echo the shapes of the sand dunes in the background, but I knew this would be difficult to do well.

But then I thought of the mysteries of Egypt and hieroglyphs and developed a kind of personal symbolic language to cover the entire background. I enjoy improvising these shapes and can quickly flow them around the odd negative spaces left by the main characters in this quilt.

I wanted to use King Tut thread on the right of the sample for the obvious reason, but opted for the more subtle effect of a lighter-weight variegated thread on the left.

It often takes several test samples to find the variegated thread that will optimize the play between the background pattern and the stitching.

The Great Sphinx of Giza is something didn’t think to include until late in the game. In Egyptian mythology, a sphinx is half man and half lion with eagle wings. I thought it would be nice to give him some cat-eye glasses although I don’t know how they would stay up since he’s been missing a nose for over 600 years. When I found this painting of Napoleon and the Sphinx, it reminded me that in the 1700’s, the Great Sphinx was just a head in the sand, until someone decided to dig down a little deeper.

Filed Under process | 7 Comments

Who’s that girl?

September 25, 2007

PaMdora, CleoPaMtra, or Nefertari?

I’m having way to much fun with this quilt, considering I’m on deadline and have only be able to get into the studio a few hours each afternoon. The Egyptian head dress was hard to make, but still, too fun! Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a fascination for Egyptian art.

Here’s the new food pyramid. And since I was concerned as an icon, it may be only a national convention, I’ve thrown lots of other icons to boot. What could be more universal than food itself? On that note, it must be time for a snack….I think there’s some ice cream in the freezer.

Filed Under process | 11 Comments

Food Pyramid Redux

September 23, 2007

Finally a pot I’ve had on the back burner all summer has started to boil. If you remember, I started another food-inspired project and then stalled out. I thought the problem was color and some of you tried to help me out with lots of comments, thank you very much, especially Del who sent me to photos like this for inspiration.

So I struggled with color for a long while (that’s one reason I draw on the computer — it gives me a lot of freedom to play with the design) and stewed on rhetorical questions like… “what color is sand? What color is sky?”

Someone asked if I use a tablet. I’ve had several different Wacom tablets, but the Graphire 3 is my favorite. I like the small one because it’s portable, I don’t have to move my wrist much to draw, and anyway, size is relative on the computer.

When I wanted another for the home, they had gone onto the Graphire 4. But it doesn’t have the pen holder on top and the styling wasn’t as sleek. So I bought another Graphire 3 on Ebay. Although there are a lot for sale, they go for almost retail price, so I guess other people think the same as me.

But back to topic, sometimes when you think there’s a problem, it’s not just one. It’s several. Which in art, like in medicine or mechanics, makes it much more difficult to diagnose. When I found this strange photo called The Secrets of the Singing Sand Dunes, I finally realized my worst problem was the sand dunes were too flat. Then Russ said the vertical orientation was too skinny. And there needed to be more stuff happening, so I’ve added some new surprises for you to see later on.

Then I laid out the new colors. When the abstract foundation of color looks exciting, I know I’m on the right track. So that’s when the pot finally started to boil…

Filed Under process, technology | 12 Comments

Upside Down

September 6, 2007

When I was a kid, I used to practice reading books upside down even though the other kids in my fourth-grade class thought I was weird and made fun of me. You see, I had read somewhere that to be a spy, you needed to be able to read well upside down so you could covertly read papers on someone’s desk while you were sitting on the other side.

Since I never got that spy job, I haven’t used that skill too much. But this week I’ve been practicing making a quilt upside down, because on Saturday I will have to do it in front of some tv cameras for the new Quilting Arts TV that will be broadcast on PBS starting in December. So now it’s time to take this project on the road.

Filed Under journeys, media, process | 7 Comments

Toastmasters

September 3, 2007

Speaking of toast, that reminds me of a story about my niece. Once when she was little, her mother was happily serving dinner to the family. Her mom raised a glass and said, “Lily was such a good girl today, I’d like to make a toast.”

Lily excitedly jumped out of her chair, raised her glass, and shouted, “and I’d like to make a pancake!”

Filed Under process | 4 Comments

Art or Toast?

September 2, 2007

Doesn’t it get you down sometimes — bills, phone calls, business, legal mumbo-jumbo, everyday get-under-your-skin, little pesky stuff? I’m about ready to punt the business of art, and just make some ART!

or toast, whatever comes first.

Can’t help myself, but everytime I finally get a drawing ready and it starts to come out of the printer, I get a thrill seeing it big for the first time! I cooked up this idea on the way home from work one day, stuck in a 106 degree traffic jam.

This is the first big thing I’ve tried to print since the ice storm, so it was an unpleasant day of trying to find paper that wasn’t water-damaged, cleaning up the machine, and trying to get a new computer to talk to it. I’m not good at that kind of stuff, so fortunately Russ helped me out. In the end it was worth it.

Filed Under drawings, process, technology | 9 Comments

keep looking »

No, I haven’t taken up smoking…

Acrylic Ink Sketches

Open Space, New Projects and Fear

Monoprinting and Dye Painting

Entering Shows: Breaking it down, Step by Step

The Design Ramblings of Pam RuBert

Traffic Jam

Unsewing

The Quilted Line

Thread Experiments

Who’s that girl?

Food Pyramid Redux

Upside Down

Toastmasters

Art or Toast?

PaMdora's Box

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