Painting Outside the Box...

 

I think I mentioned in a previous post that sometimes I have a tendency to paint anything that doesn't move too fast!

I don't know, maybe it's the three dimensionality that gets my motor running, but it seems to have a much different feel than painting in 2D.
And you get in the mood for a change, so it's all very interesting to explore...

I think it might have started with my

ex husband's motorcycle back in eighties, I had painted a nice surreal on his jean jacket that he was really attached to, it had a floating face above a marshy scene based on landscapes in photos I had taken around Nova Scotia, Canada somewhere. It was supposed to catch the feeling of the Maritimes, and it really did, in a very dreamy, bluish, sort of floaty way... After he decided his Yamaha 750 Virago had finally reached the point of needing a paint job, he really wanted that image on his bike!

Never mind that I had no experience whatsoever painting a motorcycle, had never used an airbrush and didn't even own one! Talk about being forced out of your comfort zone... But on some level, I think he did me a favour, I muddled through, did my research and it all turned out quite lovely. And I learned it's much better to step out and experiment than to get complacent and stop learning!  I wouldn't mind painting a few bikes sometime too if it ever came up, and I learned a lot about airbrushing, metal paints and so on in the process. So it was all good.

But back to the blog subject at hand... That was probably my first serious experience with painting on 3D objects. And it's got different design challenges, you have to keep looking at it as you do your design to see what the audience will see and try to balance it as much as possible to keep the composition working. It's a lot of fun, but you have to keep on top of things.

After that, periodically, I'd just paint something that caught my fancy, just for the sheer enjoyment of it!

When I was first separated and had no money, everyone on my Christmas list got homemade shortbread cookies and hand painted dough ornaments from me that year. The funny part of that was that when I eventually got more money together and things got better over time, my friends and family still wanted the cookies and ornaments instead! Hilarious;-) Thankfully, they finally got tired of them and I got tired of baking, so it all worked out.
Somewhere in the mid 2000's, I found a lamp in a thrift shop that looked like a clove of garlic to me. It was kind of attractive in shape, but was very, very ugly in colour and texture. So I decided, well, why not, I'll paint over it with acrylic and varnish it, it's plastic based anyway! The lamp turned out beautiful, and I've still got it. It got me to thinking about other objects...
Such as boxes.  Jewelry boxes, knick knack boxes, boxes for keeping keys, rings or pins in.  Why not make them more decorative and something people can enjoy putting on their shelf or mantle?  So after that, as a small hobby, I've always painted boxes, it's just something that satisfies that urge to create that doesn't seem to be quite as serious as a full blown painting.
I've noticed boxes have come back into style more in the last decade, maybe I was just getting ahead of the curve a bit... And of course, I've been experimenting with glass painting as well, maybe next I need to paint a glass box!

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Candlestick - Jul.2010,  2. Paper mache ring box - Jan.2010,  3. Small Jewelry box- Jan.2010,  4. Octagonal box - Dec.2009,  5. Circular box - Jan.2010,  6. 7. 8. Lecture Stand - 2009,  9. Painted Lamp - circa 2001,  10. Book shaped box - Jul.2010, 11. Eye box - Jul.2010.

 

Learning To Paint On Glass

 

Over the years, I've dabbled in a lot of mediums and foundations to create artworks.  I've painted jewelry boxes, candles, wood of all sorts, lecture stands, jackets, motorcycles and even lamps! (I learned how to use an airbrush to paint a motorcycle, it was a lot of fun.)

When I bought a house seven years ago, the front foyer window had this horrible painting of bluebirds on it that were rendered by an amateur using a media I had never seen before. 

It was painted over the double paned window with a plastic semi-opaque paint that gave the appearance of stained glass.  Or tried to...

This was something I sat down and thought about, and I realized that not only did I want to remove the offending 'artwork' on the entrance-way window in my new house, but I wanted to do it again myself. Properly.

It seems to me that this medium has a lot of promise to it.  It doesn't suffer from some of the limitations of stained glasswork but it gives a similar effect.  The glass doesn't have to be cut, meaning you can include a lot of details that are possible in traditional glasswork.  It's really 'glass painting' as opposed to stained glass art, and it can be done for a fraction of the cost.  And it wouldn't look cheap if you did it right.

After physically removing the old 'artwork', I set out to find out about my new prospective medium by looking on the internet and checking out art and craft stores.  I found out that it's used mostly to create suncatchers and to create fake stained glass pieces on mirrors and windows (in a limited way)...  By fake stain glass, I mean that the craftperson doing the work will use a pattern that simulates a stained glass pattern and follow it as closely as possible...  This really wasn't what I had in mind for me!

I've never been good at following someone else's patterns, my first painting at eight years old was in oils and I used the paints from a paint by numbers kit my aunt had given me to do something original... No copying for me!

So I bought some of the paint and blanks (wax paperlike plastic sheets) to practice on so that I could get a feel for the limitations and also figure out what I could do with it.  I found that it dries quickly, but takes a day to clear out to the final colour.  Meaning you can't see what colours you are really working with at the time you do the piece.  This just makes it more challenging!

I tried out my abstract, pattern based pen drawing as 'patterns' to see how they would look, and I was delighted with results. 

I'm a pretty prolific and quick artist, so I can create some pieces quite quickly.  The new medium and it's drying limitations slowed me down immensely.  And I found that I needed more strength in my hands to get a straight line, maybe the person who did the original work on the window was fighting this when they got the wavy lines on the bluejays...

To combat the lack of details in the lines, I bought more attachments for the simulated leading bottle I was using to apply the under-drawing to get finer control.  It helped, but it slowed down the process even more. 

This couldn't be helped, I wanted to be able to do the artwork to my normal standards and I wasn't going to cop out even if it meant way more work.

I also found out that the paint runs and clumps, so I had to be careful about the amount I applied to keep it from clumping up.  Even more unexpected, if I didn't run a toothpick through it after each colour was applied, it would bubble and that didn't look desirable at all.

Finally, I felt confident I could start on my 'new' window, I prepared it carefully so that the paint would adhere and I created many sheets of predried leading lines that I could apply to the window and anchors with wet leading as I did the work. 

First I had drawn a beautiful abstract pattern that I applied to the window to follow.

As I progressed, I found that the four foot by eighteen inches wide window ended up taking me a hundred hours or more to research, practice and paint.  The actual piece itself took over fifty hours!  Not a quick medium to work in, but it certainly gave me a unique result I was proud of.

I painted the window you see here in late 2005 and it never faded or chipped.  It was sold with my house last year and from the response I've seen to the piece over the years, I would say that people really like it....

So I've decided to give it another go and I've started on some new windows!

Since the landlord at the house I'm renting was all for the idea of me painting a few windows to practice the artform, I decided it was a great opportunity to refine the process.

I've started on new windows here, and unfortunately, it's really hard to photograph them well enough to get the full effect of the artwork.  The light from behind the window tends to skew the metering so you end up with a sillouhette effect which tones down the details.

On these new windows, I found that working with glass paint told me how much older I had gotten in the last six years.  My hand shook even more and I had to take it very slow to get the result I wanted.  But it was worth it, I've finished the left three windows and I'm working on the right side to pull the viewers eye over the left windows.  Sort of a flow of expression, it's working out quite well, even though I haven't finished the windows yet, it's given a beautiful result!

I even bought a digital SLR camera to improve the quality of my photos of them!

Reminiscing About Dungeons and Dragons

 

The Gesture
by Teresa Young



Tiger Tracks
by Teresa Young

I am always mulling over how the world works in general terms as it's quite an interesting subject... 

Lately, I've been thinking about my world and how it has changed since I was a kid, and one major way that it has changed is in how I play games...

When I was small, we read books, watched a bit of TV, socialized by playing cops and robbers, or other such simplistic role playing games. 

 

Those games were pretty good, but you needed an excellent imagination to fill in the blanks, or you quickly ran out of ideas.

Blue Mushrooms
by Teresa Young

When I was older, something called Dungeons and Dragons was invented and I was one of those geeky teenagers that went with others of my kind to play in garages and basements.  (Still with the imaginary role playing; we filled in the blanks in our heads!) 

It was great fun, and it's interesting to see what subsequently developed out of it with computers and the gaming industry.

It was very different then, with the speed of the computers and gaming units, we moved at a snails pace of progress on our quests as we had to meet with the other nerds to play, so it took time.  I remember that I had one character that lasted about nine months, and it was slow going because we used hexagonal dice with drawn out dungeons and a physical dungeon master (one of your buddies) overseeing  your progress on quest(s). 

We moved our little metal markers on a graph physically using the dice rolls to determine characteristics and movement, and your character was restricted to progressing when you could get together to play.  Not to mention battles and outcomes!



Queen of Thorns
by Teresa Young

The person that had the most work was the dungeon master, he actually drew out the dungeons in coloured pencil and felt pens on large graph paper sheets and put it up in front of himself so that the players couldn't see it.  As we all rolled our progress with dice he'd have to physically chart it on his graphs in order for us to move along. He had books to refer to for characteristics of monsters and characters and with status ranges that could be represented by the dice rolls.  There were also ranges and guidelines for battling, leveling and rewards, it was pretty involved.

These funny little books with no colour illustrations were ordered by snail mail and were obviously mimeographed in somebodies basement as well!  It was like a cottage industry in the seventies, and our parents were scandalized and debated how healthy D and D was for their kids.  Citing lack of exercise and how it could lead into going into cults or believing in the occult, it was the big ogre of many PTA groups!

It's pretty funny as I've heard the same hoopla come out multiple times over the years as each new generation of gaming formats developed.  And as far as I've seen, everyone has survived, especially the youth, and we don't seem to be any the worst for it.

Now I guess I'll go see what I have in my library of games I can play... HehHeh!


Art Images by Teresa Young:
1. Tiger Tracks - March 2004,   2. The Gesture - June 2007,  3. Blue Mushrooms - January 2002,  4. Queen of Thorns - August 2008.

How Do Our Experiences Shape Our World View?

 

I've often wondered about that old saw about 'seeing the world through the eyes of an artist'.

Over the years, I've heard many variations on that particular theme in popular culture:

- Life through the eyes of a child.

- Approaching life with the 'engineering mindset'.

- A writer's take on the world.

- A mother's viewpoint...

And so on... Which leads me to wonder, how much do our experiences really shape our world view?

I have a fleeting image of individuals who change hats to change their viewpoint... IE: I'm looking at this as techie or now I'll check it out as a mother!

How many times does that average person change their hat in the course of a day? It would certainly be challenging to quantify. And your control group would have to be very perceptive and honest in order to make the study relevent. If it could even be done...

Coming back to the artist, how does that artist express/communicate his vision of the world in his work if he also has many other 'personas' or worldviews? Could be an interesting direction to pursue if you had a sense of humour I would think...

I have a writer friend who is fascinated with personal expression and how the artist can speak for their generation on some level. There's been a lot of debate on the artists role in society and their voice in a culture. She even postulates that it is the artists responsibility to publish their views in order to express that 'piece of our culture'.

I don't know about that, but I'm a firm believer in variations in order to create a broader, more balanced view of things. 

Maybe our own hat changing trick is designed to do just that, balance us out so that we don't stagnate or go crazy!

With that in mind, I'm going to go change hats and take a look around...

Images by Teresa Young:

1. The Fungus - August 2001,  2. Urgency - June 2007, 3. Currents Musings  June 2009, 4. Closeup of Veil of Tears -  March 2010.