Coming Up For Air

Who knew that 2020 was going to be full of chaos, mayhem, worry, enforced solitude, frustration, worry, anger, helplessness, intense faith, worry, renewed focus, and a partially overhauled studio?
So many emotions exist in limbo.  I speak my emotions through my art when I'm overwhelmed. I also tend to head further into the whimsy spectrum as a brief getaway. 

In between searching for toilet paper and Clorox wipes, I've spent about 75% of my time in the studio, sometimes working and sometimes decluttering and reorganizing.  I also had some deadlines and commissions to keep me fairly focused.  Some of you may have noticed my return to watercolor.  I've become obsessed with improving my technique and upgrading my paint stock. Some of my recent adventures can be found on the StencilGirl blog today.  I won't spoil the surprise, but here are a couple of my recent meaderings. 

  Who are these masked marvels?

Matchy Matchy

While on the subject of masks, here's a scoop for you.  I have a couple of art friends who are putting your art on masks.  I just ordered three tonight and can't wait to get them.  Message me if you're interested in wearing your art and I'll send you the deets. 

In the midst of all of this world chaos, I had my six month oncology visit with Giancarlo in May (yes, that really is his name) and yearly cancer check this month.  I am happy to say that I was cancer free and we're all working together to help me with the drug side effects.  While I was waiting to hear, I headed back into alcohol inks with a trial of a relatively new manufacturer, T-Rex inks. I was really pleased with the movement, saturation, and price point.  It was a nice distraction for me and I can't wait to play with them some more. 

 

I also have taken a lot of time during the pandemic to work on my Citra art for an art show later this year.  I postponed and then taught two classes (social distanced w masks) this month and it was so much fun watching them discover how interesting it is to work with the random backgrounds.  All went home with extra papers to play with, too!  I hope to teach the follow up collage class later this year at Checkered Cottage here in Kirkwood, MO.  A reminder to those in my classes (online or in person, contact me to be added to the Citra art facebook group.  More shameless plugging:
Subscribe to my newsletter here to be the first to know about classes and art sales.  It's very low volume. 

 

Stencil by Cecilia Swatton

 

Art Foamies stamp By Nathalie Kalbach

I plan to teach at Stampaway this year again unless something changes in the newly open Ohio.  Class size will be limited to allow for social distancing. As always, for daily art, follow me on Instagram.  I also put art on my facebook personal and business page as well or go to my website for all my links. I plan to continue with the last 20 days of #the100dayproject and flow into World Watercolor Month on July 1.  Lots of art coming your way.  Stay safe this summer everyone. 

Merry Everything!

I spent last night reworking and updating my website a bit so thought I would take the three hour late night drive to update my blog and fill in the blanks since I last wrote. Healthwise, it’s been a long road back, but at least I’m on a straight stretch of road and not taking detours. I feel mostly good but every now and again I hit a wall and need to take a breather. Creatively speaking, I’ve been in a burst most of the year. But even that has worn me out at times. The first half of the year was almost exclusively Citra artwork as mentioned in the last blog post. The cherry on top was the filming of my first online class in March for StencilGirl’s new class platform. Citra Solv Art debuted in August and has been well received. I am posting bonus material for those taking the online class and for those who have taken my in person class, Transformations. Message me if you are interested in knowing more about it.

Madcap

Imperfection

October also saw the release of my first club stencil kit for StencilGirl. For those that don’t know, StencilGirl has a monthly subscription service that I’ve participated in since its inception. It was fun to design for it and then even more fun to see them in use by others.  The best part is that if you join you can always order past month's stencils. 

Into the Woods

                              

                                   Umbrella

                                       

Alcohol ink work has dominated the second half of my year. It started with my incarceration at St Luke’s. I had no idea said incarceration would occur so I was unprepared and my anxiety went through the roof. It didn’t help that we were all wheeled into the hallway for a tornado warning during my first few hours there. My husband saved the day and brought the only art supplies I had packed. A new series was born that week. I’ve had two small batch sales and I am so grateful for all the support for this new direction. I was even more grateful that my work caught the eye of Dick Blick and I had a featured demo there in November.  Into the Woods and Umbrella are fall additions to the series. The rest are not up in my gallery (updating over the Christmas holiday) nor Etsy yet but if you follow me on Facebook and Instagram, you’ve probably kept up. The next pop up sale will be the first week in February. Newsletter recipients will get sneak peeks and other perks. Sign up here.

In between paintings, I’ve become obsessed with making ornaments so much so that I’m adding them as a class opportunity next year. I’ve got some special tips, tricks, and tools to share with everyone. I’ve had a blast and there are several time lapses and lots of photos sprinkled on my social media to show my enthusiasm. This is my new favorite done on a navy glass ornament. True confession:  my favorites come in and out of focus because they all have different vibes.

I’m sure there will be many more to come as I explore the possibilities. I’ve been very blessed to have sold quite a few from Instagram and local queries and I love sending them out into the world. The most interesting commission so far has been the order of a blue and a pink to become baby reveals for  the grandparents on Christmas Day. 

For those interested in non-art sightings, here are the boys dressed to the nines for the holiday season.  Angus is on agility hiatus until January 5th.  I've been told they're crowd pleasers when they run.  

            

and the best for last..... DPT White Coated daughter.  I also call my dear husband and her #myeverything. She's about to finish her first of three clinicals in Knoxville.  Next up in January she heads to Virginia Beach and finally to Annapolis for the summer.  Then it's time to graduate and take her boards.  She's my inspiration. 

If you've stuck around this long, I'll let you know I've already picked my word of the year for 2019.  It's actually two words and it's very important to have both.  "Live inspired" will be the focus next year.  It's one thing to inspire.  It's another to model living inspired.  The components are mind, body and soul.  Stay tuned.  My teaching schedule will be evolving so stay tuned for that as well. 

I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season and to look upon the new year with expectation. 

Play all the Time

Alcohol Ink

My book, Texture Effects for Rubber Stamping, is now thirteen years old this week.  In the art/craft word it would be considered a dinosaur.  We'll take that one step farther and say that I am a dinosaur, too.  I've been traveling, teaching and reinventing myself for over twenty years.  It's hard to believe it's been that long, but it becomes easier when you are contacted by the teen-age daughter of one of your early students.  Molly  found the book in her mother's craft room and proceeded to work through it, but had some questions.  Some of the inks used in it are now gone, but she had scavenged the net to find some. My favorite King James glossy paper was what brought her to me.  I answered her question about what could be substituted and she asked about ten more.  She was totally enthralled with cardmaking and was a little miffed when I said I didn't do it as regularly as I used to.  I enjoyed the back and forth, but especially liked her probing questions because they got me thinking.  She'd mentioned her favorite techniques in the book and what a variety of effects she found she could get and some other interesting discoveries. She said she thought it was still very relevant.  Well, she actually said "on trend,"but I paraphrased that because I've never thought of my art as being trendy.  

I haven't heard from Molly lately, but our conversations got me thinking about how many of those old techniques I'm still using today with different media and different substrates.Whether it's ink or paint application oddities, substrate choice oddities,  or my infatuation with exploiting negative space, I still use over seventy-five per cent of the book's techniques day in and day out.  And yes, I've added quite a few more in the last seventeen years.  I dole them out liberally when I teach, which is not as often as before because of the whole dinosaur thing mentioned above.

CitraSolv & India Ink

What has changed is that I am finally taking my own advice.  During the heyday of my book, I signed quite a few copies.  I signed "Play all the time" on every one of them because I felt the most freedom when I just sat down and played, rather than looking for that "second coming" outcome.  That's how I approached my art for a long time until deadlines started dictating my pace and other commitments came my way.  My studio time became more purposeful and less about the journey.  Beginning last fall I made a concerted effort to leave time to explore new techniques/mediums, immerse in past favorites, and to just "be" in my studio and I'm a lot happier with my output.  I don't blog as frequently but I do a ton of social media uploading, especially on Instagram @nancycurryart.  It's a great world to step into if you haven't.  No politics, opinions, hoopla....just a moment in time photos or videos.  I do use the My Story a lot to show techniques in real time.  I cross post some to both my Facebook accounts so don't think you won't see the art there, too, but I'm consistent with Instagram.  It also take me a while to get my new art on my gallery.  I am doing so many pieces that are color or media studies that I get backlogged really fast.

Alcohol Ink & Oil Marbling

 

White latex & acrylic pour

I don't know what the next twelve months will hold for me, but I'm sure it will be a combination of new and old.  I'm still fascinated by the unpredictability of acrylic pouring and all the different ways to do it.  It does take a lot of space and time so I doubt I will do it day in and day out, but it will be interspersed with my other offerings. 


I am hoping soon to add resin coatings to my repertoire. That involves a learning curve for technique and safety so we'll see how long it takes this dino. 


I'll continue to work with CitraSolv and varying my choice of media. I love the intuitive challenge that these paper provide.  It's also been my most popular class for the last four years running.  I've got to keep my skill set up.  The piece below I did this summer for a blog entry for Rubbermoon.  I had a blast melding old and new techniques on the one piece.  And yes, the whimsy.  I'm all about the whimsy. 

I hope this catches everyone up on what's going on in my world.  If you're new to my art and want to see where everything is, go here.  All my links are there to social media, Etsy, StencilGirl and Rubbermoon.  Thanks for stopping by. 

 

CitraSolv & White Ink

Believe 2014

BELIEVE: (verb)  1. accept (something) as true; feel sure of the truth of. 2. hold (something) as an opinion; think or suppose.    SYNONYMS:  think, be of the opinion that, have an idea that, imagine, suspect, suppose, assume, presume, take it, conjecture, surmise, conclude, deduce, understand, gather, fancy, guess, dare say

It's a word used everyday in real life, the art world, journals, greeting cards, tv diatribes, talk shows, etc.  I haven't even chosen it for a rubber stamp because so many other people have. It's a word you don't even really think about because it is so pervasive.  That is until what you believe is tested.  What you thought was true, is not.  What you believe on faith only, wavers.  It's easy to say you believe in something or believe something to be true until that moment.  And the aftermath of that moment.  That is when what you really believe becomes apparent.  Life is full of these moments.  Some we chose to engage, and some we chose to let slip by, clinging to what we KNOW is true.  My moments to engage came over eight weeks this fall.  I am still in the aftermath.  I am still making sense of it.  I am still seeking the truth that I so want to believe.  It's an intense process that becomes all encompassing.  It's a process that is lonely.  It's a process that you must go through to accept the new normal. This process will continue on into the opening moments, maybe weeks of 2014. 

I celebrate my personal journey with this piece of art.  The focal piece was a Citrasolv piece that I originally manipulated early in the fall.  I played with it a little in November, adding some more solution and then using some foil and alcohol inks to enhance the color.  Today, I used Jessica Sporn's 9 x 12 stencil for  StencilGirl to create the focal ledge using Titan Buff, Mars Black, and Bronze Golden Acrylics.  The charm is actually a left over from a Charming Charlie's necklace that I used for something else.  PPA holds the metallic fibers together. 

Happy New Year to all.  I am looking forward to 2014.  I hope you are, too.  


UPDATED WINTER TEACHING DATES:

Ephemera Paducah, Paducah, KY :  March 7 & 8   2 all day classes
Stamper's Ink, Kansas City, MO :     April 11 & 12  3 classes

F R O L I C

My Citrasolv explorations continued today while I was handling some other mundane matters.  The lure of the pages ready for more play just pulled me in.  I did get a load of laundry done.  I will make dinner.  I did train Angus a bit.  Ok...not very long.  I guess I should stop leaving the pile of pages on the island in my kitchen with the Citrasolv bottle next to it.  Let's get started......

So the first picture is what I started with.  This was a set of pages that the ink didn't quite move as much as I would have liked.  I did them several weeks ago and just put them in a pile of rejects.

You can see why I looked at these pages as collateral damage in the scheme of Citrasolv movement.  But they also became a challenge to see if I could obliterate the original composition and create something new and interesting.  I know I am a broken record, but I really love to do this.

I took Terri Stegmiller's delicate floral stencil and placed in on top of the page.  I used a GOOD paper towel that I dipped in fresh Citrasolv and began rubbing off color through the stencil. I continued until I had done both pages. It still didn't obliterate the coral as much as I wanted but I was hopeful. 

I decided that it needed a bit more noise before I took the brush to it.  I used various sizes of punchinella and added the circle noise haphazardly in the background.

It was now time for the additive part of the process to begin.  The next two pictures show how I again used leftover pieces of the page to begin adding color to my emerging composition. I used a Citra dedicated liner brush and reactivate some of the bluey-purple color and took it to the pages.  I concentrated first on the centers of the flowers that I thought were too bland. 

Next, I took some other colors that I took from those same scraps (turned over).  I added more color throughout in a pointillism method alternating with a sliding motion to move the activated ink around and set about morphing the background more.

 

I was pretty pleased with the changes that occurred.  It is amazing what you can do using a page as a palette.  It isn't as stark as some of my other manipulations, but it seemed to suit the delicacy here.

To being the finishing process, I flipped the design upside down, added a delicate floral in black ink throughout the piece,  and trimmed it to fit a large piece of purple cardstock. I then used one of my own stamps with black StazOn and a black Sharpie to distess the edges.  No, I usually don't use a ruler when I am trying to give it a vintage feel.  I fell in love with the raw edge, though.

Since there was a raw edge that I wanted to keep at the bottom, I added a sliver of cream cardstock to square it all off within the purple mounting. A tattered floral finished it off nicely. I am pretty happy with the changes and really enjoyed the challenge.

P O E T I C

I keep returning over and over to playing with Citrasolv ink manipulation so today when I finally had some free time to do what I wanted to do, I spent some time introducing new tools and colorants to add and subtract to the organic image from the original movement of ink.  One of the most interesting things I have noted is that these inks from the National Geographics can be reactivated over and over again to produce results (at least weeks) after the initial melting of the ink.  That means you can stockpile papers and create new art from the organic image at will.  I love that. YOU will love that.

I worked on two different pieces today.  Both came from manipulations I worked on in September simply by spraying Citrasolv into the page of a National Geographic.  They air dried then and were put way in a plastic bag.  One thing I neglected to do today was to take a beginning picture after the initial manipulation.  Mea Culpa.  So the beginning picture that I have from today is one from this morning where I spent time using dip pens with more Citrasolv to move the ink again....a thicker parallel type pen and very thin nib.  Both produced interesting results.  The thicker nib rediscributed the ink and created new caverns and ridges, lights and darks.  The thinner one was used to add more abstract detail.  I washed each nib out immediately after finishing.

I continued adding and subtracting until I felt that a whole new composition had been created around the Citrasolv happenstance.

After allowing some drying time, I spot added some color back into the composition with a very tiny liner brush and Ranger Adirondack alcohol ink.  I really enjoyed adding some personality to the piece.  I used Germex to clean my brush between color changes.  91% rubbing alcohol would do the trick even better, but my cupboard was bare.

I could have worked on it forever and even found that I could alternate more Citrasolv reduction with alcohol ink addition.  It worked very well together and the transparency of the alcohol inks complemented the visual texture already finished.You will notice in the next picture that the piece has been turned 180 degrees.  I don't often change it's orientation that late in the game, but I decided that that white lip on the top would be a perfect place for a word I am playing around with on my next plate.  So, I flipped it.  Then I mounted it on black glossy.  I don't know where it's final resting place will be, but I am pleased with it's new life.  The page originally was one of my least favorites and now it has new life.

I was so happy with how the first one turned out that I played with a second page that I believe was a picture of a seal. It's pictured here lying on it's side.  I was unhappy with the incompleteness of the ink dissolution so this was the perfect page to play with.

 

I used the same tools to move more of the ink and to take away the seal like face.  I also turned it 90 degrees counterclockwise. I liked that orientation better for what I was thinking I would do.  I decided on this one to do a quick sketch with India ink in the same pen nibs I had been using.  I used the lights and darks I created by moving the ink, to become the backdrop for a contemporary flower. 

After I got the detail I wanted with this quick sketch, I cut down the paper to a manageable 5 1/2" x 51/2" square.  It's then you can see the flower come to life.  It isn't fighting with all the unused background anymore.

I decided to finish this piece off with a simple mat pulling out a color from the piece and a white 8" x 8" canvas.

I'll sign it and name it tomorrow.  Nothing came to mind immediately.  Any suggestions, just let me know! 


 

StencilGirl Map Stencil Blog Hop: WE ALL GO A LITTLE MAD SOMETIMES

Welcome to the StencilGirl Map Blog Hop!!!!!  If you arrived from Rose Wilde's page,  you are in the right place.  If not, you can follow the list at the bottom of my post and start from the beginning. 

I was positively thrilled when Mary Nasser asked me to join in this StencilGirl blog hop.  Even better....it is my first one!  I have long been enthralled with Mary's map collage art.  I was not at all surprised that map stencils arrived on the StencilGirl doorstep.  It seemed a fait accompli. For me, the hardest part of the whole thing was picking which stencil to focus on since all are divine.  I ended up choosing the MAP 6 stencil, shown here: 

For the past two weeks I have been absorbed in Citrasolv ink manipulation so I chose to place the stencil on top of a saturated page that was originally a seal in San Francisco (National Geographic loves animal photography) and I let the Citrasolv do it's magic and reactivate the inks on the clay-coated paper.  It was not a perfect manipulation but somehow that fit for what I was trying to accomplish and as I will show, that can be remedied.  I love the happenstance of this technique every time I do it.  More  Citrasolv explorations can be found here. 

 

I knew at this point I was going to try to revive some more ink to fill in some of the roads that didn't quite reactivate as I wanted them to so I went ahead and added a matting paper with some two sided adhesive tape.  That step could come later and should if you need a lot of Citrasolv to add some detail.  I knew I didn't need much so it was fine to do it now.
















I replaced the stencil back on top and carefully looked so see what I wanted to add back into the print.  My eye was always drawn to the lower right quadrant so that's where I decided to focus my energies.








It is very easy to add more revived ink to your print by using Citrasolv again.  I used the cap from the bottle and a synthetic liner brush to activate ink from an unused portion of the page and slid the brush under the stencil lines where I wanted more detail. It worked like a dream.

Once I was happy with the amount of detail, I added the words from one of my new stamps into  the individual crevices of the map.  I simply stamped each word individually with StazOn and the wonky nature of the phrase seemed to go well with the haphazard nature of the map.  I loved the marriage of Mary's stencil with my phrase.  This photo also shows the amount of detail I was able to add back into that quadrant.  Yess........

The final mounting included a strip of white paper and an 8" x 8" canvas panel that was painted black prior to the mounting.  I used double sided sheets of adhesive to attach it all to the canvas.

There you have it!  This is my portion of the blog hop!  I hope you enjoyed yourself.  Stencils are so fun to be used in a variety of ways.  I am happy to say that these StencilGirl stencils stand up to the Citrasolv very well, but I do clean them immediately after I am done with running water.

NOW FOR THE FUN PART......... THE GIVEAWAY

Mary Nasser will be doing a giveaway for this hop – giving away a set of her  four new stencils. ALL the comments on each blog participating will be eligible for the drawing. So what do you do?   All you have to do is leave a comment by 11:59 PM Central Time on October 4th. The more blogs that you comment on in the blog hop, the more chances you have to win.  Plus, you don't want to miss any of these wonderful blog entries.  They are sure to impress and inspire!!!!

Here is the Blog Hop Order for October 2^nd:

StencilGirl Talk
Mary C. Nasser
Mary Beth Shaw
Jessica Sporn
Janet Joehlin
Heather Haymart
Judy Shea
Pam Carriker
Nancy Wethington
Talk2TheTrees
Corrine Gilman
Rose Wilde
Nancy CurryYou are here!!!!!
Kristen Powers
Carolyn Dube 
Maria McGuire

Have a splendid time on this hop and good luck in the givewaway!