All completed this winter and early spring.  This one is called “Transformation” and is mixed media, 15×11″. Includes old house paint and watercolor, gesso and embroidery stabilizer as well as acrylic ink.

This one is “Gentleness.” It’s an acrylic pour done on mat board that was prepared with Gloss Medium on both sides.  The lines added later are acrylic ink, done with an old fashioned nib. It’s 15×11″.

And the last in this post is “Cladonia” which is an acrylic pour on Yupo.  It looks a lot like the lichen “British Soldiers” which is very common in the woods Up North.  It’s 13×10″.

This started as an acrylic pour in black, yellow and red.  It was nice cells, but otherwise didn’t have much interest. From another pour I had some drippings that looked like petals, so I added them forming a flower shape.  The center was another piece of “pour puddle” which I enhanced with some brown dots of acrylic.  The acrylic pieces when peeled off the freezer paper they were on, adhered immediately and permantently to the acrylic pour on the tile.   I outlined the whole flower and stem with yellow acrylic and enhanced some of the yellow lines from the pour.  I like it very much now.

Now I’m giving it a couple more coats of UV Varnish and adding some hanging loops on the back, so I can string some picture wire on them and hang it as a normal painting.

Comments appreciated.

People have complained about the smell of using Silicone spray in doing their dirty pours.  The solution is two-fold: Use an already liquid silicone oil, or make your own oil.  I have a 2 oz. dropper bottle that I take outside and spray the silicone from the pressurized container into the  bottle.  This eliminates the odor of the spray itself when using it indoors. Then I can just add 5-8 drops of this silicone to each color cup with almost no odor.

Here’s the way it looks:

Have you found any other ways of dealing with the odor of the spray?  If so please say in the comments.  Thanks.

Today was the first day of my 3 day abstract/experimental art workshop. Trying to get everybody loosened up and to think and look at images as non-real things is difficult. Today we did collage papers for use in doing a painting of an abstract image. (See my gallery of Abstract Images as some are in there.)

The gals really worked hard today. Here’s a few shots of the work.

I entered this piece in this year’s ISEA exhibition at BigArts in Sanibel, FL and received notice last week that it was accepted. So, now the process of varnishing, framing, packing and mailing it off starts. It was started on my spinner after coating the whole piece of Yupo with black gouache and then applying fluid acrylics on top. When they were thoroughly dry I hosed off most of the gouache, and then enhanced some of the other areas by hand painting.

This piece I started a couple winters ago, by copying shadows cast by a bush outside with an early winter sun. But it just didn’t seem to work. So after experimenting recently with water soluble embroidery stabilizer I applied that over the previous working using a somewhat dilute gesso. This created a great texture as well as subduing many of the lines. Some, I repainted to emphasize them. Just varnished it today, and I have a black frame I’ll mount it in for hanging.

Cleaning out my old photographic stuff, and found these two printing frames, made by Ilford. They have hardly been used.  I hate to throw them away, but If I can’t find a taker in the next few months I’ll have to. They originally cost about $50 20 years ago. All you have to pay now is postage.

I’m sure they are not available in stores anymore.  But in their time they were the perfect solution for creating contact sheets of 2×2 slides. Two trays were printed, which were offset from each other by the width of the slides, so the slides could be printed 35 to an 8×10 sheet.  If you are interested call or e-mail. (269-330-9808 or mplagge1901@earthlink.net)