Journal
Random Musings on Art and LIfe
As I have been preparing to teach my new Whole Cloth Collage with Paintstiks and Textures course, I have been trying to pin down an answer for an interesting question – what exactly is a Whole Cloth Collage? According to our friends at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a collage is A) an artistic composition made of…
We arrived at our friends’ ranch on Sunday, and I took advantage of a beautiful Monday for a walk about. Our time “at the ranch” is my favorite time of year. If I were to pick up and move to another place in the US, I expect it would be to this corner of…
For the past 18 months, I have been working on a major art quilt project. Her name is Bailando en la Noche, or Dancing in the Night. I chose her name because the medallions evoke the swirling skirts of Mexican Folk Dancers under an exuberant night sky. [Tweet “Check out “Bailando en la Noche” –…
As we begin our tour of Rubbing Plate Roundup, I just couldn’t resist showing you a super-sized rubbing I made from a patio table in Chapala, Mexico. It’s slightly off topic, but Paintstik Rubbings are the first chapter in the book. (Wink, wink!) You’ll just have to pretend along with me that I’m working from…
At the beginning of my art residency here in Chapala, I created a stencil from an image of a dancer, and then painted her up using my extreme stenciling technique. She was quite lovely in the shimmering iridescent Paintstik colors, but I wanted to give her dress a bit of pizzazz. So, I dug into…
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day with Zahava Sherez and Joan Bowers, two of the artists here in Chapala for the Residency Program. Zahava arranged for a driver to take us to Tonola and Tlaquepaque, both on the outskirts of Guadalajara. Our first stop in Tonola was to meet Salvador Vasquez,…
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Victoria Schmidt suggested that we visit her friends Janice Kimball and Francisco Urzua in the neighboring town of Ajijic. Janice is an artist, writer and designer of tapestries and Francisco is a master weaver in the old tradition, working on a loom that has come down through generations…
In a previous post, I showed you how I made a stencil from sign maker’s vinyl using an image of a Folkorio dancer. Today, I’ll show you how I added really bright color using Paintstiks, a brush, and my fingers. Yes, you read that correctly. While I do most stenciling with a brush, the technique…
My big goal for my Personal Art Residency in Chapala is to learn to use my Silhouette cutter. I purchased it more than a year ago, but have done precious little with it since. I decided that my first task should be to cut a stencil and paint up a piece of fabric for a…
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a previous post, I talked about testing paint colors before starting work on a big project. Today I want to talk about a different, and perhaps more important, test that can save you from untold hours of unhappiness. With the new high-tech tools available today, we can make a scale-model of a design to…
Last week I shared an article by Nancy Kazlauckas about how she tests Paintstik colors for a project. I’m not quite as methodical as Nancy, but I did use her color testing method before I started painting on my big 3-panel project. In this case, a couple of hours up front saved me a lot…
by Shelly Stokes, Founder and Creative Mentor One of the students in the Totally Textured online course asked for advice on choosing Paintstik colors for a piece of fabric. Now, I have to admit that I usually “go with my gut” — choosing colors by instinct rather than some set plan. And that’s not terribly…