Welcome to the Sketchbook Challenge!

So you want to start keeping a sketchbook but every time you sit down with a book in front of you and pencil in hand you freeze up and just can't seem to get started.  Wouldn't it be helpful to be able to get a glimpse inside another artists sketchbook to see how they use theirs?  Well you're in luck because help is on the way!

The Sketchbook Challenge is a new project launching on 1/1/2011. Follow along with us as we fill our sketchbooks based on a monthly theme that will be announced on the first of each month.

You'll be sketching alongside:

Jill Berry 
Sue Bleiweiss
Laura Cater-Woods
Jane Davies 
Jamie Fingal 
Judi Hurwitt
Leslie Tucker Jenison 
Lyric Kinard
Jane LaFazio
Kelli Perkins 
Carol Sloan
Carla Sonheim 
Susan Sorrell
Melanie Testa
Diana Trout
Violette

Each month we'll announce a new theme on our blog and throughout the month we'll be showing you images from our sketchbooks and talking about the intention and inspiration behind them.  Along the way we'll be sharing tips, techniques and tutorials.  We hope that by giving you a peek inside our sketchbooks and showing you how different they all are that we'll inspire you to start keeping a sketchbook of your own.  And of course if you do, we'll want to see some photos of your book too so we've designed a blog badge for you to put on your own blog to show your participation in the project.  You can download the badge here.

We encourage you to post photos of your sketchbook pages on your blog and then post a link in the comment section of the Sketchbook Challenge blog so that others can look at your pages too!

And that's not all! Thanks to the generosity of some terrific sponsors we'll be doing some givewaways and special shopping offers too!

So pick up your blog badge here, go grab a sketchbook, some pencils, pens, markers or paints and get ready to sketch with us!

Home Again and Studio Doings

After countless cities, airplanes and hotel rooms jammed into one five-week period, we're finally home again. I'd tell you all about it, but a vacation is usually only interesting to the people taking it. But if you're really dying to know, here are some of the photos I took on my various travels, knock yourselves out!

Monday saw me back in the studio and I have to admit, after being out of it for so long, it felt a little foreign to me, like it was someone else's space. To get back into the groove, I charged more screens with thickened black dye.

These guys were done simply enough... I thickened my dye by adding Jet Black dye powder to clear print paste, putting it into a syringe with a very narrow tip, and drawing it onto the screens. Then they sat in the driveway all afternoon to bake in the sun.

Can I admit that I always, always, always seem to make far more thickened black dye than I can use in one session? As a result, I find myself scrambling to prepare more fabric to use it on, rather than put the excess down the drain.

Because I had so danged much left over, I tried a technique written about by Leslie Tucker Jenison in the Oct/Nov 2010 issue of Quilting Arts.

In the article, Leslie uses tiny scraps of paper, MX dyes and silk screens to create interesting textures on fabric. I only slightly modified this technique by using scraps of cotton fabric, which I cut with a pinking blade in my rotary cutter.

I used long, narrow scraps of Pimatex to print on and then, as Leslie demonstrated, scattered the scraps across the unprinted fabric, wet out the screen with my thickened dye and continued to print down the length of the cloth.

The two on the right were printed using Leslie's method and the piece on the left is a monoprint taken from the paper that had been placed under the fabric before printing.  Pretty neat results, and instead of washing all that great dye and texture out of the screen, I left the bits of fabric stuck to it, left it with the others to dry in the sun, peeled away the scraps, and will use it later in the week to do some deconstructed screen printing.

And lastly, there are only two days left to sign up for my Dharma-sponsored give-away. On Saturday, October 9, two names will be chosen by a random number generator to receive one of these fantastic dye kits. All you have to do to be eligible for the drawing is to comment on this post.

Until Saturday, happy creating!