The Sketchbook Challenge EZine!

Stop the presses!  The first Sketchbook Challenge E-zine is now available for purchase!

Available for download right now for only $9.99!

The Sketchbook Challenge E-zine is 83 full color pages of creativity, inspiration and projects!

Click here to peek inside!

What you’ll find inside...
Learn how to draw a pinecone with Jane LaFazio
Exploring Text Collage with Kelli Nina Perkins
Make a Scrappy House Quilt with Jamie Fingal
Working in series by Jane Davies
Make bad art with Lyric Kinard and become a better artist
Sue Bleiweiss shows you how to make a sketchbook sleeve
Carol Sloan shares her remedies for blank pages
Take 5! with Carla Sonheim
Screenprinting for the Mixed Media Artist by Leslie Tucker-Jenison
Take your sketchbook out to eat with Susan Sorrell
Stacked Journaling with Judi Hurwitt
Learn how to use your inner GPS to create journal pages with Violette
Learn a trio of pamphlet binding stitches from Diana Trout

Important information regarding printing this document for binding:This e-zine has been formatted for on screen viewing. If you want to print a copy to have bound then you must scale the document to 90% to allow for a wide enough left side margin. In the print box, select the scale option and change it to 90%. Please print a test page first (we recommend page 5) to make sure that the setting is appropriate for your printer before printing the entire document.

The Sketchbook Challenge E-zine is in pdf format and include step-by-step instructions and full-color photo illustrations. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or higher to be able to open the lessons. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free software that you can download from the Adobe Website. 

POST A REVIEW AND WIN A PIECE OF MAIL ART!

Post a review of the sketchbook challenge e-zine on your blog or website and we'll enter your name into a drawing to win a piece of mail art from one or more of the Sketchbook Challenge artists!  Send a link to your published review by 12/1/11  to sue at sue@suebleiweiss.com to be entered into the drawing.  Winners will be announced in December - good luck!

Can't Resist This!

Lynn Krawczyk has been brilliant again and has started a Thermofax Club Of The Month. 

To join the club, all you have to do is head over to her etsy shop by clicking the link above and choose one of the icons reading, "2011 Thermofax Screen Of The Month Club." The club gives you exclusive access to six artist-drawn screens that will only be available to club members, delivered to you one each month for six months.

I feel honored to have been asked to create one of the designs myself and I hope that if you've ever wanted to try using these simple and stunningly effective tools, you'll begin here. There are only twelve slots available and then, as Lynn says, "When they are gone, they are gone and memberships won't re-open until the 2012 club!!!"

In other fun news, May was my month to choose the theme for The Sketchbook Challenge and I chose the theme of resists... what do you resist? What do you fail to resist? Come over and tell us- or better yet, show us by also joining along in your own sketchbooks! And don't forget to upload photos and scans of your sketches to our Flickr group to be eligible for some pretty amazing give-aways.  And tune in later today to hear our own Carol Sloan give an interview for Artistically Speaking radio.

Happy creating!

Studio Doings

Life is settling back into a more comfortable routine, and I couldn't be more grateful. I don't think I ever realized just how much a creature of habit I had become until something huge came along to shake up my tidy little world.

My studio lures me as it always has, though my hours spent in it have decreased dramatically. That's okay, though- it makes my creative time more energized and focused.

My design wall is humming with fabric, something it hasn't seen in a few months.

I've kind of gone bananas for using my hand prints as a design motif; I love the large scale straight line/inverted "U" marks they make. I know, I know- I'm not the first artist to discover that I have hands, prehistoric cave wall artists were doing this eons ago- but the lovely simplicity of painting my hand and pressing it to a surface is particularly appealing to me right now, so I'm just going with it.

It led me to thinking of my hand as a discharge agent, so out came some old painted and hand-dyed fabrics.

(36" x 45")

 

This piece of fabric is nearly two years old. It was originally hand-dyed, and then a simple screen made with contact paper squares was used to add textile paint. I was totally lost after that which direction to take the piece in (I know now what I didn't know then, of course- never start surface design with paint), so it got folded and put away. But this week, it came back out to receive some hand-printed discharge marks.

 (detail)

I gloved my right hand, made a discharge pad out of a plastic tray lined with paper toweling soaked in Clorox, and began making impressions all over the fabric. After I had reached the discharge effect I was looking for, I plunged the piece into cold water, rinsed it thoroughly, and neutralized the bleach.

Now it wants to come out and play with the other pieces on my design wall, some of which were also discharged in the same manner using my palm prints.

In other news, the basil is doing beautifully... maybe next year I'll try growing some other herbs.

I signed up for another year with the Brooklyn Art Library to do The Sketchbook Project 2012. I chose the theme "Writing On The Wall" and when it arrives and I start working on it, I'll post photos to keep you updated. I hope everyone reading will seriously consider getting involved in this awesome project!

And finally, May is my month to choose the theme for The Sketchbook Challenge. I hope you'll join me over there, and work along in your own books with me and my fellow artists!

Happy living!

Too Matchy-Matchy?

Hi all, this is my posting today over on The Sketchbook Challenge blog.

I love to bring opposites into play in my work when things get a little too copacetic. I'm always drawn to analogous color schemes, but by the time I get everything looking all happy and cooperative, I'm bored stiff with the composition. That's when it's time to liven things up by going off the rails and adding something totally unexpected.

A good example is the two-page spread above. Everything was getting along too well, not to mention that I really disliked the page on the left.

After puttering around with some tissue and paints, I created a highly contrasting sheet of paper, which I then adhered onto the offending page with rubber cement.

Now the spread has more character.

I extended my collaged sheet over onto the right-hand page a tad, just to marry them a little more. They are certainly opposites- a cool blue/green and a warm russet/orange- but they also relate somewhat in that they were both heavily layered with the same paint colors and using the same stamping tool. I have no doubt that later they will call for something more dramatic to bind them together, but for today, this spread is incomplete and will make a wonderful background for future imagery.

More "opposites" work in my sketchbook included both opposites in composition and in color.

Here, a heavily painted collage sheet (left) is paired with a paper towel remnant (right) that had been used to mop up green/blue paint. The piece on the left is created with unnatural colors in garish combinations (my favorite kind of mixed-media art to create, quite frankly!) while the piece on the right is almost pastoral and looks as if it could have been monoprinted directly from leaves taken from my backyard. Like the one above it, this spread is incomplete.

Color opposites find harmony in my sketchbooks... here, painted paper and hand-dyed fabrics that have been doodled on with Pentel Gel Fabric Pens.

Scraps of fabric previously used for experimentation are always welcome in my sketchbooks, too. Here, purple and yellow- opposites who famously don't usually work and play well together- share space without dominating one another.

More temperature opposites, turquoise and yellow, mirror each other from one side of the sketchbook to the other, the left one done with layers of paint while the right comprises layers of stacked journaling in yellow and turquoise india ink.

Again With The Good News, Bad News Thing!

Well, things have changed pretty substantially since I blogged at the beginning of the year. The bad news first: I won't be attending Jane Dunnewold's Art Cloth Masteries class, after all. It feels awful to even type that, but there it is.

The good news is that I will once again be able to blog at will and read my favorite blogs again, something I had given up simply due to time constraints. But those constraints are no longer an issue, and you should start seeing me pop up in your comments more frequently than I have for the last few months.

I'm still weighing my options for what my future might hold and where I'd like to take my career, but for now, for a few days at least, I've been taking some "me" time.  That's very good news for my sketchbook, as is has been welded to my hand for the last few days.

I'm working through my ideas for where I want to take my stacked journaling design idea, and what better place to do that than in the pages of a good, loyal sketchbook?

 

The page above was created with Fineline markers and stacked journaling- the word green, to be exact, which is what created the loopy bits to the outsides of the leaves and the great texture in both the leaves and the stem. So far I haven't found any design that I haven't been able to enhance with some form of stacked journaling.

Here, stacked journaling was screened onto a previously painted sketchbook page using a Thermofax screen and black textile paint. 

Stacked journaling was used here to create shapes on fabric which was then mounted into my sketchbook with fluid matte medium and "coffee stained" with fluid acrylic paint.

Creating contrast against a brightly painted background....

More screening of stacked journaling, adding depth to a previously sketched, screened, and painted page...

 

Stacked journaling on top of the existing text and Notan-like design of an old, yellowed telephone book page, cut and mounted into my sketchbook....

As you can see, I use my sketchbooks to do more than sketch. They are the incubator of ideas which will grow and develop organically, as I work each page in my own particular way. 

I hope you'll come show us some of your sketchbook's "particular ways" at The Sketchbook Challenge.

Fun Car Is Fun!

And Highly Prized, which just happens to be the theme for this month's Sketchbook Challenge.

This is my zippy little two-seater Altima.

She just got paid off last October and after our three-year companionship, I think she and I understand each other brilliantly. She'll be with me for as long as she can roll down the road. Her name is Fun Car because... well... because she really, really is.

This is my zippy little stacked journaling sketch of my Highly Prized Fun Car.

I lightly sketched in the outline and added the blunt details with pencil. Then I stacked journaling inside the details with Steadler Triplus Fineliner pens. 

This week also sees me preparing for a week-long independent study group I'll be attending this month with my masteries instructor, Jane Dunnewold.  I've been doing a little 'old fashioned' fabric dyeing- using my washing machine to dye yardage of pale-value solids in several different primaries. 

I spent a lot of time making sure that my machine would be appropriate for dying a good solid color. I measured the water temperatures before and after each agitation cycle, and then timed the cycles themselves. Turns out that all necessary factors were in perfect balance for full immersion dyeing, so I launched into it.

The first two pieces came out of the machine with a soft, even color across the length of the fabric. I have no reason to think the other two I do today won't be just as beautiful. I wish I'd known how easy it would be to achieve a true solid just by using my machine- I'd probably have done bolts of fabric this way by now! My hope is to continue to layer color, imagery and text onto these pieces throughout the indy study week.

I hope your new year is filled with fun, creativity and laughter!

More Stacked Text

This time, in color...

("Inside/Outside", watercolor paper, 18" x 24")