I'm playing with a full deck here... i hate puns, really....

But I want to talk a bit about what I am doing right now.  I know there are tons of "art decks" with things to write about or prompts etc. and I have tried several of them over time.  HOWEVER, I don't want to do a funky chicken dance while drawing on big paper with fat charcoal... or whatever else is in the list that the creator found worked for them or thought would make the deck more universal.....
I have my own version of "block" and I decided to try to find my own way to "unblock" without creating a new task that might or might not get finished or could become a block in itself. 

I lock myself and the dogs in my studio every morning and let them play or sleep or do whatever and I write my artist's pages and then I do other things and I try not to let myself out til noon.  I have done a good bit of work in the music journal and the bridge book and I am pondering another book that I am not ready to decide to do yet, but...

I just don't always have something that I want to DO while I am there and so I decided to create a chore deck.  I also decided right away that this was NOT going to be all drawn and painted and decorated it was going to be a piece of art supplies without any gilding whatsoever because I could certainly spend a lot of time making this and have it turn into another unfinished project.

I dug up a deck of cards .. 54 cards including two jokers and found that I could write on them with Sharpee permanent pens.  I sat down at the table and started looking around the studio.  Then I started writing.  One task per card.  Simple tasks..

* Go through the box of Polaroid Image Transfers and organize them
* Make a Gelliplate print or 5
* Check out the box of old Mediums to make sure they all are still usable
* Design and cut 1 print block
* Cut 5 eraser printing blocks
* Organize photography prints better for finding them
* Go through 1 box of yarn from under the bed
* Use Cotton Scrim in a print
* Collect all books about one artist and go through them

The list is heavy on organizing one specific area or type of tool or work or whatever.  I find that once I open something to organize it, a lot of ideas come flying out.   SO, this morning I shuffled the deck and picked the first one listed above.  I now have two image transfers from the box left out so I can work on them tomorrow.  If I don't do that, then I get to pull another card. 

The cards are absolutely not works of art, but I had a very easy time writing 54 things to do and I now have a list of all those little things I need/want to do.  I certainly could have dressed them up better and not just scribbled them down on a card but then I would not have 54 done and ready to see if this kicks me into doing more. 

So I found a pretty box to store them in.... and here they are...
 

The red transfers well also!

This is a bit exciting, though for some reason, I think related to the paper, the tape was cloudy and not as clear as the black typed one.  I want to do some experimenting with different papers since an image I was playing with came off some double sided Imaging and photo paper really well.  I bought when it was discontinued and sold at Jams for 10% of the old price.  I have TONS of it, I wonder now how I managed to lug all those boxes home, but I did somehow ...

In any case, experiment of the day was a success. 

 

Something I am thinking about... or maybe playing with

I have an Underwood Typewriter (courtesy of my children, who are great gift buyers!)  and I have been playing about with when to use it to create text.

Transfers using tape ... where the clear tape is placed on a printed image and later the backing paper is washed away leaving the ink on the tape ... is one of the things I love to do.  I have used it here, and here and here in my GWBridge book with different effects.  The cover uses clear contact paper, but since making that I have gotten some 6 inch wide tape, so I have been using that.

However, to do this, you have to use laser or carbon based ink images.  Copier machine images will work, but Ink Jet images won't work since the water washes the ink away.  I only have an inkjet printer here, but my local UPS store... I LOVE THOSE GUYS... help me out.  I send them a pdf that I want printed and they print it on their lovely copiers and I go pick it up and pay for it, easy peasy.

I just wanted a little bit of text to play with here, however, for a project I am pondering.  SO, I broke out the typewriter and typed my favorite Peter Beard quote.  Sometimes it works better if you let it rest for 24 hours, but I had to see if it would work at ALL!  SO after about 10 minutes and some vigorous rubbing with a bone folder I soaked it  and it came out VERY interesting
!
Before attaching to anything.  I didn't clean it up TOTALLY clean, since I liked the look with some of the original paper showing:


As close as I could get, so you could see the lovely effect that the typewriter type gives.  You would never get this effect with a computer and a printer. 


Attached to some bumpy paper that I gessoed with stone gray Daniel Smith Gesso, which is one of my favorite background colors:


My lovely little typewriter came with a red and black ribbon, so I retyped the quote in red, also.  I am going to wait for 24 hours or so before peeling that one.

Things that worry me:  This is an OLD ribbon. I have to look to see what is out there that could /can replace it if I get addicted to this effect.
And, if I can find a replacement will it be the same kind of ink? 

Falling in love with old things is not for the faint of heart. 

And for other quoteaholics out there, this is the quote, which is about the artist as a collector:

"Once the connoisseur of connections starts looking for the coded signals that hint of order beneath chaos, they are everywhere, like the shimmering squiggles of string theory, organizing them into a manageable matrix becomes essential for getting from one day to the next."

Anyone who has seen my studio knows how this resonates for me. 

A New Page in the GWBridge Journal

This double page spread just fell into my lap when I looked at the photo.  I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like on the page, and it came close to what I had thought. 
This is the full page spread.  The edges are added with liquid pencil, and they fade better than they appear to in this photos because of the liquid pencil absorbs the light and the transferred photo reflects it.  But it is close to what it looks like in real life. You should be able to embiggen all the pages and it is better seen that way, I think.  The book is 4.5 inches by 14 inches when open completely.

closeup of the left page

closeup of the right page

Standing up, which is how I think the book will be seen generally.  There is more about how this all got started here and here.

I think that there are 7 spreads and a cover left to do... this one is fun.

There is a hole in the world today, Will Campbell has died at 88.

Many people reading this will not know who Will Campbell is/was.  He is marvelously described in his obituary in the New York Times today which briefly mentions the way I came to know of him, through his autobiography/biography of his brother -- Brother to a Dragonfly.  I read it years ago when it first came out, and loved it at the time.  Since then, I have heard him speak several times and even shook hands with him once.

He was a voice for non-violence that never lost track of the fact that the world has humor and variety in it and is a wonderfully complex place.  To hear him speak when he took questions from the audience was pure delight.  He will be missed, but somehow I think he is fussin' at the God he believed in about why he didn't shine the light a little stronger sometimes.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/will-d-campbell-maverick-minister-and-civil-rights-stalwart-dies-at-88.html

edited to add
http://eedition2.latimes.com/Olive/ODE/LATimes/LandingPage/LandingPage.aspx?href=TEFULzIwMTMvMDYvMDk.&pageno=MzA.&entity=QXIwMzAwMA..&view=ZW50aXR5

It is a link to the LA Times obituary that contains one of my favorite lines, I think he used it every time he spoke .. "If you're gonna love one, you've gotta love 'em all."

The Walls Notebook

I am enjoying this Walls Notebook.  It is a fat little book of pictures of city walls, mostly New York, but I think there are some others in there.  This started out as 2 garage doors and I increased the colors and added 2 figures I found in an early 20th century magazine.  I saw them years ago and thought the figures would be useful at some point, and here they are!  I try to keep the idea of wall art, so they could easily be stencils...

The best thing is that it is often very quick to do a page and you feel as though you have accomplished something when you are done.