18 Tuesday Jun 2019
Posted in Art, Art on Exhibit, Zendala
Tags
100 Mandalas, 100 Zendala Challenge, acrylic paint, Art, collage, colored pencil, mixed-media, painting, paper, Sheboygan Visual Artists, SVA, Zendala, Zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, ZIA
I have submitted a donation to the Sheboygan Visual Artists small works fundraiser.
This is Zendala 7 of 100. We are moved into our new house and things are getting unpacked and setup. I hope to update my blog in the near future. Have a beautiful day.
27 Tuesday Feb 2018
Posted in Art on Exhibit, Zentangle Inspired Art
Tags
acrylic paint, Art, collage, dahlia, Flower of the Day, flower painting, flowers, mixed-media, rhodendron, Zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, ZIA
Here is the completed piece. I created the dahlia stencil from a photograph provided by Cee from her photography blog. I took some pictures along the way so you can see the work in progress. It will be part of an exhibit that will run all of March at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morris Township, NJ.
I will also be exhibiting my Mandala with Rhododendrons in this show.
I hope you have a beautiful day.
19 Friday Jan 2018
Posted in art class, Gratitude Journal
Tags
acrylic paint, Art, Art Journal, Art Journal Every Day, Gratitude, Gratitude Journal, heavy body acrylic paint, soft body acrylic paint
Lots of gratitude has come with the beginning of this year. As a consequence, I’m a little behind in posting what I have been up to. This first page layout of the year started with a comparison of 2 different brands/hues of purple. They each have their good points. Also, the one on the left was heavy body paint and the right was soft body. It was interesting to see how they cover the page differently. If you want a very uniform coverage the soft body seems to work better. Then I played with gold paint and pens. I was inspired by some gold on purple that I saw over the holidays and really wanted to play with this color combination. I think I will do this again!
I started the year off teaching an altered book art journaling class that I already posted work from the students. Here was my demonstration page that I continued to embellish over the last weeks. I am having a lot of Zentangle private student classes and I hope to catch up on blogging about photos that I have been taking, too.
I hope you have a beautiful day.
01 Friday Sep 2017
Posted in Art, Art on Exhibit
Tags
100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, Art Exhibit, black paper, eclipse, Mandala, sun, White ink, White ink on Black paper, Zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, Zentangle Method, ZIA
This piece is inspired by the Diamond Ring phenomenon from the eclipse. I am submitting it for a show this fall at Alhamra Art Center. This is a repurposed canvas from a painting party fundraiser. Here is my original version of the painting – it was a bunch of balloons and I made them more like flowers.
And I added some collage and some Zentangles. I’m not sure it is 100% done. I kind of want to tangle on the gold, but once it is on the canvas it is tricky. Maybe tomorrow I will post the development of the Zentangle Inspired Art – Mandala 50 of 100!
25 Friday Aug 2017
Posted in Art, Art on Exhibit, Zentangle Inspired Art
Tags
100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, Art, Certified Zentangle Teacher, collage, Mandala, Zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, ZIA
This is the large (for me 30″x30″) mandala that I have been working on all summer. There are a lot of layers and I took some pictures of the process. I really became fascinated with layers of acrylic glazes and am making a partner piece to this one that is more focused on that technique.
I started with collaged dictionary and other book pages onto the gessoboard. I also included some stamps. Then I did about a week’s worth of journaling on the board and stenciled a quote from a song that we sang at the Unitarian Fellowship I attend. This song has really resonated with me and really captures some of what I feel about my mandalas.
I already shared this layer with you earlier in the summer.
At this point what I was envisioning for the mandala started to change. There were a number of intermediate layers that didn’t really work for me. So I got started on the mandala pieces. I’m still learning about layers in collage and what kinds of paint play well together. I used some gouache paint and that left wrinkles in some of the pieces, but I decided to incorporate some Wabi Sabi into the finished piece. I may add some more gold accents, but I think it is done.
I played with a lot of different papers including navigation maps, dictionary pages, pages from a Chinese Poetry textbook and tissue. I continue to love how tissue paper works in collage. I used an old Vogue pattern for one of the pieces and decorated it with a Zentangle® pattern. Each of the pieces had some Zentangle® patterns.
I really toyed with leaving the layers show through in this point in the mandala but it was too much of a contrast from the other parts.
Here is the fully assembled piece, but it needed some more Wabi Sabi so I added gold paint in a few of the joints. You can see it in these close up pictures of the details.
The finished piece will be on exhibit at the Alhamra Art Center in September and October and is available for purchase through the Center. This is mandala 47 of 100. To join the 100 Mandala challenge check out Kathryn Costa’s website.
18 Friday Aug 2017
Posted in Gratitude Journal
Tags
acrylic glazes, acrylic paint, Art, Art Journal, Art Journal Every Day, black paper, Gratitude, Gratitude Journal, modeling paste, stencils
This is the home gratitude page layout. I have started buying one stencil each time I go to Michael’s or to an art supply store. I’m so happy with this flower stencil I recently purchased. This page layout is strongly influenced by the large mandalas that I’m working on. The first one is almost done. I’m trying to decide if I want to add gold to it using gold leaf or gold paint. You can see my experiment in the places where the mandala shapes come together. The gold leaf is kind of messy and I’m not very good at it yet, but the color and texture is so much more rich. I may keep practicing. I just talked to the gallery manager where it is going to be shown and they have extended the deadline to the end of August. I’m happy to have more time to figure it out. I also started another big mandala to go along with this one. If they don’t sell they will go in my living room. I’m really happy with them so far.
This gratitude journal entry is from my recent trip to Nashville to spend time with one of my favorite people. We had so much fun playing with art supplies and talking about art and doing show and tell. I used modeling paste with one of the new stencils of gears and that was a new technique for her. She introduced me to a few new kinds of gold paint that was super helpful for my current mandala project. I had brought a stencil for her that I knew she would love and it was just what she needed to finish one of her projects. Sharing art and friendship is one of the greatest joys in life for me. What are you grateful for this week? How did beauty touch your life today?
01 Tuesday Aug 2017
Posted in Art
Tags
100 Mandalas, acrylic glazes, acrylic paint, Art, collage, Mandala, Zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, ZIA
This summer I have been working on a large (30″ x 30″) mandala collage. You have already seen the background layers of the gessoboard. Here is a sample of the Zentangle patterned mandala pieces that I have been working on all summer. By the end of this week I hope to unveil the whole thing in a blog post of my process and the product. This is mandala 47 of 100.
19 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in Gratitude Journal
Tags
acrylic glazes, acrylic paint, Art Journal, Art Journal Every Day, Gratitude, Gratitude Journal, Journal, Let it be a dance
All of July so far has been captured in 2 art journal page layouts. There are a lot of layers in many ways in these pages. I hope you find some beauty or inspiration. I use my journal to practice affirmations and recognize what went well and what I’m grateful for from the day or week.
The background of this page layout came from my 50 small paintings endeavor that I worked on during Lent. I’m happy with how abstract the flowers in the vase turned out and I think they make a nice background for my gratitude journaling. I have been doing morning pages off and on for a while and I have gotten back into it recently. I have had a rough patch of depression and keeping track of gratitude is very helpful for me. I also have a quote from the Barbara Kingsolver book “Flight Behavior”
Her every possession was either unbreakable or broken.
The rectangle of wood on the right hand page is from a restaurant in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. Turns out I’m really not a beach in summer kind of person. But the rectangle of wood is from a restaurant that is so popular that we were never able to get to eat there. I loved these business cards that are printed on a very thin slice of wood and so that is the memento that made it into the journal! We really did have a nice time camping with some friends, even when it rained.
These pages have a few layers of journaling and lots of glazes. I’m really becoming obsessed with acrylic glazes. The left hand page has 2 pieces of the large mandala I’m working on and trying to decide if I want to do a glaze or 2 over the top. Maybe I will assemble it without the glaze and post it to see how it works. The white writing on the right hand page is some of the lyrics from the song “Let It Be a Dance We Do” by Ric Masten. I go to a Unitarian church here and we sang this last Sunday and it resonated with me. Most Sundays we sing something that really touches me. “Without the dark there would be no light… Share the laughter, bear the pain.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3s1XkTZEos
This sketch is of some flowers my husband brought me while I was in the hospital. This is the inside cover of one of the journals I use for my morning pages. I plan to collage these pages when I finish the journal.
What are you grateful for this week?
21 Wednesday Jun 2017
Posted in Gratitude Journal
Tags
acrylic paint, Art Journal, Art Journal Every Day, colored pencil, Gratitude, Gratitude Journal, mixing paint, Prismacolor colored pencils, purple, Reticula, Zentangle
This page layout is a little bit of a mess, but that is because I’ve been doing so much work. I made a batch of Artist Trading Cards and included some leftover bits from that on the left hand page. These include my new business card stickers from MOO that I put on the reverse side. People love these as my business cards. It is like they get there own little piece of art. I love the stickers and I hope you do too!
The right page has a prototype of one of the pieces of my Draw the Circle Wide mandala that is under construction. I made a photocopy and painted it with gouache to test how it would interact with acrylic matte medium. No smearing or bleeding of colors and the colors turned out nice and clear. I think this is how I’m going to paint these sections. Part of the development for that mandala was finding just the right purple. I also used this layout to document all my new Prismacolor colored pencils.
It turned out that I needed to use magenta to get any purples that I liked. What was interesting was experimenting with Payne’s Gray as a blue. It also demonstrated that I have a lot of shades of blue and not as many reds. I may explore that further. Or maybe there just isn’t the same variety of hues. Do any of you know about that? In any case I used Ultramarine blue and magenta to make the purple for my iris.
Another feature of the right page of the gratitude journal entry was my playing with reticula in a mandala. What is a reticula?
It is a pattern that you put in a grid. Changing the orientation creates different meta-patterns. This was one of the really wonderful things we explored at the Certified Zentangle Teacher seminar I went to in April. There is a lot of gratitude for my husband in these pages, too. I haven’t used one of my stencils for him in a while. Maybe this week. What are you grateful for? What is new in your art practice?
I hope you have a beautiful day.
Jeanette Clawson Art 