Art Diary. A weekly wrap-up of art activities. For earlier posts, search under the category Art Diary.

Art. Your hands and mind work together as best friends. 

 Saturday, July 14 – I’m celebrating the conclusion of the last 7 or so weeks of busyness with shows and public events with my favorite activity – ordering my living and working space. It’s the first step in starting new projects. I got my studio in shape:

I’m planning to work on some paintings. Like I need more of them! with so many that I made for the exhibit –  but – maybe I do. All but two of my current work are at the gallery exhibit until 8/31. Somehow I neglected to realize I have an art fair planned for August 25th. Oops. I also would like to enter a piece in an exhibit in August.

I’ll dig around here at home and improvise, but maybe three more paintings would not hurt? Besides paintings, I also have a couple of other projects on the go. So, a clean studio is a signal to get to work.

I also opened the kiln this afternoon. Take a look.

I’m really happy with what I can see – I was mostly wondering how the sgraffito tiles worked out. I’ll show them in more detail in their own post, but I can see that the contrast is good between clay and figures, the tiles are not warped (sometimes that happens in firing to tiles that look flat in the greenware state), and overall, well, I’m just happy!

It’s a whole different look from my bright tiles and I love that idea, too, another aspect of clay that I can participate in.

Sunday, July 15 – I worked on those paintings some more, in the afternoon. You can see that there are four of them now. That is enough. I’m coming up with some odd images. We’ll see where they go.

Monday, July 16 – I decided to prepare the small clay figurines for the coloring process by doing their faces. Here’s the whole group before I start:

I color their faces with Velvet underglaze, Jet Black. (These little people remind me of those sheep with black faces. Just saying.)

Then I wash off color from the prominent spots, using a wet rag. The black color stays in the indentations. After I finished their faces, I did the same thing with their hands.

Now they are ready for their color sessions.

I did the rest of the figures in the same way.

I also gave the “clay rocks” their coat of black – it forms the base for the colorful patterns I give to these items.

Tuesday, July 17 – From yesterday, I worked a little on that “secret project” I mentioned a week or two ago. Here is a snippet, just to represent effort:

I also worked on a couple of the paintings from the group I started. The yellow shape one now has turned into trees. Kind of.

Wednesday, July 18 – I got in a little painting today. As you know, I’ve been working on those four paintings over the last week, a couple at a time. Today I took three of them into the studio. Two look pretty similar to how they appeared when I started today’s work but the one (that started out with three yellow things, moved into trees, and well, now it’s a beach with rocks on it…I think) underwent a lot of change.

Oh dear, sometimes I feel for my paintings, with their identity problems in early life…but I think these particular ones may have found their way. More or less. I’ll let them sit a few days and see.

Friday, July 20 – After spending yesterday at my weekly Poetry Marathon session, I decided today that it was time to wrap up these paintings. Two look finished to me. The other two I took back to the studio.

I did just a few small things to this one:

This next one, well, if you look back earlier in the week, it started out as three yellow things, became trees, then a sort of beach. I was getting annoyed with it by Wednesday’s end and so on Thursday, I got my husband to sand down the lower half of the painting. Because… I had an idea and I wanted a smooth surface to work on. I highly recommend sanding paintings off if they get lumpy and you hate what you are doing (this is a good reason to use board or masonite, if I think about it, because it won’t work on canvas…I find yet another way to enjoy my choices in life, this one being my love of board/masonite to paint on).

You also see a concrete example of what happens when I want to paint but don’t know what. I just keep going around in circles until – things resolve themselves. It’s always worked that way for me, so I trust the process and keep slapping on paint…

But I digress. At the end of today’s session, I have a beachgoer. Time to stop.

I’ll set these paintings aside for a little while. I think next week I want to try some clay work. Some ink and Chinese brush. Some…well, we’ll see, won’t we?

OK, that’s it for this week! Thank you for coming along with me.