I'll admit it right here. I'm a pack rat. Working in recycled materials only gives my pack rattiness permission. 2 weeks ago when I shot the bookbinding UStream I carefully arranged my cameras so that the viewers could not see the abject misery my studio suffers. My towering stack of boxes of paper had been ransacked for supplies and some of my supplies had never come out of their boxes when we moved. Posters sat in tubes and folds waiting for me to do SOMETHING with them, all stacked in one sad pile to the far corner of my studio. My large workbench, something I take great pride in telling you I refinished MYSELF when we first moved into the house sat unused, not because I don't love it but becuase I haven't seen it's top in months because stuff was piled on it.

After seeing a hoarder's clip on YouTube I realized I'm one step away from collecting my urine in pails and storing it in the studio.*

So I've been planning on buying shelves for sometime now and this is a great time of year to get cheap shelving. Back to school means back to college and that means cheap shelving. Anyway. I managed I find cheap wooden shelves of ok quality at homedepot for $20 each. I picked up 3. It's a splurge but totally worth it. I spent last night moving the giant pile of supplies and paper to the OTHER corner of the studio. I put together 2 of the shelves and started to go through some of the boxes of supplies, stuff I need put into 1 box, stuff I don't in another box. Trash is going into a big ass trashbag.

Art supplies are going on the 2 shelves at the far end of the studio, paper in the closet, and bookbinding supplies on the other shelf next to the closets and the papercutting table. The rolling table will live next to the drawers when I'm not using it, when I am it'll roll out and be used. Various other supplies will get permanent homes as well. When I have a place to put stuff I put it there but when I don't I let it float around and gather places. I might even get out the lable maker…

As I move from my recycled bookbinding** and back into drawing and painting I realize I need fewer supplies and less stuff hanging around. I need pencils, charcoal, pens, paint and the stuff to put it on. Similar to art journaling "fine" art needs fewer supplies. Likewise, bookbinding doesn't need many but paper and thread etc, but the recycled portion of it takes more and paper takes up a lot of space, esp when you start buying it by the case.

I go through periods of simplification in my life, I'm in one now. I'm evaluating what I need and don't need. I'm sure some stuff will end up on the swap and classifieds section of the ArtJournaling.ning.com site and some on eBay.

Really it's good to simplfy and pare it all down to the essentials.

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water buffalo head
Originally uploaded by shishirnaik

Lovely image of a waterbuffalo head. Love how the red peeks through and the tones are so simple.

Originally uploaded by chloe mcgregor

Love this lettering, it reminds me of high school.

Age…
Originally uploaded by Liveartnow, having a temporary trade stop 🙂

Lovely little mixed media collage.

It's funny that certain things come up in your life on their anniversary dates.

@badpatient just tweeted a video of the Dresden Dolls doing a cover of PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. If you don't know PJ (I should find you, shake you soundly and give you a mix CD) what you don't know is that Rid of Me is the single most obsessive break up/love song ever recorded. Seriously, listen to the lyrics and listen to her play it live. She effing blows my mind.

I watched the video and it's awesome (go to my facebook to see it, i'm too lazy to snag the link again.) and it transported me back to a place and time in which I was crazy, stupid and broken hearted.

The last time my ex and I split was in June/July. I remember sitting in her kitchen after she'd avoided me for about a week, I waited for the bombshell that I knew was coming. Instead of the expected bombshell I got the "I'd like to see other people."* I shocked her by breaking into tears.*** She pressed on with her explanation of why. I continued to cry. It was one of those break ups you expect and see it coming for awhile and frankly it was long past due. She fully expected me to tell her sure I'd like to see you while you see other women. I again shocked her by saying that I don't share well and no. She cried and asked me to think about it. I reiterated no.

I felt strangely free after those words were said.****

I went home and made her a mix CD, well, after visiting a friend and drinking a few celebratory beers. The last song was Rid of Me. She didn't get it. She called me up to tell me she didn't get it and called the CD weird. Sigh. She missed the point entirely. Rid of Me is about obsessive, heart wrenching, gut churning love and breaking up. It's the raw cheated on broken heart. Rid of Me is the aftermath of love that should never have been.

The funny part about this is, though my ex didn't GET Rid of Me***** and thought it was weird she definately suffered from what I now refer to as "Rid of Me" syndrome: post break up insanity. Which is a whole otherset of stories, which I'll not share here as I know my ex, or her grilfriend read the blog on occasion.**

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Muellerized…
Originally uploaded by meganstringfellow

Lovely little sketch.

As I make time for art the more my passion for it grows. It becomes a more important part of my day and my routine every day. Every time I force myself to sit down with a pencil and my sketchbook to draw another free fruit, I'm reminded that this is what I love to do.

I took a small painting into my coworker who snagged me the free and gorgeous lemons last week. She was ecstatic. Something that was a simple throw away practice sketch to me made her day. She told me later in conversation that her nephew is into art but he keeps talking about waiting until he has time.

IF you wait until you have time, you'll run out of it.

Jonathan Manning wrote about how there are moments in your life that open your eyes and show you that you have to do stuff, and do it now before you run out of time. His blog is the Artistic Biker (if you aren't reading on a regular basis please do so starting now, and I'll forgive you for not reading his stuff earlier).

When I was in my first year of college my Grandfather, whom I was very close with, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He'd spent his whole life working, working hard and saying things like "When I retire I'm buying a set of oil paints and taking some classes" and "When I retire, I'm going to drive to California and swim in the Pacific." Well, he retired and a year later he was diagnosed with cancer and the summer between my 2nd and 3rd year he passed away. Many of those "When I retire" goals never realized. That has always stuck with me, and mostly the fact that he had all sorts and hopes and dreams that he was waiting to realize and never did. 

So, if you don't make time for "it" whatever big thing it is in your life you want to realize you could never end up doing it. Make time for it now, even if it's only 10 or 15 minutes a day. If my grandfather had taken a painting course when he was 50 He'd have gotten 17 good years of painting. One of the last things he told me was that he wanted me to do everything I wanted and not to put it off, a powerful message for a 20 year old girl from a dying man.

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I really like the grungy way this page starts out with the paper glued down and then ripped off. I love the torn paper look.

Quebec City – sketchbook
Originally uploaded by Jan Poynter – ARTIST

Love this sketch.

A month or so ago I wrote about how I purchased both a 2x4ft piece of 1/4 in thick birch plywood and the same in hardboard. I wanted to figure out which I liked best in terms of ease of use, preparation time and that sort of thing.

Here are my results:

Birch plywood was easy on the saw, with simple measurements I was able to pull a straight line with my circular saw. It chewed through it easily. I was even able to double stack it and cut through a double stack.

The hardboard one the other hand needed a firm hand for cutting or the saw would pull to the side and leave me with uneven sides. I tried double stacking it just for giggles, bad idea, it bound the saw up and made a mess of it.

For the record I'm using a black and decker 18V cordless circular saw with a 6 inch blade. (I think)

For gessoing I use a thinned gesso for the first coat, so it gets down into the fibers and really bonds with the surface. For the second coat I add some titanium white to the gesso to increase it's opacity. the last layer(s) are straight out of the bottle gesso. I'm pretty neurotic about brushing each coat in perpendicular directions to one another. This creates a really nice texture that I love.

The birch plywood dried really fast. The gesso went on smooth and with no skipping or strokes pulling away from one another. The plywood took 3 coats for a nice even coat that did not show the grain of the wood.

The hardboard dried much more slowly. The brush strokes sat more on the surface of it and the thinned gesso had a tendency for the strokes to pull away from one another. This tendency went away as more coats were applied. To get an evenly applied and opaque covering that was sufficiently white I needed to apply 4 coats of gesso.

Overall for my purposes the birch plywood wins out. It's slightly more expensive but the fact that it cuts more easily and uses less gesso means I spend less time preparing it's surface and can get to the business of art more quickly.