Nature Painted with Tracie Lyn & Marilyn Huskamp

My Art & Soul workshop "Nature Painted" with Tracie Lyn Huskamp and Marilyn Huskamp stretched my acrylic painting skills. Both teachers gave us individual attention, demonstrated lots of techniques with different products and created a fun environment to play and paint.

I'm entering this piece in Portland Audubon Society's 2009 Wild Arts Festival. You can pick-up a free 6"x 6"x 1½" canvas at Art Media along with an application form. Entries are due November 7th. Get more information Here. The artwork will be exhibited November 21st and 22nd at the Wild Arts Festival, Montgomery Park.

Tracie is good friends with Marilyn, her mother-in-law. They make a great teaching team. Check out their blogs here and here. I got to know them better through our Nature Gathered challenge this past year.

Tracie just published a book explaining all of her mixed media techniques- collecting botanical and other natural stuff, backgrounds and painting nature themes. I highly recommend it for lots of nature inspiration. You can find her book here.

Stairway to Heaven- Last Nature Gathered Piece

Heavens was the last theme for our Nature Gathered art challenge. I made another art quilt using a sketch, fabric, hand and machine stitching and acrylic paint for the clouds and stairs. It's entitled 'Stairway to Heaven". Below is the sketch for this piece.

The Nature Gathered art challenge offered many opportunities to experiment with new techniques, work with my sketches and photos to develop a theme and share ideas and inspiration with other artists in the group. Doing one piece a month sometimes felt like a lot of work- to create a vision and then implement it with an 8x8 inch format. The rewards of doing this challenge are numerous- stretching boundaries, playing with new ideas, being attuned to the natural world, making new friends and creating a body of work. Our show at the Sixth Street Gallery in Vancouver ends tomorrow. I want to thank everyone who participated, especially Jan and Tracie Lyn for getting us all together.

If you want to see the two other art quilts that I made for the show Click Here and Here.

Join Us For Our Nature Gathered Show

The Nature Gathered artist reception at the Sixth Street Gallery will be on Friday, August 7, 2009 during the Vancouver, Washington Downtown Art Walk, from 5-9 pm. PLEASE join us! We will have live music, food and refreshments at the gallery. In addition, the August Art Walk includes Art in the Heart which features artists demonstrating the creation of their art in front of the various galleries. Our show will be on display at the gallery from August 8 through August 28.
The Sixth Street Gallery celebrates their Fifth Annual Fiber Arts Festival at the same time as the Nature Gathered Show. Both exhibits will display a variety of artwork you don't want to miss. I feel very fortunate to participate in the Nature Gathered Show.

Nature Gathered Elements Mandala

This weekend, I worked on my Nature Gathered elements piece. Mandalas inspire a spiritual aspect in their creation. An ancient art form used across many cultures and religions, creating a mandala is a meditative process, an act of devotion. Across Asia from India to Tibet to Japan, mandalas symbolize sacred art that reflects the soul or luminous consciousness. One can use mandala paintings to make a mind-body-spirit connection to heal and reconnect to our essential Being. Below is the process I used to create this piece.

the drawing-

Copied drawing using Saral paper to prepared collaged and gessoed canvas.

the painting-

addition of gold-leaf foil and pin lining with 3-D dimensional fabric paint. Then I painted three layers of amber shellac to finish the piece. I learned this creative process from Anahata Katkin.

"Euphorbia Seasons " for Nature Gathered

Our Nature Gathered group selected seasons for the April challenge. Mine represents a variety of seasonal euphorbia. I discovered this plant last year and began taking photos. I didn't realize that poinsettia also belong in the euphorbia family. The outer edges are stenciled- an inspiration from Mary Ann's online class. I used Photo Shop to arrange and alter my photos.

Mt Hood Landscape for Nature Gathered Challenge

I used Alma Cox's telamadera fusion technique to make this piece. She was a featured artist on Oregon Art Beat in February. Her work inspired me to do a piece on wood with burnt-in lines of my sketch, acyclic paint and fused fabric. In Spanish, tela is fabric and madera is wood. She also wrote an article about her process in Cloth Paper Scissors March/April 2008. I see she is teaching at Art & Soul in Portland this year. I left the mountain and sky painted without fabric and burnt into the wood the fir trees. It's a fun process.
I wanted to play with color and value studies using Photo Shop. It's hard to distinguish differences from this scan but it did help me see what colors to lighten or darken.
This is my final study before I put finishing touches on the piece.

Lost Coral Reef

Our Nature Gathered theme this month is the sea. I've always been captivated by the Institute for Figuring hyperbolic crocheted coral reef exhibits. Margaret Wertheim from Australia started the project to make others aware of how fast the earth is losing its coral reefs. When a coral reef dies, it loses all of its color. I crocheted one of these bleached coral reefs. The branched coral is machine felted with wool roving on Lutradur. Everything else is crocheted.
Here is a close up view from the side .

I keep a sketchbook with ideas and inspiration for projects and here is one of the pages I used to design the "Lost Coral Reef".

Cabinet of Curiosities- ex-tinc-tion

For my January Nature Gathered piece , I chose to highlight extinction in my cabinet of curiosities. The images are drawn and water colored. The theme reminds me of life cycles and what survives or not. Life can be very fragile. Climate change, global warming, over population and development make this more apparent. What wild life will become extinct in our lifetime?

Nature Gathered December Snake Piece

The Nature Gathered theme for December was amphibians and snakes. I enjoyed working with the quilted pet portrait idea and decided to make this one 3-D. All is made with fabric except for the polymer clay head. The complementary color palette is one I want to explore again.

Nature Gathered Fauna Piece

It's cold here in Portland with snow, ice and wind at 25°F. It's given me a chance to do a piece for our Nature Gathered group. Karen Winter's article on quilted pet portraits in the Aug/Sept issue of Quilting Arts inspired my squirrel. I even felted in a little snow on the ground for him. Working with fabric and thread helped keep me warm and cozy today. Hope you are all safe and sound during this cold snap.

Mexican Field Notes for Nature Gathered

I'm getting caught up with my Nature Gathered posts. While in Mexico, the process of using natural materials for dyes really interested me. Both the weavers and the candle makers used
the same plant-based dyes for blue, green, yellow, brown or tan and cochineal for red. The colors are wonderful, rich and very earthy.

Flora Drawn and Collaged Nature Gathered Challenge

The layering of paint, collage and line drawings interests me lately. Here is my interpretation of our Nature Gathered flora challenge.

Portland Art Collective Blog & Nature Gathered

The Portland Art Collective started a new blog to promote their "Open Doors" Art Show and Sale December 5th and 6th, 2008 at the Multnomah Arts Center in Portland, Oregon. Members will be posting photos of their artwork. Subscribe to the blog and feel the enthusiasm for this new venture that we are undertaking. I feel very fortunate to be apart of this creative group of artists.

In August, the theme for our "Nature Gathered" project was entomology . I wanted my 8x8 to reflect the look of fossil images in contrast to crawling bugs. I used plaster of paris and party store plastic bugs to create the fossil insects.

Nature Gathered

I'm in a new 8x8 art exchange called Nature Gathered to explore a different theme each month for a year. Members post their artwork on the blog monthly. In July, our theme was birds.

It's amazing to see the variety of unique interpretations and wonderful art techniques that each artist uses. My "Birds" combines acylic painting, collage and drawn lines. I wanted the feel of summer, togetherness and the peacefull experience of being outdoors. Please visit our blog and see what we're doing.