Time Well Spent

I spent the day yesterday working on Gelli plate prints with Penn. The first day of Autumn was a windy and wet one, so it was the perfect day to be holed up in the studio with a good friend, creating.

As you can see in the photo on the left, I created quite the stack. There were thirty one 8 1/2 x 11 sheets and then about a dozen book pages that I used to clean my brayer off on in between prints. Nothing goes to waste! The print on the right was my most favourite of the day.

I also really love the one on the right. 

These ones are more subtle. They kind of remind me of Basic Grey, which is my favourite paper arts company.

I have also been working on Roben Marie Smith's You've Got Mail Art class. I haven't been doing the projects so much as working on technique right now. Don't get me wrong-the projects are great-I just want to focus on developing a looser style right now. I've been using what Roben Marie teaches to experiment in doing that.

These are four pieces where I just used card stock as my substraight:

I will probably take them to colour copy when I make copies of my gelli prints. I like to colour copy my originals so I can use them endlessly in future art projects.

I find these two particular ways of making art very relaxing. I just lay paint down and there's really no wrong way to do it. If I don't like something I've done, I simply paint over it. It's quite freeing.

Penn and I also spent some time looking at some zines from each other's collection. She just did a zine swap with her art group recently and I realized I really need to finish the zine I've been working on for some time now. I love making them, but they are a considerable amount of work. I tend to work on them in stages, so it takes months to put one together. I have the art created, I just need to decide what the content is going to be. (No mean feat!) My goal is to have Manual Dexterity 4 completed before I have hand surgery. I see the hand surgeon on Thursday and then I'll have a better idea if that's even possible. Here's hopin'!