Projector confessions, planning future marks, and posca pen stitches
Log from the scary studio #4
Hello friends, welcome to my studio.
It’s been a full month of these weekly studio logs! What started as a whim is stacking into an accountability practice that is both keeping my butt in my studio chair and creating some lovely company in my little corner of the world. So for that I am very grateful to you, my dear readers, whoever and wherever you are.
Today I’m starting in the studio with some projection tracing. I put the gessoed wooden panel on the wall and set up the projector. I use Adobe Fresco, and this lets me have my drawings on my iPad (for the actual drawing part) and on my phone, which I hook up to the projector with a lightning adapter. I trace my drawing with a grey marker (to avoid last week’s black debacle) and just like that, I’ve got a painting in the lineup for my work table.
I want to cringe even including this part of my process in this log, because I can hear someone yelling “cheating!!” from their inbox. But, as I always do when I talk about using a projector in the studio, I will remind myself (and whoever else needs it) that it’s a tool like any other, and a very popular tool at that. Mary Pratt used one. We had a whole projector room in my art school painting program that we were encouraged to use. And before projectors we used carbon paper (which I still use on occasion) and camera obscura (which I teach in my photography class) to capture something exactly as it exists onto a surface. So really, I’m taking part of a canonical tradition, and I’m in good company.
Back in my little purple painting room I’ve got an almost cold cup of tea and Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on the tv. Next up is a fun coral paint colour on my big yellow painting. I still haven’t cleaned up the orange fingerprints from last week, but I think I’m going to leave that until the final layers to touch up.
On my smaller painting, all of the collages pieces are on! I’m having a hard time imagining the fun paint strokes that I want to layer on top, so I take a picture of the painting and do a little play time in Adobe Fresco while I’m waiting for the coral paint to dry. This is an easy way to take the scary away from these high pressure marks, which can be paralyzing enough to make me stop working without some time for experimentation.
I have planned a few swoops I feel happy with, digitally anyway, so I go back to the big painting and do another layer of coral. I’m almost out of this colour paint in my little tube, so I hope I don’t run out before I get the coverage I need! This is a downside to mixing my own colours, but it’s worth it to get that perfect hue I imagined.
Back to the little painting, I pick up my Posca marker in a lavender colour to put some stitches in between some quilt squares. These little details are so fun to do and really make the work feel more finished.
Kingsley isn’t very content to let me work today, and is up asking for scritches every few minutes. Could you say no to this face?
I wash my brushes and cut this studio session short to get ready for an anniversary dinner with my husband. We can’t be all studio and no supper, now can we! Even though I had a shorter amount of time, I’m still happy with the work I finished and I know what steps to take tomorrow, which are two huge wins I always aim for in the studio. That wasn’t so scary, now was it?
Other studio news:
I’m working on a sculpture for the St. John’s International Airport, and we had our first visit to the install site this week! It’s currently a construction zone, but it was great to see where the work will go and do some planning in real space.
I saw my long-time studio friend Daniel Rumbolt’s show Forever There this past weekend, and if you haven’t checked out his work - do it. It’s so beautiful.
Ways to support my work: