Sewing!

 I'm lovin' my new tote bag. It has a pocket, for your mobile, or wallet or to hang your glasses. Way cool!

Kids' Stuff

For these prints, I went back to cutting the designs from plastic sheets and printing from a template. It meant my screen was available for multiple prints and I could work faster.
I'm getting better at using the photo emulsion tactic, but it's rather time consuming! 

I will be using these prints for a variety of kids' related objects such as aprons, decorative pillows, and stuffies.

Summer Market Announcement!

This summer I'm bringing You & Mia to the streets of Vancouver!  So exciting.

In July and September I'll be selling my latest and greatest items at the Blim Monthly Markets (more info to come). There will be t-shirts with bikes, new children's aprons, pencil cases with Vespas, pillow cases with hippos, and hopefully some great tote bags for your groceries and other items that need to be carried around.

The Blim  Market is a great opportunity to see all the creative talents of local crafts people and enjoy a day of outdoors shopping. Hopefully the sun is shining.

Tribal Textiles in Zambia

I recently returned from Zambia. While there, I took the opportunity to visit Tribal Textiles, near Mfuwe.
Driving along a bumpy country road lined with trees, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, there is a signpost for Tribal Textiles. Turning off the main road, you are greeted by white-washed buildings, lush greenery overhanging wooden benches and stone courtyards. The air is cool and fresh under the shade. We stretched our legs, cramped from the long road-trip and walked through the shop and workshops.

Colors pop off of pillow cases and aprons. Bold geometric shapes and traditional patterns cover everything from bedsheets and curtains, to table runners and other home accessories. Everything is made with 100% cotton, designed and painted individually. I first thought the designs were created using Batik, like in Indonesia. But the designs are made using a starch paste that is sun-dried and then hand-painted. Baking the fabric makes it durable in countless washes. We arrived during the mid-day meal break so we missed out seeing the process, but there's a great little video (by Will Benson) that explains the How To part.

Enjoy!

Mama Olifant

Here's the elephant pillow I designed for Mother's Day. I was a wee bit late and only printed it the day before so it wasn't much use to my mom, or any other moms for that matter. Happily, it has been pointed out to me that it can also work quite well as a Baby Shower gift  (which can happen at all times of the year)! 

In short, the back is made up of an elephant stencil I cut out, while the front is screen printed using screen filler. I'm enjoying sewing pillow cases as they look very complete and finished at the end, and in reality it's just a bunch of straight lines! Print, print, zoom, zoom, cut here, cut there, and you're done! Voila!

Just for the fun of it, here are some of my other favorite elephants:

and to pull on the heart strings, here's a scene from Dumbo:

 Now, go call your mom and let her know how much you love her.

When in doubt, put a Vespa on it

I made a pillow! I know, not the biggest accomplishment ever, but I'm a novice in the world of sewing, so I'm excited! The stitches are (more or less) straight, and the pillow fits inside. What more would you want from a pillow case? Oh yeah, a cool image. So, when in doubt, slap a Vespa on it. 

The large front Vespa was done by cutting a stencil from my stash of overhead projector plastic. I didn't want clean lines, so I cut in and around the marker lines, making the final print like a sketch. I opted for doing both sides of the pillow using a stencil. It wasn't for any artistic reason, I just didn't feel like getting all the screen printing paraphernalia out and having to clean the screen afterward. Talk about lazy! 

Well, maybe not lazy, so much as I'm finding myself with a new found attitude of "just do it" (for fear of getting dinged by Nike, I should say "just get it done!"). My "just get it done" attitude means also that I'm opting for good over perfect and it's leaving me with many more items produced and while I avoid  the endless tinkering and over-thinking I just plow ahead and learn along the way.

It's a pretty cool pillow, if I do say so myself!

Printing, printing, printing

So, to celebrate that the Vespa has been brought out from its winter storage I thought it was an appropriate image to try out stencil printing. Also, I needed to get away from my regular screen printing extravaganza.

There’s something fantastic about printing which I believe comes down to all those tedious steps I so criticize. You start at one point, presumably with an idea. Then, perhaps you sketch it on a pad of paper, and with that it changes. Your idea becomes a reality and the lines aren’t quite what you had imagined but a version of them. You correct, amend and finalize the sketch to your liking. Again, it has changed. In the case of stencil printing, you would then cut out the design from card stock or, as in the images here, from a plastic sheet. Again, the design changes as the exact-o knife slips or your hand wobbles. 

By the time you add paint, fill out the empty space and lift the plastic to reveal the final print your idea has morphed into a beautiful creation. It is somehow removed from you personally, making it easier to look at it objectively. 

For me, because I am my own worst critic and I’m exceedingly hard on myself, I enjoy printing, in whichever form, because of this objective view. The final creation is a version of my original idea but I like it even more!

Show & Tell again

Here's a new video showing how to reclaim your silk screen frames. You can read about screen printing and the various methods other people use, but sometimes I find I learn the best tips from watching videos. It's the little things that make the process easier and more efficient. For example, you can use pushpins on the corners of the frame to ensure the screen doesn't touch the surface when you're drying your emulsion-covered frame. Or, you can put a Pony Clamp at the edge of your frame to rest it between prints. This, and many other things I learned by watching people's videos. So, I of course hope that you also learn something from my Show & Tell videos.

Less thinking, more doing!

I'm currently completing a Certificate in 3D Design at the wonderfully inspiring Emily Carr University of Art & Design.The school is situated on Granville Island, which is not an island at all, but a peninsula, filled with artisan's stores, art galleries, a public market with locally grown veggies, terrific restaurants and basically everything and anything one could need to fill a whole day of "touristy" activities. I believe Granville Island is a good example of what the architect, Matthew Frederick calls "Denial and Reward" in which the built environment presents the user (that's you) "a view of their target - a staircase, building entrance, monument or other element - then momentarily screen it from view as they continue their approach. Reveal the target a second time from a different angle or with a interesting new detail. Divert users onto an unexpected path to create additional intrigue or even momentary lostness; then reward them with other interesting experiences or other views of their target."  Granville Island is very much like this, creating a playful place to wander and discover no matter what your age.

But I digress...I was writing about art school.

The building complex of Emily Carr University of Art & Design is built by Patkau Architects. Concrete, glass, and metal come together to create a great space to work and be creative in. There's a bit of the "Denial and Reward" concept in the building's design. Hallways lead to balconies overlooking open spaces. From the library you can see the South building. Interior windows gives you a view into workshops and tool sheds down below.  The main entrance gallery space is constantly changing, keeping you engaged every time you enter the school.  My current class, "The Business of Art Practice" lead by Chris Tyrell was the push I needed to get a blog started and actually produce, not just think. As inspiring as the Emily Carr building may be, thinking can only get you so far. For months I've been thinking, conspiring, pondering, wondering, dreaming...

Snap out of it: Less thinking, more doing! Who would've thought less thinking was a good thing?

The class, in a nutshell, is about how to turn your art into your career.  And who better to teach this than Chris Tyrell? Author of Artist Survival Skills and the upcoming Making It, Chris knows what he's talking about. (On a side note, Chris is about to embark on a walk from Paris to Montpellier. Yes, that's right, he's walking the entire way.  Talk about less thinking, more doing! To read more about this fantastic adventure, go here). So, as I was saying, of course not all 25 students will have the same life goals but Chris manages to weave in and out of topics that pertain to us all. Everything is covered, from taxes to entering galleries, to writing grants and applying to artists' residencies. Marketing, promotion, artists' health, insurance, sales, financial growth (or lack there of), it's all covered. After just the second class I got my groove in gear. There was no Step 1, Step 2 type of procedure but I felt that I could sit still no longer. I bought 20m of "shoe canvas", 160m twill tape, new needles, 3 new large frames, paint, a large squeegee, a bucket of emulsion and a great pair of fabric scissors. 

My plan was to make aprons. Many aprons. Mass-production. And by "mass" I mean a whopping seventy-six aprons! That's a lot considering the most I've ever made is five. I like the idea of aprons because it's a tool. I mean, who wears an apron unless it's because you're cooking or crafting or painting, etc? So, it kept in line with my "functional" design concept.
Will I succeed and turn my art into my career? Well, first I need to stop giggling when I say "my art". People make a living doing the strangest things, so why not screen printing on aprons? At this point, whether I succeed or not is secondary as I have already succeeded at one thing: I am giving it a shot. I jumped right into all of it and so far it's been great fun. If the world revolved around me, which, much to my dismay I discovered a few years ago that it does not, but if it did, then I would screen print aprons and pillows for babies and their parents, messenger bags and totes for bikers and tea cozies for grandmas and other wonderful creations and I would be content with "my art".

Cheating on the prints

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: screen printing is all about the preparation. You prepare steps 1 through to Almost Ready and the finally you get to pull the paint over the screen (so exciting) and lift the frame to reveal your...masterpiece? Too often I have lifted only to be disappointed that the paint didn't go through everywhere or I entirely missed the corner of the pattern. Great. As I usually print on t-shirts, it's not an entirely cheap loss. Anyways, so there I am, staring at my not-so-great outcome and it occurs to me that it's my design, I can do whatever I want with it. I'm the creator, if I don't like it, I can change it to something I do! 

I have fabric markers, fabric spray paint and 3D fabric paint that I can add to the original print. Sometimes it just makes things worse, which leads me to add more colors, more paint, more cover-up. Gah! In the end it looks like some hodge podge mix, like a Versace shirt gone bad. Real bad. At some point I have to give in and accept that long gone are any chances of saving the design but at least I tried.

 This print was one of the very early ones. Two kayaks on the water, as seen from perhaps Jericho Beach. The sky is a result of spray paint, so it bled onto the mountains. Then, I added waves or ripples on the water using a fabric marker. The kayakers are also done with marker. I should probably have stopped right before I started outlining the mountains, but the owner of the t-shirt loves it, and still wears it after 5 years! I guess it's a good sign that the image is outlasting the actual cotton t-shirt! Perhaps it's time for a revised version?