July 2011

Holy Green Lantern Batman… It’s Friday!!!!

There is nothing better on a HOT summer’s day than a cold beer. Wouldn’t you agree? Brooklyn Lager… one of my favorites. This 6″ x 9″ illustration is for sale. Just click on the button below and it will take you to my etsy shop.

This illustration is one of a series of drawings I did for my friend and colleague, Dani, The Event Planner Extraordinaire! Her gorgeous (of course it’s gorgeous, I designed it) website aspecialgathering.com explains all. What do you think? The above drawing was done for her video blog eventimpossible.com. I am currently working hard on illustrations for her second vlog installment and I’m getting more inspired all the time. Go Dani!

Just an illustration to go with the name. What it means exactly?.. You may never know.

This was by far the messiest project! After constructing our forms out of food boxes, egg cartons and duct tape we made our paste. One part flour, one part water and a glob or two of Elmer’s glue. This whole process transformed me into a kid again. Dipping strips of paper into that gooey concoction and pasting them onto our creations brought me back to grade school art class. I think I was picking paste out of my hair and off of my arms for the rest of the day. After the Papier Mâché dried we gave our sculptures life with paint. Ella is very happy with her robot, that she has named “Mickey.”

Batik is a method of decorating a fabric using a manual wax-resist dyeing technique. Batik or fabrics with the traditional batik patterns are found in such places as Indonesia, Malaysia, China and India.

Batik is something I have never done before, but I thought for “Mommy Art Camp” we’d give it a go. I was not armed with the proper tools. It would have been helpful to have a Tjanting, a tool used to draw precise lines of wax onto the material by allowing a small amount of wax to flow from an attached reservoir. We would have to do without.

I melted the batik wax in my handy dandy candle maker. We then dipped some bristle brushes into the wax and proceeded to paint the fabric. We had to work quickly, hot drippy wax doesn’t stay hot and drippy for long. Creating our pattern took quite some time. By the end I was exhausted, but pleased with our work and we had tons of fun. After our pattern was done we dyed the fabric in our washing machine according to the RIT dye instructions, then took it outside for a tie-dye lesson from Dad.

I have yet to get the wax off of the fabric. If the 105º day today doesn’t do it for me, I plan on sticking it into a pot of boiling water. The wax should come right off and just float to the top of the pot.

Yesterday we found ourselves at the craft store shopping for fabric dye for a project later in the week when Ella spotted some square pieces of quilting fabric. They came home with us and last night, instead of TV she started hand stitching wallets, purses, and business card holders. MZ Wallace watch out — we have a future star here. Even though we started out the day planning for our Papier Mâché project, we quickly switched to sewing. I dug my old Singer out of the garage, gave her a few lessons and she was off.

She made 3 pillows (one for her bear), a couple of purses and a wallet. While I was making sure she wasn’t loosing pins on the floor it dawned on me. “I make pincushions. WHY AREN’T WE USING ONE?” So I ran downstairs and got one of my cupcakes. It made all the difference.

What a fun mess this was! Learning how to draw with an eraser helped Ella to visualize the negative space of drawing. We went outside and covered an entire piece of paper with charcoal. Outside is key! This was very messy. Then we each chose an image and used an eraser to draw with. This showed Ella the different shades of light in a drawing, not just the different shades of dark. Our results were by no means masterpieces, but we had fun. Now it’s off to the shower with her and time to hose down the kitchen.