A Silk Aquatint Print Portrait – and a New Website

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Everything in it’s Place!

Hello there, my friend! Long time, eh? I’ve been away, building a new website!

It’s good to be in touch again, and I’m so glad you’ve stopped in for a visit. Tea? Some blueberries? Have a seat by the window where the macadamia nut tree blossoms are riding the air. Tell me how you’ve been?

Sharing Art Goodies

Here are some excellent, artsy resources I found share-worthy for you:

• If you’re not familiar with the silk aquatint printmaking featured in the little portrait in this post, this page has a good introduction.

• Textile Artist has a fabulous post about creating portraits of your friends and family with embroidery stitches, featuring the beautiful work of artists Emily Jo Gibbs, and Sue Stone. I love that Sue started doing these projects timidly at first, and her tips to get started in the article are spot on.

I wanted to use old family photos of days out to express myself, my views and my story. But I was held back by believing my work had to be realistic, and of course, I was scared that what I was making just wasn’t good enough.

Sue Stone

• If you enjoy challenging yourself to create art confined to a particular color palette, this article by Digital Synopsis is a fun read. The author has extracted beautiful color palettes of famous movies, and laid them in a banner grid along the base of memorable scene stills. (Do they give you ideas for new work?)

• And speaking of color palettes, do you create swatch guides for all the colors you have in your arsenal of art supplies? Did you know you can get small paperback books to document your colors? A swatch journal lets you keep color samples of all your pigments, pencils and paints, with labels and notes that you write, in a book for easy reference, like this one.

Artwork featured in this post: Reflecting 5.25 x 4.5 inch Silk Aquatint with Colored Pencil (available here)

Where Have I Been?

Over the past two months, I’ve been straining my brain to learn new things. I rebuilt this website.

The archive of almost 600 previous posts have been pulled over, new pages were added, and there is a new navigation bar at the top of each page. There are some glitches here and there, but I’ll get them sorted out in time.

I’m not a web designer, and site-building was a strenuous learning curve, clouded with thought bubbles of question marks, expletives, and plenty of doubt. (And I made the daffy decision to study for an Amateur Radio Technician license at the same time. I know. What was I thinking?) But it’s done (And I passed: call sign KN6HPP).

If you find things don’t work around here, please feel free to shoot me an email. If you’re curious about the products I used to build the site, let me know in the comments.

Silk Aquatint Experiments

I bought some new polyester silk to make silk aquatint plates, and I’m excited to test it. If you’ve made silk aquatints before, what fabric did you use?

I’m curious to see if I can print one of these without a press. I suspect they will need a lot more pressure, and stabilization between paper and plate during a hand transfer, but perhaps a registration jig could help with that? Have you done any experiments to hand transfer a silk aquatint? There is a silk aquatint instruction manual by Sue Brown, available over here.

Please share your insights in the comments. It would be so cool to figure out a way to open this form of painterly printmaking to a wider, sans-press audience. Let me know your thoughts.

Catch Me Up on You

Leave some links in the comments to share what you’ve been working on while I was wrestling with my website and Electromagnetic Wavelengths. What have you been writing, painting, drawing? What books have you read? (My son gave me this book, which I enjoyed as a reward for finishing the Ham Radio License Manual!)

Catch me up on your happenings….

Thanks for stopping by, and have an excellent week –

Belinda

P.S. Cheryl Arkison writes a quick, compelling piece about changing your whole day with one, tiny adjustment to your morning routine. Read it here.

P.P.S. If you’re new around here, you can subscribe to get each new post via email right over here.

Art Quote

Let me tell you the secret that has led to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

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