Spelling issues and a sticky mess full of holes

Dear Nikki/Dear Sarah--Day 438 of our daily drawing exchange

Well, today’s art-making wasn’t nearly as much fun as yesterday’s. I finished Hemi’s birthday card, which was more complicated than I thought it would be. I used masking fluid for the lines and bases and the areas for the little vignettes before I did the green wash. When I used the special eraser to remove the masking fluid (after it had dried), it took off some of the paper too. When I finally got to the point of writing Happy Birthday, I left out the H in Birthday and had to make a messy correction. It was altogether too fiddly (especially after yesterday’s zany-ness), and confirms that I’m not all that interested in accuracy! And my lettering is awful!

Hope you continued to ignore your phone today, and perhaps even got outside in the sunshine. I went for a walk in the morning and it was glorious. Got some great photos of emerging magnolia flowers. Last year a did a series of realistic pencil drawings of magnolia buds—this time I’ll be less realistic and more colourful.

And by the way, the French money is only worth decent money if it’s crisp and unused, so I’m going to collage with it after all.

XO S

Hi Sarah -

well, I think the card is delightful - corrections and all! Funny, though, that you were also having paper-lifting issues.

I managed to watch one of the many videos posted by Catherine Rains (thank you for the suggestion). In it, she describes the process of doing an image transfer from a magazine onto a sturdy substrate, which can then be used as collage fodder. I thought I’d try a quick experiment with materials on hand, but lack of patience and over-enthusiasm during the wetting and rubbing phase led to quite a disastrous outcome.

Rolling with the ‘hey, it’s fun to experiment’ mantra, I came up with this:

and it was only after posting that I realized that the way the light reflected when I took the photo, you can’t see the key player down in the bottom right corner.

There she is, waiting for someone interesting to stroll past.

For these shiny-surfaced pieces, I think waiting until everything is properly dry and then using my printer’s scanner at home would be a better option. Despite the total technical failure of this one, the technique has potential, so I will give it another try when I have more time.

Today, despite the better weather, I spent most of the day inside - either at the Canadian Company of Pilgrims annual event (wonderful! too many places to walk, too little time!!), running back and forth to let the dogs in and out, and then an evening of scanning, sorting, and tossing.

Until tomorrow -
Nikki