Another year almost behind us. Time goes so quickly these days, at least for me! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. And may 2024 bring much joy and creativity to your lives!

I recently signed up for an online class with Wen Redmond. http://www.wenredmond.com/ through Fiber Arts Take Two. https://www.fibreartstaketwo.com/ FATT really present their courses very professionally. And they’ve got wonderful artist interviews on their YouTube channel. Wen’s course is called Photos, Fabric and Mixed Media. I’ve been wanting to focus more on using photos in my artwork and I think I will be learning a lot from this course. Wen is very generous with her methods of achieving remarkable fiber art.

One of my goals this coming year is to get good at using Photoshop and other apps of that nature. In November I decided to subscribe to Photoshop and once I got it loaded to my old laptop (2017) all sorts of problems occurred. I now have a new laptop. Then once I got everything transferred from my old laptop to the new laptop it wouldn’t connect to the internet! I now have a new modem. It was as old as my laptop was! So after about 3 weeks of frustration, I’m all up to date and maybe good for another 5 years or so.

I kind of lost my creative mojo while dealing with all that computer techy stuff. Hopefully I’m back on track again.

Last week I spent some time following Wen’s first module of her class. It focused on getting your fodder prepared for using in the upcoming modules. She uses acrylic paints watered down quite a bit so she can get some nice soft washes going to print on. I tried painting on a variety of cloth, interfacings and paper to see what I could achieve and hopefully give me a wide range of substrates. Wen said not to worry about the color wheel when choosing your paint colors, just play. But I decided to use a color scheme that I hadn’t explored yet so I could also use my fodder for my Gail Harker L3 course.

I struggled with getting my paint thin enough to do a wash. I also seem to have a hard time making things be lighter and softer with the idea of printing on them. Maybe once I learn more about Photoshop I’ll be able to lighten things up there. Hopefully I have enough usable fodder for Wen’s future teachings.

I went with a Tetrads scheme from a square: Yellow, violet, red orange and blue green. I tried to use up some craft paints a friend had gifted me that were beginning to dry out. And all the substrates take the paint so differently. The final results were almost always a surprise which was fun!

This is Lutradur:

This is cotton twill:

This is watercolor paper:

This is the plastic that some of the painted pieces were laying on:

Another plastic one. Even though these are on plastic, the photos of them can be saved, manipulated in an app and printed onto another substrate. The plastic images are fascinating to me.

And some tissue paper:

Anyway, I had a LOT of fun painting last week as you can see.

I decided I’d play a bit more and try to make a quick little collage. That bright yellow and orange piece on top of the above pile caught my eye to use as a background piece.

This is now a combination of cotton, cheesecloth, some kind of a rice paper and newspaper.

I added a bit of silk organza:

The last photo is as far as I’ve gotten on this little collage.

It reminds me of a ship sailing off into the sunset in shallow waters.

I’ll try to remember to post it after I finish it.

Happy New Year!

Tesi Vaara