It was a productive day

Thursday was the fifth and last session in the Introduction to Printmaking class.  Our final subject was Monotype and since I took a class in it last fall, was happy to have the refresher.  I printed six times that night and this one is my favorite.  In fact, I hung it in the bedroom.  I'm waiting to see how long before Ian notices something is different.

This is the "ghost print" which is an option if there's enough unexhausted ink on the plate.  I turned the ginkgo leaves over since they still had ink on the underside and put them back on the right side.  I like this print too.

I couldn't print my Lino Cut plate last week since it wasn't finished.  I finished it Monday on my volunteer shift and printed it before class.

I asked Michelle for permission to take a photo of her shirt.  I really do need one of these!  We work hard during our class periods, standing the entire time.  There's just no time to sit.  I've made good friends in each class and since we can use the studio as members, these friendships have continue to grow - yet another reason why I love Bend.

I've come down to the final week before the final session of Pat Clark's drawing class.  Our actual class ended a month ago but Pat came up with a little something extra.  On the last class we were all given a 16" x 20" piece of watercolor paper and put our initials on the back.  Pat set up seven drawing stations and we had 2 minutes to do a contour drawing of the object.  The thing on the left is a chicken foot.  The piece of stick was my contribution to this collection of lines.  At the end of 2 minutes we passed our paper clockwise to the next drawing station.  I was stumped because I need a center section to remain unpainted and don't have enough skills to know how to do that.

I met with Pat at her open studio session on Wednesday afternoon and got some answers.  I bought some masking fluid thinking I'd just have to mask the whole area but reading about it, realized that it's only for small areas.  Pat told me to make a template and attach it with blue painters tape.  I attached this yesterday and did the wash background.  Today I painted in figures, watercolor on the left side and acrylic on the right.  I'm starting to feel more confident with watercolor, especially since I've discovered I can manipulate it with my finger.

I removed the template today and it's pristine - huge relief!

I explained to Pat that I had to keep that area white so I could collage this piece on but she just shook her head and said, no collage - no glue.  Gleep.  I'm pretty content with this project and obviously it's not a work of art, just a work of learning experience.  She had listed three directives for this:  1) Dominant color - yellow ochre; 2) Must have an architectural detail - window; 3) Must have an element: earth, fire, water, air - clouds, ala Rene Magritte.  I was feeling pretty smug until she said - No glue!

As for Maudie Mae's broken wing, I bought mountaineer webbing from Gear Fix, a business right next door to the A6 studio.  I was dropping off my Tai Chi shoes there to have the forefoot stretched when I realized that the shoe guy might be able to put in a rivet.  Here's the old and new webbing.  He was impressed that the 60-year-old cotton webbing had lasted as long as it did.

This is the unbroken webbing but as you can it was just a matter of time before it broke too.

The new webbing is perfect and there's that wonderful rivet.  I got everything back together this morning and was able to weave two towels and start a third. I didn't realize that the old webbing had started to stretch so that the apron rod wasn't square to the breast beam.  I noticed the difference today almost right away.  

I was devastated when the webbing snapped and I was at a loss what to do next.  I can't help think how both of the things I worked on today had that in common.  I didn't know what to do to fix things but when I dug in and went to work, the solutions evolved in the process.  It was a productive day.