:: Test Doodle Runs a Fowl

Don't' you love when something, that you though was nothing, turns out to be something after all?

Off to the side of all of my pieces I have an area that I test the strength of my bleach and try new techniques. Occasionally these little "doodles" begin to look like something and cry out for attention. This was one of those needy little things.

Once just a splotch of bleach dots and layers of testing, it is now a real painting. The addition of limbs made of circles and dots and weird skeletal wings and feet has become . . .

. . . "Runs a Fowl"

I hope you like him.

:: chase the bird on Etsy ::

:: Dive into my Coral Reef and explore . . .

This is my newest original bleach painting created using only chlorine bleach and water on black matte board. It's so fresh it still smells like my lemon scented Clorox!

Coral Reef is part of the "Oceanic" series of paintings I've been working for the last month. It's inspired by a trip to the Seattle Aquarium and the hundreds of photos I took while there. I think the colors created by the bleach discharging the dye gives a beautiful and warm representation of a world that is usually seen in cooler tones of blues and greens.

I've also been experimenting with different ways to make texture. The reef in the foreground is a new method I tried for the first time here. I think it really gives a wonderful abstract view that allows the imagination to see whatever it wants in the overlapping darks and lights.

Explore and enjoy!

Painting size is 5" x 7" (12.7 x 17.8cm)

:: learn more about my bleach process ::

:: see close-ups of the piece in my Etsy shop ::

:: I designed myself a calendar.

I designed my new event calendar to focus on the most important part of life, the weekend!

I was so tired of bulky calendars with the mass of used pages piling up above them and still only able to display one month at a time. I wanted something that was clean, simple and compact that would allow me to put up as many months as I needed. I also wanted to have Saturday and Sunday together at the weeks-end where they belong so I can see my plans in one place rather than both sides of the calendar.

This unique calendar features conveniently sized, 4.25" x 11", individual pages that can be posted by a desk, pinned to a bulletin board, mounted with magnets to the refrigerator or in any other place you need a compact calendar. Mount 2, 3 or all 12 months side-by-side to easily see upcoming appointments and events. Weekend days are together in one unit and highlighted in grey so your fun activities get the attention they deserve.

August Garden is a collection of photographs I've taken over the summer at different family events and in our family gardens. I don't profess to be a photographer, and these are not show flowers, but I think they turned out nicely. I will also be offering a calendar with full color photos, graphics and my artwork.

:: view all 12 calendar photos ::

:: see the calendar in my Etsy shop ::

:: The secret is circular.

Oceanic continues . . .

I was trying to come up with a new way to create surface texture, not just for this series but for my bleach work in general, and I think I've stumbled on to something. The secret is . . . circles!

I've always scribbled and doodled creatures and weird plant life constructed of circles with pen and pencil. There are stacks of sketchbook pages in my portfolios and flat files, not to mention the poor phonebook and just about every other available surface. But I think I've finally found a way to make it really work with the bleach.

After making the circles and leaving some of them open loops for the black to show in the middle I filled in the spaces around them to lighten it and make it a solid mass. It made it feel like sculpting in a way. It's a great way to lighten large areas, even if it did take almost an hour just to do this small piece!

It's a tedious process but I really like the possibilities . . .

:: Oceanic Experiment...success or failure. You decide.

Welcome to the new world of "Oceanic".

After a trip to the Seattle Aquarium I came home with more than 200 photos. As I was going through them I thought maybe I should have taken more pictures of my children enjoying themselves on their first visit. It seems I took a lot of close-ups and weird angles of the creatures in the tanks and almost completely forgot the kids. Oopsie.

So I thought I should make something of it while I was feeling inspired. I started a huge lion fish and realized that I needed a little warm-up before tackling him any further. So I started to doodle the shapes that I usually do when I'm sketching with pen and pencil. I was shocked to see that the swirly lines actually worked very well in bleach so I just kept doodling. After several hours I had an area about 12" x 14" that was a mass of what looked like seaweed, coral and bubbles. Not all of it was brilliant so I cut it down into this piece and several smaller ones.

The series will continue for many years I'm sure.

:: Aquarium photos on Flickr ::