Still life with leaves

I've made several still lives with leaves that had some paint on them because I had used them for gelatin painting. The leaves were so beautiful that I rescued them from the waste basket.
The photos were taken with my phone and I don't know how it happened but now it's a motion picture. Did I do it or is my phone that creative?

The ones below are really still.

Plastic monsters

These strange creatures I made with melted plastic that I sewed together.

Graphics Course

This bookcover was the inspiration for my lino cuttings. The method I used was to cut away more and more parts of the lino. And to print each stage in a different colour. Here are a few of the prints.
I'm doing this course at the studio of Annemieke Waasdorp.

Still lifes from nature

For the Art Academy I had an assignment to photograph nature elements. So I played around with things from the garden and stuff found on the beach.

Bookbinding Fair

  

This post was still in concept-mode in my computer... 

I'll be there the whole weekend, but on Saturday I will be was sitting behind our bookbindingclub table with the results of this year's theme book. I'm showing you already one of the two books I made.

 

Gelatin prints women

Besides playing with plants and a gelatin plate, I've also been printing with stencils of women. These are a few examples that are still to be made in birthday invitations.

Autumn tote bag

I made this tote bag for my eldest daughter. She has an internship at a kindergarden and is doing a project about autumn. She will put things in it that are related to autumn, e.g. a children's book and some craft examples. The purpose is that it's going to be passed around the kindergarden parents and that they use the stuff that's in the bag and that they also put in all kinds of autumn elements.
I'm quite pleased with it.

From scarf to cushion cover

Last winter I forgot to wash my felted scarf (made in 2007!) with a wool programme in the washing machine. Grmpf! I didn't want to discard it, because I liked it very much. So I decided to cut it up and felt it to a brown cotton cushion cover I already had. For extra sturdiness I handstitched around the borders. I also added some extra felt circles to cover some of the silk underlining of the scarf.

This photo is made just after making the scarf. It hangs a bit limp because it's still wet.

Playing with circles

Just playing with circles from leftover gelliprints.

A real bookbook!

I saw this funny video on Mary Anns blog. It's so true that it's a relief to have something in your hands without wires or batteries.

Exhibition Les jardins des Arts

A work of mine has been chosen for this exhibition on Saturday 27 September in Oegstgeest (The Netherlands). (The exhibition is garden-themed because it's National Gardeners Day.) I did a little happy dance of course. It's funny that I made an artists book especially for this occasion, with gelatine prints of things from the garden, but the judges didn't choose it. They chose a work from the last assessment for the Art Academy, the felted sticks.

OMG it's a bloke!

  

I've tried drawing a face with charcoal again. It's a face, that's okay. But the original is a photo of a woman! The various elements seem to resemble, but the overall picture isn't.

I have to keep practising a lot!

Etching

Making marks in an etching plate was the challenge for the second lesson in Graphics. It was remarkable easy. The acid bath did the hard work. Next time I try a serious drawing.

 

Quilt collage

Some time ago I felt the urge to make a collage without too much thinking. So I grabbed pieces that were lying nearby and sewed them together. But in the end there was, again, a story. In my head.

Stencil project

Kind of crazy stencilling on paper to make a folder for a friend. Afterwards I rubbed the paper with furniture polish.

Graphics course

This summer I started with a short course Graphics. It's meant to make me acquainted with all kinds of Graphic Arts, such as drypoint, etching and monoprinting (although I do that already, e.g. with a gelatine plate). Above is an example of dry needle etching in cardboard (actually a lid of a cardboard box containing drinking glasses) that I did the first lesson. It was fun to slightly alter each pass.