Mary In Mike's, Biker Buddy and Giraffes conversing

Biker Buddy, by Mary Taitt
mixed media on Moleskine thin paper

Biker Buddy with the flu
mixed media on thin Moleskine paper

I started the first one in markers, but I didn't have enough colors for shading so I added oil pastels and then I added acrylics.  The second one is what I made from the bleed-through from the first.  I'm not counting it as a page, because the paper is very thin and I wanted to make the bleed-through into something.  I also thought it would be fun to make it into something somewhat different from the original.  In the first painting, I was experimenting with unusual light sources and also concerned with flat (dead) colors--and how to make them live (add light).

dead and living colors

I chose colors that I thought looked particularly "dead" on their own, olive green, Indian red, flat grey and burnt umber.  Some of the ways to add light included dry brush, adding other colors, glazing.  I am not a fan, generally speaking, in my own work, anyway, of large areas of single blank dull colors.

test prints
giraffes conversing
Mary Stebbins Taitt

We recently put my mother-in-law, ML (for Mary Louise), in assisted living.  She used to be a teacher.  One of the books I inherited when she left her home is called printing for fun, and I read through it and discovered from printing techniques I hadn't heard of.  One is printing with paper masters--not like mimeograph, but cutting and pasting masters with shapes and using them to print with.  I decided to try it with textured papers and did my first two test prints in Mike's book.  I then made a card and included the master, because as I discovered, paper masters do not last too long--they begin to wear out and disintegrate.  It is only for fun and very small "runs."

Pocket items: Sample card
paper master

sample prints
giraffes conversing (NOT in pocket)

I included a scan of a few of the sample prints I made and you can see the disintegration of the paper.  (although they are not in order).  It was still a fun and relatively easy project and would probably be good with kids who have a short attention span anyway.  Just cut out and glue the shapes, make a few prints and move on.

prints - woohoo!

Hey guys! So, I decided to get some prints made of some pages from this Moleskine exchange (Ash's book), as well as from some in Aya's. Yesterday I got four from a company called Artscow. My wife told me about a deal they had recently, so I thought I'd give it a go and see what they were all about. My expectations were low-to-average, however, I'm happy to say the results were far from it! The quality of paper, the crisp image, the vivid color - I was even more pleased than with Imagekind, which says a lot. Anyhow, I will be putting these all up for sale at my Etsy shop this week. The giant tortoise is the first to go up! The prints are all 14" x 11" and will be in a limited run of twenty, signed and numbered by yours truly. Twenty-five bucks per print is a fair enough price, considering the cost of getting them made, mailing them, as well as the time and labor involved. So, stay tuned for more this week. I'll definitely be selling more prints of this kind very soon as well. Anyway, hope you like 'em (and sorry for the shameless self-prommotion).