A Slow Start

To a big (ad)venture

The "BLAH” art I created experimenting with various stencil techniques using the gel plate. Things didn’t go that well: I forgot how to do things, I was missing my kneaded eraser and some other critical items, and my lighting sucked.

As those of you who have been reading my ‘stack for a while know, one of the gigs I have is as a stencil designer for a company called Stencilgirl Products - I am only one of many artists who design for them. Last fall I thought about all of the work I had done to create projects for all of my over 40 (!) stencil releases, all of the blog post projects I had done for StencilTalk and a few short videos I made…and realized that I should write a mixed media art stencil book to pull together the many ways stencils can be used in making art.

I have been thinking about it, planning it in my mind now for about two months. The end of January I cleaned up in my laundry room “studio” and dug out my lighting and camera boom and got that all set up. I did a practice video which took me all day. (I figured I’d do videos because I can pull step-out stills from it and I won’t miss anything when it comes time to compile the book.) With that done I set out to start on my first project this week.

I promised myself at least four hours to undertake a simple project, and honestly, it was a painfully slow endeavor. I had an idea in my mind about how it would come together easily and quickly and turn out the way I imagined; it did not happen that way. The four hours came and went and the work was just…blah. My materials were still not organized enough, I was missing some art items (calling Dick Blick!), my table felt too small, the lighting was still not right and, to my dismay, my technique lacking. It turns out that I am going to need a lot of practice to get the rust out, which means time, to actually get the results that will be worthy of a book.

This post is not meant to be a complaint; I didn’t want to completely disappear from Substack while I work the bugs out of this thing. In fact, I’m going to try to make it part of Visual Coffee Break somehow without losing sight of the original goal which is to add some beauty to your day without taking up a lot of your time.

My original goal for the book was to finish everything by August of this year, and well, I’m starting to wonder if I can reach it. I don’t want to rush things (see this post about that). I hope you’ll stick with me on my big adventure!