Mixed Media Artist

Now is the time to do things: To make art, to fall in love, to be the person you want to be. There is no "later". Waiting until "later" to do things becomes "never". It took several days to make Now, Not Later . First, there were a couple of steps that needed time to dry overnight before moving on, and second, it just took me awhile to figure out what all I wanted to include in the assemblage. I tend to pull out all my possible materials that might work and leave them sitting around until something gels. In this case, it took a bit longer than maybe is usual for me. Anyway, the first step was to go to Home Depot and buy a new tool…always a good start! I got a forstner bit for my drill press. It cuts a hole with a fairly flat bottom to it; only the little guide hole mars the flat surface. 1. I used a wood heart, but you can use any shape you want. Cut holes where you’d like to place a picture embedded in resin. Gesso the entire piece and let it dry. 2. Pai...

Every now and again, I feel the urge to pull out an old favorite and mix it up again. That was the case the day I made this CD clock. My daughter and I made quite a few of them when she was still in high school. It was a quick and easy project that we could bang out fast, and the clocks made dynamite handmade gifts! I started by buying a pre-made clock works with a swinging pendulum. This one was ready to hang on the wall just as is. The other main thing you will need is an old CD. I used one of the vast collection of AOL CDs that I still have hanging around the studio. One down, 99 more to go! Materials and tools: CD Clock works and battery Gesso Acrylic paints (crimson, burgundy, citrine, purple/gold halo) Printouts on vellum Acrylic medium or glue Sponges Small brushes Heat gun Scissors Waxed paper 1. Sponge gesso all over the front of the CD. Dry thoroughly, and use additional coats of gesso until it’s completely covered. 2. Sponge on the acrylic paints of your choice. I listed ...

This is one of those really fun little projects that you can do in practically no time, or that you can spend a lot of effort and thought on to make it *really* spectacular! I opted for easy and fun, using strips from CD covers and inserts, and mounting them on 140 lb watercolor paper. 1. Slice up strips of paper, both solids and patterns (or with words like mine), and feel free to add non-paper stuff like ribbons and other fibers. 2. Chose which will be your vertical "warp" pieces and which you will weave through as a "weft". 3. Line up the warp pieces and attach them to your table with a piece of low-tack masking tape. 4. Weave the weft pieces alternately under and over the warp. You are free to do this unevenly if you desire, skipping warp pieces, adding short weft strips, etc. For an example of a woven paper piece which uses pieces cut into wavy shapes rather than straight, see this post on making woven paper pieces . Copyright 2008 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be re...

I truly hope that no one finds this offensive! Around Christmas this past year, I was really missing my son. He was my first born, and his birthday is December 29. Now that he’s a married man, we can’t expect to see him every Christmas anymore, but this was our first time without him. As I was reading some of the traditional scripture passages for Christmas, I came across Isaiah 9:6. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…” It struck a chord with me in a new way this year, as it most likely did the year he was born. Maybe not, maybe I was too busy at that time! Anyway, I decided to make a simple layered digital collage using a picture of my newborn in my arms. It helped :-) I’ve previously shared my technique for creating digital collage using scanned background papers . For this specific collage, I used four layers: 1. The background layer is a piece of watercolor paper textured with gel medium and cheesecloth that I painted and scanned. I altered the colors in Photos...

Last week I showed you the first half of my experiment with the heavily textured collage papers that I made, which was a geometric collage . This week, it’s an organic collage , which emerged when I tore up the papers that were left. This one is called I Sing for Joy : I Sing for Joy Just like last week, I started with a masonite board as my substrate. 1. Paint the edges and top of the masonite with black acrylic. 2. Tear up some large and some small pieces of textured collage papers and foil. The tutorials to make the ones shown in this piece are here and here. 3. Mix your torn pieces with some that are cut straight if you’d like. 4. Arrange and rearrange until you’ve got a composition that you like with the papers. Use polymer medium to adhere them to the masonite and to each other. Cover the piece, weight it, and let it dry. 5. I added a piece of cork lightly painted with the same citrine color as I used on the ripped edges. I also added a silk leaf that was enhanced with ...

Back in January, I shared a batch of collage papers with you that I made which stressed the textures. They used a limited number of colors so that they’d all work together well in future projects. Well, the time has come! I decided that I wanted to do a bit of an experiment and do two projects: one very geometric and one very organic. I like both ways of working, so it seemed most sensible to do the geometric one first. That way, I could just tear into my papers afterwards and not have to worry about whether I’d left enough to make the shapes I needed. Here’s the first result, called God’s Gifts God’s Gifts To prepare, gather up the collage papers you have on hand, or make some. There are tutorials for my papers here and here , among other places on this blog! I used a piece of masonite board as the substrate for this collage. I love how strong it is, preventing warping when you’re using heavily manipulated papers like these. 1. Paint the sides of the board with black acrylic or bla...

I’ve been quite intrigued with the look of infrared photography for some time. Since I don’t consider myself to be any kind of photography pro, I’ve hesitated to invest in a camera that can do that sort of thing…but along to the rescue rides my faithful Photoshop CS3 ! Now that , I’m willing to spend money on! I’m sure that an infrared expert can easily tell the difference between the real thing and my PS manipulation, but I’m still pretty happy with it: I can’t give you exact settings to use, because each image is different. Also, there are many different ways to get the same effect with Photoshop , so use the tools with which you are already the most familiar. This really isn’t a beginner project, but anyone willing to spend the time can probably come up with something pretty nice! 1. Super-saturate all your blues and greens. 2. Select the foliage and other green areas. With the "marching ants" visible, add an adjustment layer for the Channel Mixer. Check the monochrome bo...

Pesach This collage was made in a very similar fashion to this one I made over a year ago: My Favorite Things I wove the background stips of paper together and adhered the paper cast center before beginning the rest of the embellishments, but otherwise, the two are pretty similar in construction methods. Here’s a link to the tutorial that I wrote on making collages embellished with embroidery . Copyright 2009 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact. Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals

Old-fashioned cyanotypes vary quite a bit in color from print to print. When you want to create one digitally, a good way to chose the color is to scan a real cyanotype and sample the color from it! If you don’t have a sample of a real cyanotype blue to use, here’s a fairly decent way to find one. You’ll need to play around with the sliders until the color looks good to you…there was quite a bit of variation in the color, so don’t feel that it has to match one you’ve seen exactly. 1. Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate it. 2. Open the channel mixer, tick the Monochrome box, and play with the sliders. I like to have blue up around 80 or 90, red from 10 to 20 to add noise, and green at 0. Lower the contrast too. 3. Open up a curves adjustment layer, clipped to the previous layer. Pull the line up somewhat for blue and down somewhat for red. Mess around with the settings until you like the overall color and contrast. 4. Select an oval around your main subject. Select the inverse an...

Here's an in-process project that I'm working on right now: a fabric wrap to go around my Guatemala trip album. I can’t complete the wrap right now until the photo album itself is finished, since I don’t know how thick it’s going to end up being. So what I did was to cut a piece of base fabric several inches longer than the current width of the entire album when it is opened and laid face down. I want my wrap to…well, to wrap around the album when it’s done. This isn’t meant to be a traditional book cover with nicely mitred corners and all. It’s kind of messy, which is what most Guatemalan fabric lends itself to. First, I cut a piece of lightweight striped cloth that was meant to be a tablecloth. I cut it to wrap the album, with the stripes going up and down. Next, I cut pieces of heavier weight placemats, only as wide as the top of the album, and spread them over the surface, with their stripes going horizontally. I used a large zig-zag stitch and sewed down the face of the wr...

One of my other tutorials on the basics of bead embroidery will be very helpful here! When you’re going to embroider a piece of fabric and then glue it onto a structure, use either ultra-suede or buckram as the foundation, depending upon how heavy the beads and bits are going to be. Here’s how I made this little piece: 1. Create a cabochon by pouring resin over an image inside a bottle cap. 2. Trace around a wood disc onto a piece of ultra-suede. 3. When the cabochon is set, glue it to ultra-suede and bead around it until you’ve reached the borderline. Clip the foundation close to the stitching and add an edging row or two. 4. Drill a hole the same size as your dowel into a print block. Make it about 3/4 inch deep. Drill a groove into the back of the disc on the flat side to cradle the dowel. 5. Use wood glue to glue all pieces together. Glue the beadwork onto the front (dome) side of the disc. Copyright 2008 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May b...

Most photo-editing probably has a desaturate button, or maybe even a grayscale mode. These remove the color and also the life from a photo. Photoshop had a wonderful conversion method in the Channel Mixer: you’d add an adjustment layer, tick the monochrome box, and slide your green and blue sliders up to total about 100. Red would stay down around 0 so that you wouldn’t be adding unwanted noise to your print. Here’s what you’d get: would become… Not too bad, but still kind of dull. The new Black and White dialog box is used in an adjustment layer. Here’s how it works: 1. Open your image and duplicate it. 2. Click the Adjustment Layer icon and select Black & White. Click on the auto settings. It’s already better than what I did using the Channel Mixer!! But it can be tweaked quite a bit more. 3. You can play with the sliders by color if you want, but here’s the really fun part: click and hold right on the image itself in any area you want to adjust and you’ll get a scrubby slider. ...

1. This time use a sheet of foil for your background! Wrinkle it and spread it back out without pressing out the wrinkles. 2. Use Golden’s GAC 100 as the acrylic medium that you mix with your paints. Do not use any water! This will eventually cause the paint to peel away from the foil. Use only heavy-bodied tube acrylics, mixed with the GAC 100. 3. Paint with Quinacridone Gold and Lumiere’s Bright Gold. 1. The piece on the left uses a strip of watercolor paper and two smaller strips of corrugated paper. Use polymer medium to attach the corrugated pieces. 2. Brush more polymer medium over top. Sponge with Quinacridone Crimson and Quinacridone Violet. Use stencils or stamps with Dioxazine Purple. 3. Apply Metallic Bronze with a small dry brush. 4. For the piece on the right, apply strips of masking tape unevenly to the surface of a piece of watercolor paper. 5. Paint with Dioxazine Purple and Permanent Violet Dark. Dry thoroughly. 6. Stamp Quinacridone Red dots through scrim, or apply do...

Here are three background paper techniques for you to try out next time you've got an hour or so free. You’ll notice that I was using and reusing the same colors over and over, and sticking largely within the same color family. The reason for this is that I wanted to have a slew of papers that would all work together for some upcoming projects I have planned. 1. Use a sheet of 140 lb watercolor paper. Apply extra heavy gel medium unevenly with your hands. 2. Stamp in texture with a large stamp and let dry (or use a heat gun). 3. Give it a light glaze of Quinacridone Gold acrylic. 4. Sponge lightly with Permanent Violet Dark, Quinacridone Violet, and Citrine. Repeat with colors as many times as desired. 1. Use a sheet of canvas paper and cover it unevenly with cheesecloth. 2. Press polymer medium through the cheesecloth to adhere it to the canvas. Dry thoroughly. 3. Paint it with Quinacridone Red and Metallic Bronze. 4. Sponge with Quinacridone Violet, very dilue Dioxazine Purple, ...

One of the nice things about this technique is that you don’t have to have a really high-resolution image to start with. Since most of the detail is purposely lost, you can start with something less than ideal for a print. You can play around with color too: although Nate’s eyes look blue in the original photo, they are really turquoise green-blue, so I picked a closer color match and changed his shirt to play up that color. 1. Duplicate the image, desaturate, and duplicate again. 2. Invert the duplicated black and white image, and apply the Color Dodge blending mode. 3. Add a small Gaussian blur, and touch up the background or any other part of the image that needs it. 4. Add a new layer for each new color and use the Multiply blending mode. 5. Select the face in the first color layer to add red. As you progress through the next steps, do not lose this selection in the history path! 6. Choose red as your foreground and white as the background, and paint the face selection. 7. Adjust t...

Links to all of my top recommendations on the following topics can be found at the Why Not Art bookstore . Collage and Assemblage Altered Books and Artist Journals Handmade Books Fabric & Beads Photoshop/Digital Art Creativity Recommended Magazine Subscriptions Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals

Dani, a few months ago, working on her Phoenix in the open air portion of the wood carving studio…with her new favorite tool :-) Copyright 2007 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact. Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals

OK, here’s the verdict: it’s difficult to come up with a convincing digital version of a Polaroid image transfer, and it takes a LONG time to do it. It is a lot easier to do these physically with the DayLab machine. But I am so addicted to my Photoshop, I just have to try to see everything that it can do. Compare these two shots: The frame on the second one still needs a lot more work. It is way too solid and dark. The upper one is better, but probably still needs a few ink smears along the edges to make it really good. Anyway, here’s what you’ve gotta do, and you can decide for yourself if it’s worth going to all this effort: 1. Scan a piece of watercolor paper or canvas to use as the base. You could also just create this in Photoshop using the texturizer. Save this as an 8 x 10 image. 2. In a separate file, create a border for the image transfer. I adapted the directions for creating a "grunge" border found here at Kirupa.com You’ve got to size your border to either 3 x ...

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to try out an image transfer machine by DayLab . It is extremely cool! You insert a slide, expose a piece of Polaroid film, let it develop partway, and transfer the negative to a piece of watercolor paper or fabric! Very very cool. This is the (mostly) developed picture… …and this is the transfer from the negative. If you do black and white shots, or shots with subtle hues, you can go in and color them afterwards too. Here’s a gallery of images on the DayLab site. If you decide that you want to play with this type of transfer, first you need to know that the machine isn’t cheap! You might really want to think about taking a class if you can find one to make sure that you really enjoy the process. But here’s the rest of what you need to know: DayLab has workshop teachers (note 2012 - sorry, link no longer works, but you can still contact DayLab through their site)  listed on their site and some simple instructions to get you goin...

Over at WetCanvas , we did some simple paper casting as an October mixed media forum challenge. The results were really fun! It’s so easy to do, as our friend Sue explained to us. Most of us used one of two simple methods: * wet some toilet paper with liquid starch and press it into a mold, or * wet a piece of watercolor paper and mold around the object with your fingers Obviously there are a lot more sophisticated ways to do paper casting, but we found that these two methods were very versatile, and allowed us to experiment using stuff we already had around the house! Sue graciously listed many other links, which you can find over at the WC thread . Copyright 2007 Cyndi Lavin. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact. Technorati Tags: mixed media , collage , assemblage , digital art , photography , altered books , art journals