The Lure of the Open Road © 2014 Diane Duncan
I seem to be turning more and more to mixing things up! Memorabilia, textiles, beads and whatever seem to be creeping into my work. I love texture and working in assemblage and mixed media help to fulfil this need!
Sunday, October 20th, two of my groups came together to hold a ‘pop-up’ art show! For three hours we were able to share some of our work with friends and acquaintances. I’ve limited my photos to ones that mainly feature my work as I haven’t had a chance to ask permission from other members to show their work. However, you can get a peek at the variety of pieces from the more general shots. I’m saving some of the items for focused blogs to be posted later. We were thrilled with the turn out and had lots of...
read moreI’m always on the lookout to find new materials or techniques that I might use in mixed-media art. While at the Calgary Creative Stitches & Crafting Alive Show I came across a booth with a representative offering courses in the use of Paverpol to create garden-safe sculptures. My sister has created a couple of sculptures and they combine fibre empregnated with a material that hardens it to a waterproof structure. I have never encountered an opportunity for a course previously so I immediately signed up. Brenda Topley of Black...
read moreYears ago I took a workshop that introduced me to encaustic. While intrigued I wasn’t particularly pleased with the pieces that I produced in the workshop and the teacher, who spent a lot of time talking about the creation of her encaustic medium, made it sound as though it was a very time intensive project. I must have had some lingering interest though because a year ago I bought Encaustic Workshop by Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch. Leafing through the book at the time I thought to myself that it didn’t seem as difficult as I...
read moreLast fall I started to work on what I am calling my ‘Re’ series. You may ask, what is my ‘Re’ series. I’ve always been fascinated with trying to use things that might other wise be discarded and of course that opens the door to using processes that ‘Recycle, Reuse, Repurpose, Reclaim, Reprocess, Restore, Rescue, Relove, Recondition, Remodel, Regenerate’. Of course if you are not a purist you could add words like ‘Salvage, Upcycle, Convert …’. The first of my babies left the nest...
read moreI didn’t get back to the project until late in the day yesterday as an invite to lunch could not be turned down! The next step was to added the surface design. I considered using white glue and decided it would take too long to dry. I considered getting ‘stringing compound’ and decided it would be too expensive. So in the end I chose to use my old standby, quick drying and paintable, DAP. I had part of a tube on hand so did a sample and although I would have preferred a finer line, decided it would work and made a trip...
read moreI’ve been told that the in-thing is to do a casting of the ‘baby bump’ and to decorate it as a piece of art. My young’uns decided that the kit was too expensive so after a discussion with me they purchased the plaster embedded tape at the local ‘M’ store and got out the jar of Vaseline and went to work. Then they announced that it was over to me to decorate! I spent all day yesterday shaping the edge with a Dremel and adding tape to build up and strengthen the edges so that it...
read more
