Journal

Random Musings on Art and Life

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What Is A Whole Cloth Collage?

December 31, 2015

As I have been preparing to teach my new Whole Cloth Collage with Paintstiks and Textures course, I have been trying to pin down an answer for an interesting question – what exactly is a Whole Cloth Collage? According to our friends at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a collage is A)  an artistic composition made of…

Just Me And My Shadow At The Ranch

September 24, 2015

  We arrived at our friends’ ranch on Sunday, and I took advantage of a beautiful Monday for a walk about. Our time “at the ranch” is my favorite time of year. If I were to pick up and move to another place in the US, I expect it would be to this corner of…

Bailando en la Noche: An Art Quilt by Shelly Stokes

May 28, 2015

For the past 18 months, I have been working on a major art quilt project. Her name is Bailando en la Noche, or Dancing in the Night. I chose her name because the medallions evoke the swirling skirts of Mexican Folk Dancers under an exuberant night sky. [Tweet “Check out “Bailando en la Noche” –…

A Super-Sized Paintstik Rubbing in Sunny Mexico

April 30, 2015

As we begin our tour of Rubbing Plate Roundup, I just couldn’t resist showing you a super-sized rubbing I made from a patio table in Chapala, Mexico. It’s slightly off topic, but Paintstik Rubbings are the first chapter in the book. (Wink, wink!) You’ll just have to pretend along with me that I’m working from…

Folklorio Dancer 3: All Dressed Up With Stunning Stitches

April 23, 2015

At the beginning of my art residency here in Chapala, I created a stencil from an image of a dancer, and then painted her up using my extreme stenciling technique. She was quite lovely in the shimmering iridescent Paintstik colors, but I wanted to give her dress a bit of pizzazz. So, I dug into…

The Ancient Art of Salvador Vasquez

April 16, 2015

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day with Zahava Sherez and Joan Bowers, two of the artists here in Chapala for the Residency Program. Zahava arranged for a driver to take us to Tonola and Tlaquepaque, both on the outskirts of Guadalajara.   Our first stop in Tonola was to meet Salvador Vasquez,…

The Magical World of Aztec Studio

April 9, 2015

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Victoria Schmidt suggested that we visit her friends Janice Kimball and Francisco Urzua in the neighboring town of Ajijic. Janice is an artist, writer and designer of tapestries and Francisco is a master weaver in the old tradition, working on a loom that has come down through generations…

Folklorio Dancer 2: Add Color with Extreme Stenciling

March 19, 2015

In a previous post, I showed you how I made a stencil from sign maker’s vinyl using an image of a Folkorio dancer. Today, I’ll show you how I added really bright color using Paintstiks, a brush, and my fingers. Yes, you read that correctly. While I do most stenciling with a brush, the technique…

Folklorio Dancer 1: Cutting and Transferring a Vinyl Stencil

March 12, 2015

My big goal for my Personal Art Residency in Chapala is to learn to use my Silhouette cutter. I purchased it more than a year ago, but have done precious little with it since. I decided that my first task should be to cut a stencil and paint up a piece of fabric for a…

Test A Design With A Silhouette Cutter

February 12, 2015

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a previous post, I talked about testing paint colors before starting work on a big project. Today I want to talk about a different, and perhaps more important, test that can save you from untold hours of unhappiness. With the new high-tech tools available today, we can make a scale-model of a design to…