1000,000 Giraffes

I have a fun post for you today. I wanted to show you my submission for the 1000,000 Giraffe.com site. The goal of the site is to collect one million images of originally created giraffes before 2011. The only stipulation for submitting to this site is that your Giraffe be an original drawing,painting or sculpture created without the aid of a computer. Let's get back to the basics!

The site has some fun features like stat listings, searches, blog and "guess the artist's age" game which is my favorite. It was very easy to upload an image and were notified very quickly that our pieces were accepted in the collection. So for some simple creative fun, draw yourself a little giraffe and submit it to the cause.

Below are the watercolor painting my daughter submitted and the drypoint with watercolor that I submitted. What do you think?

Claire Age: 5

Drypoint on plastic w/watercolor

Wordless Wednesday

Boy Girl Party

A Twisted Stitch

Sparkle Peach

K9 Knits

Art Card Trading @ CARDED

I have another invite for you. This time it is for anyone in the Vancouver and Lower Mainland area. The hosts of the recent Red Hot One Inch Action show are putting on another art show called CARDED. My image of "Superboy" has been accepted for this one night show. With this format 50 artists will present their work on traditional 2.5"x 3.5" art cards for trade amongst each other and any audience members willing to purchase $5 packs of 5 cards. The trading is supposed to be fast and furious and reminiscent of those hockey card trading days of our youth. How many cards will you give up to get your favorite one?

I have created art cards before but this will be the first trading session I will have ever gone to. If you would like to take part in the trading as well, you can find the show on Saturday, February 27th at the Jacana Gallery, 2435 Granville St, Vancouver. Doors open at 8pm and I hear it's pretty important to be present at the beginning of the show to make the best trades.

Visit the Hot Card site to get peek at last years show and participants.

Wordless Wednesday

She Rides the Lion

K.Brown Pottery

V.B.Designs

Sherri's Boutique

For those of you in Toronto the Good, I have an invite for you. The Year of the Tiger 9th International Print Exhibit is opening this weekend and will show until the 28th.It is being hosted by PROOF Studio Gallery located in the Distillery District.

I along with many printmakers from around the world submitted an 10x12 original print based on this year's Chinese zodiac the tiger. Prints will be sold to the public and exchanged among the participants. Below is a photo of my linocut with watercolor submission. He's a little cutie, don't you think? To view all the prints in the show go to Year of the Tiger blog.

Fun stuff. What's next year's animal?

Wordless Wednesday

Irene Suchocki

United Thread

Suzanne B. Webb

Lili Swan

Flickr Friday Favorites

I love browsing Flickr and seeing wonderful new work people have posted onto their pages. I thought I would try and share some of my finds with you. Please note that all the images are copyrighted to the artist and if you click on their name you will be able to see even more of their fantastic work.

1. smarter than..., 2. Seaside Excursion, 3. Tossed About on Etsy.com, 4. Mr. Fullofshit, 5. crowthirteen_oil, 6. prince fish, 7. 31 Paintings: A Halloween Series - #13, 8. Cabin With Woodsmoke, 9. Alis

Mezzotint

Print by:Julie Niskanen

Many years ago my husband bought me a mezzotint rocker for my birthday. I was thrilled to own such a beautiful and old fashioned tool. For those of you not familiar with mezzotints, they are a very labour intensive printmaking technique which can create some of the most beautiful and velvety prints.

Mezzotints are created by "rocking" an entire copper plate with a mezzotint rocker which creates very small indentations that will hold the ink for printing. Creating a fully rocked plate is very time consuming and it takes a great deal of skill to produce a plate that can print deep and consistent blacks. I was never able to get to that point before giving up. After spending all that time creating a fully black plate, the printmaker goes back into the plate with a scraper and burnisher to flatten and smooth out some of the rocked dots. This helps to create a variety of tones and those areas that are scraped and burnished the most will be the lightest tones. You can probably see how difficult and time consuming it would be to create an image.

From about 1700-1850 mezzotints were very prominent in printmaking, especially in England. In fact, mezzotints were a means of creating reproductions of popular paintings of the time (!). If you would like to be blown away by the abilities of these printmakers, I strongly suggest looking at "The Mezzotint" by Carol Wax. Phew, I'm exhausted just looking at them.

So suffice it to say that my mezzotint rocker ended up collecting dust and I felt pretty guilty about it. Recently I put a call out on Inkteraction to see if anyone would be interested in claiming my poor rocker and putting it to good use. Luckily for me, Brandon Sanderson of North Carolina University answered the call and bought the rocker for his students. Thrilled to pass my rocker on, Brandon also surprised me with two intaglio prints by one of the students. How cool is that? Below are photos of my latest acquisitions.

So I'm very glad to see my mezzotint rocker will see some life and I've learned the hard way to be a lot more cautious about acquiring new tools and hobbies. Encaustic painting will have to wait until I do more research I think.