What happens next is that I make yet another of whatever the thing is, but now the thing begins to take on a quite different form. What if I do this instead of that? What if I employed a radically different material that makes the old thing a new thing, or takes it in an unexpected direction? By this point my mind is happily racing ahead and within a few hours I’m off making something that was definitely inspired by the original thing, but which is now something completely new.

Like this:

One of my nicest Christmas gifts was a wonderfully creative book on watercolor painting. This one, Heather Smith Jones’s Water Paper Paint:

I have only just begun to explore it fully, but I had a great time over the weekend doing one of the exercises in the book, exploring brush choice, color mixing, and just the delicious joy of putting paint to paper by painting (freehand) a series of squares and rectangles. Two of these head up this post–I’ll move on to more exercise eventually, but for the moment I’m taking a ridiculous amount of pleasure from painting these shapes.

Did you get art toys for Christmas, too? If so, what?

There are no words.

Warm hands, warm heart, right?

But I took a look at my kitchen Buddha last night and decided he looked a little chilly, still in his summer robes, bare shouldered and all. I couldn’t do much about the shoulders, but I could at least give him a more seasonal backdrop. So I switched out the playful pink he was wearing in his little nook (an antique sewing machine drawer in which he fits perfectly) backed by a rather frivolous pink and dotty paste paper I made last spring–here, see:

For this more seasonal attire. This is part of a gelatin monoprint I made a few weeks ago. As we slip out of our fall Ango season into the quieter days of winter, it seemed to suit him better. And, you know, since he doesn’t have any mittens . . .

Here’s a little closeup:

By the way, I made this print at an art party you can see more about at my Floating Ink’s Wandering School of Art facebook page.  Be sure to take a look at the photos from that fabulous night.

And stay warm.

Yeah, it’s Thanksgiving weekend and I’m only just now getting around to posting this photo of Second Child’s Halloween garb.

Her concept, my freezer stencil printing on the t-shirt and the deep canvas bag (which I stitched together by hand because I have a new sewing machine and I’ve lost the manual already).

She wore the bag over her shoulder, Johnny Appleseed style, and filled it full of individually wrapped LemonHead candies, which she handed out at her high school and at the diner where she was working after school.

People either didn’t get it, or found it highly amusing.

Remember the old riddle? You throw away the outside, cook the inside, then eat the outside and throw away the inside? At least, I think that’s how it went. The answer, of course–corn.

My newest art project has a similar bent. You throw away the outside (the tea bag wrapper), cook the inside (steeping the tea bag), put aside the inside (the now wet tea bag), and throw away the inside.

I’ve been having a wonderful time rescuing tea bags, hanging them to dry (on my art clothesline across the kitchen fireplace), then unfolding them, dumping out the shreds of tea inside (do dry first, and throwing out the old tea afterwards so that you get the most color out of the leaves and onto the fabric bag), then saving the tea bag paper for printing projects. And, yes, I can already hear some of you saying “Throw out the used tea leaves? Never!” I suppose they’d be good for dying and could also just be composted.

To gaze even further into my own navel, I’ve chosen to start with a print of–you guessed it–tea bowls.  A similar print ended up being incorporated into the encaustic painting I showed back in September. If you look at the larger version on my flickr page. at the top edge just to the left of the green ribbon, you can see (upside down) the tea bowl image printed on a tea bag. And again–faintly, almost directly below it, but right side up.

I’m also sort of digging this rabbit–he’s one of my favorite hand-carved stamps of all time and I’ve used him in many projects.

I’m going to continue to play with this tea bag paper–making a photocopy directly onto the tea bag is in the works, with a success rate (success being defined as not totally gumming up the copier) of about 35% so far.  I’m also piddling with some different kinds of tea, different tea bag fabrics and paper (I’ve got a little collection of silk tea bags I’m eager to try), and different lengths of time leaving the bags in contact with the paper.

Compare the tea bowl image at the top of this post, for instance, with the one below left (which stayed scrunched up with the wet tea leaves in it for almost a week), and take a look at the right-hand image, too–I’ve got some ideas for using the teabags cut up, too. If nothing else, it gives me lots of excuses to drink plenty of tea!

A dear friend of mine (who lives in a beautiful small house with a big heart) is drawn to houses as an art motif in the same way in which I gravitate toward bowls. When we have art days at her (big) house, (little) houses are likely to be on the menu.  Here is a house she made me. My moribund camera had trouble capturing its beauty, but you can get a sense of it here:

And here:

It’s beautiful. There’s a tiger on the roof, and an inviting flickering light inside.  It sits about a hands breadth high.

Even more wonderful–she taught me how to make them. Here are three that went off in yesterday’s mail to someone special (along with a box of the flickering pretend candles to light them up on winter nights):

I mailed these off and will be sorry to see them go. But I’ve kept two for myself because–you know–I really do love a tiny house.