Painted ipad Bag

I have been wanting to buy a case for my 'new' ipad, but have held off because I read the ipad 2 cases didn't work with the new ipads because they moved the magnet that puts it in sleep mode when you close the cover and there aren't that many options in covers for the new ipads yet, so in the mean time I've had nothing to protect it when I'm not using it and need to transport it.

I decided to sew a simple bag from canvas with a piece of thick wool felt sewn into it as a cushioned liner. I had no intentions of doing anything fancy, just a simple temporary bag that was purely utilitarian. This did the job and suited me just fine... for a few days.

But the lure of that blank canvas was too much.

I pulled out a few printed tea bags, abaca paper and matte gel medium and glued a few images down.

Then I painted a layer of clear gesso over the whole bag. Gesso is a way to prep the canvas for paint and clear gesso would not cover the printed images the way white gesso would.

Using acrylic inks, I brushed on some random color. When I build up layers of painted imagery, I like to start by putting down some primary colors, mainly warm yellows and cool red, because when I paint blues over them I'll get greens and purples. I especially like yellow as a base color because it is light, bright and transparant and I can always go darker with layers of color over the top.

With pencil I drew a few images on the canvas, white pencils are always nice if you can't see pencil lines very well.

Then I painted the background with deep blues and turquoise. You can see some of the colors are translucent letting the printed images and color from below show through and some of the colors, like the turquoise, are opaque.

 I used a black sharpie to give more definition to the simple graphic shapes

I still havent decided on what kind of closure if any I'm going to put on the bag, for now I just fold it over and that works fine.

An Artist Village

Welcome to my stop on the Artist Village blog tour.

My house is one of the little ones in the center circle of the village.

Symbolically the bird, who spreads its wings and flies, has spoken to me over the last couple years, so I decided to make a bird house.

The house incorporates floral/plant imagery for growth, bees for hard work, a heart for healing and love, roots for staying grounded and figuring out where to plant myself and even a couple of female nudes to reacquaint myself with being a single woman again. 

Making the House

I tried something a little new for making my house. I found out that abaca paper is often used to make tea bags (and money). Abaca is also used to make unryu tissue which I have used in my collages before. Unryu is the tissue paper that has little fibers visible in it. You can buy plain abaca here or here.

I created several black and white collages, combining text and imagery in photoshop, cut some heavier weight abaca paper to 8 1/2" x 11" and stuck it in my toner printer and printed out the collages. 

Next I painted the paper with textile paints and fused it to Peltex (heavy weight interfacing). Although the fuse from the Peltex did not stick that great, it did hold well enough for stitching.

These are the finished stitched panels, before I stitched them into a house form.

A sewed, stuffed and painted a bird to put inside.

My finished house is about 10 inches tall. 

Be sure to check out the last few stops on the blog tour

Melanie Testa  May 20 

Laura Wasilowski  May 23 

Kathy York  May 24 

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