a studio journal
From the category archives:
M. Bunny
This morning I saw this little fellow contentedly munching the remains of our kale, which was sticking up above the snow. We didn’t pull the it out of the ground this fall because it always seemed to perk up after a freeze. I’m glad the bunny waited until winter. He’ll get his B-vitamins! Our dog Lydia likes to hunt for him in the yard after dark but he is far to quick for her!
Munching kale
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Every other Friday I meet two sketching companions at nearby Como Park. As the weather has cooled, we’ve moved inside to the Conservatory. I recently captured some Koi gestures while gazing into the dark koi pond and hardly gazing at my paper. I enjoy the energy of gesture drawings – with live fish it’s impossible to capture much else because of the constant movement — in this case the eyes and mouths really stood out! It might be helpful to remember this movement while re-designing my minnow stencil!
the hungry koi
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I received John Marshall’s wonderful new DVD, Journeys in Katazome, in the mail last week. It’s the first in a series of DVDs teaching the katazome process, starting with stencil design, cutting and preparation. A richly illustrated interactive PDF document describes the process in detail from start to finish. The DVD also includes high-quality demonstration videos in which John demonstrates and talks about various steps. I’ve started to re-design my Minnow stencil after viewing the videos on stencil design. While I like my original minnow design, it is a challenging stencil to paste, and feels a bit unstable, perhaps because of the large open areas. I’ll try to create another more useful variation on the same theme as a 4-way repeat, sharing the process here from start to finish. I expect I’ll need to do 4-6 iterations before I’m satisfied with it.
In the first sketch below, I’ve played with some of the shapes, experimenting with scale and rotation. I can see now that 4 minnows do not excite me that much. In the next sketch I’ll try 3 and/or 5.
first sketch
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All artwork, images and content on this site is copyrighted
by Kit Eastman unless stated otherwise. ©2007-2010
I am a textile artist from St. Paul, Minnesota. I make decorative and functional objects, hand-painted in the Japanese tradition of katazome, or stencil-dyeing, using natural dyes on linen, cotton and silk. My work celebrates daily meetings with the wild birds, plants, and lake breezes of my local urban surroundings. Welcome to my blog, where I share notes, images and inspiration.
