Prepping for Art ²

ArtSquared is just around the corner! If you haven't heard of it already, it's an annual show held in Walla Walla where nearly 1,000 works will be presented by local artists. Every piece is a mere 6"x6" square block priced at $36. The sold pieces will be benefiting arts education in the Walla Walla valley as a portion of the proceeds will be given to Carnegie Picture Lab. This will be my first year participating, and I'm excited to be involved!

For this event, I decided on a theme; beasts and botanicals! I documented a few common animals and plants that Walla Walla has to offer. This series was both free-form and fun! I was able to play with mediums I'm still grasping, like tea and gouache. All of my Art Squared works had the same process, which I documented with some quick photos below.

The first step was getting my tea papers ready. I soaked several sheets of cold press arches paper in black tea. (Chai tea to be exact. . .which made for a smelly-good time!) Once the pages were dry, I went on to flesh out my sketches.  I used tracing paper for the sketches so I could easily define the dimensions of the tea paper that  I will be transferring to.

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Next, I placed the tracing paper over the tea page and retraced my lines with a graphite sheet underneath, transferring the design over to the tea page. You can check out my previous blog post here about transferring if you'd like more information on how to transfer yourself!

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After the graphite has transferred, ink is ran over the sketch lines to solidify the illustration. This is my favorite part! At this point I can choose to ignore or add to the previous sketch, bringing the illustration to a certain life.

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Color! Watercolor is swept over the desired areas, and white gouache was added to have areas of light pop against the browned tea pages. Lastly, a custom stamp was pressed on the illustration, bearing the mark of Walla Walla! The stamp includes the longitude and latitude coordinates to Walla Walla, it's zip code, and name itself.  Now that the paper has been complete, mounting was necessary.

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I then sprayed the back of the page with adhesive, prepping it for the 6"x6" mounting boards. The boards were lightly sanded for better gripping. I smoothed the pages across the board once the adhesive was evenly spread, letting the edges flow over the sides. To get rid of the excess paper, I lightly sanded away at the edge, making the pages give and split just perfectly.

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Budding Buck

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And it's done!

Drop by CAVU Cellars on September 29, starting at 5pm, to see the rest of these little guys at the opening reception! Not to mention the 99 other artists and their works. If you can't make that date, no biggy! The show will be running up until October 29th.