Failure: Important

Failure: Important:  Lately, I've been painting a lot on canvas.  When I took Cindy Wunsch's class at CREATE in July, she kindly resined all of our canvases.  It looked so amazing.  That layer of resin just made everything all shiny and the colors richer and more intense.  I wanted to try it.

Paul, a sweet friend of my older daughter Mariel, came over to help me do the first piece.  I am always nervous to try something new by myself -- especially if it includes mixing combustible liquids and having to use a blow torch!  Paul's an engineering student with resin experience.  He helped me with a small canvas, and it looked so pretty and seemed so simple, that after he left I decided  to do ALL of my canvases.  The prudent person would have waited for this first one to dry, and assessed the situation.  But one of my mottos could very well be: "Instant gratification takes too long."  So before you could say "take a deep breath and count to ten," I had spread newspaper all over the floor of my studio, and was mixing and pouring away.

Resin is messy -- it is goopy and sticky; it drips and clings.  Having not thought this through, I didn't leave myself a good path for moving around my studio and essentially resined myself into the corner farthest away from the door, trapped by a goopy, sticky mess; by the time I inched my way out, there was resin on the bottom of my shoes, my canvases were resined to the newspaper underneath, and many of my painting supplies, which I hadn't put away, were sticky and gooey.

The next morning, it took me nearly 3 hours to cut away the newspaper from my canvasses with a box cutter and exacto knife.  The good news is that they look SO PRETTY and SHINY!  Also, I learned some valuable lessons:

1. When instructions say to test out a small area first, test out a small area first.  If you're like me, you have probably had disastrous experiences with hair color because you failed to follow this direction.  Ahhh - when will I every learn?
2. It is very important to elevate your canvases before applying resin.  The resin will drip and adhere your canvases to whatever is underneath.  Then you will have to spend time cutting the canvas away.  This time would be better spent doing just about anything else!
3. Use plastic, not newspaper, to protect your surfaces.  The resin that dripped down my canvases went right through the newspaper and glued a lot of it to the floor of my studio.  Now, I have little triangles of shiny, hard newspaper speckling my floor.  
4. Make sure the area in which you are working is well lit because you need to see the tiny bubbles that rise to the surface of the resin that you must annihilate with your blow torch.  Resining at 1AM with just a desk light doesn't allow you to see these pesky bubbles.
5. Be patient!  The resin takes about 7 hours to cure.  Poking your finger at your canvas after only an hour because you think the directions must be overstating the drying time will only result in fingerprints and poke-marks on your canvas!

It was very apt that I had recently started an art journal page around two partial newspaper headlines I had cut out:  "Merging Textures" and "Failure: Important."  I learned a lot!  If you decide to resin your work, go to ArtResin first and watch their videos.  I wish I had!

Live in Love: 

Last week, the bulb on my special daylight worklight blew out.  My husband promptly volunteered to go out and get me a new one.  Sometimes I take for granted how sweet he is and how much he supports my creative life.  Right then and there, I told Samy, my 11 year old, "make sure when you get married, it's to a man who will go out and get you a replacement bulb if that means you can keep on painting."  If I ever forget how much he loves me, I have only to look at the carpeting on the stairs and hallways that connect the three floors of our house.  This is my "Freddie loves me" carpeting.  Not many husbands would let their wives do wall to wall leopard!  As a thank you, I made a painting inspired by my kind, sweet, supportive husband. 

 

I'm linking up to Artists in Blogland, Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Out of the Journal, Inspire Me Monday, and A Year in the Life of an Art Journal, where the theme this week is kindness.   I hope you'll visit some of the links on these pages -- there are so many wonderful artists showing inspiring work.

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.