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Fun for the "Art Mom" from FLAX!

FLAX has a special "Mother's Day" offer right now on online orders - 10% on any order between 4/20/07 and 5/9/07 with code F1007. Just so you know!

Well, while I'm at it, here are a few favorite things that always make me smile in the FLAX catalog/store. I have long loved the rainbow watch. I wish it was an adult size!

• Kid's Rainbow Watch
• Color-Changing Clock
• Buddha Board
• Travel Mugs
• Nepalese Notebook (Colored papers!)
• Moleskines
• Box of Mini Journals
• Cavallini Notebooks
• Dancing Dot Mugs
• Cottman Field Watercolor Set
• Aquarellith Watercolor Pencils
• Color Wall Clock

Printmaking Techniques (for everyone)

(Print made by 6-year old.)

I recently reviewed a number of books on "printmaking techniques" in preparation for a monoprinting project I was planning to do with a group of 20 kindergarteners. I've monoprinted before, but I wondered if there were other things I could be doing and adding to my own technique that would work with kids and in the classroom setting. I ended up getting really excited about printmaking - especially by the idea of cutting my own lino blocks or even cutting erasers to make custom stamps. The following titles are ones I found most useful, most inspiring, and most comprehensive for the average (maybe at-home) artist.

• Simple Printmaking: A Beginner's Guide to Making Relief Prints with Rubber Stamps, Linoleum Blocks, Wood Blocks, Found Objects by Gwen Diehn
  This one, more than any of the others I reviewed, got me really excited about printmaking - and left me really amazed at the wonderful prints shown throughout the book. This title is chock full of amazing examples of various types of printmaking as well as good and interesting pullouts on the history of printmaking as well as famous printmakers throughout art history. The book begins with in-depth discussion and illustration of the process of developing a design (from found objects to doodles to photos to drawings) and then moves on to coverage of the techniques. Techniques includes are: Found Objects, Distressed Block, Negative Carving, Positive Carving, Multiple Block Print, Sawn Block, and Collagraph. At the end of the book is an assemblage of functional and everyday projects you can make using printmaking as the chief medium. Some of them are a birth announcement (and jigsaw puzzle), a book cover, luminaries, lampshades, labels, notecards, and more.
  
  
• The Instant Printmaker: Simple Printing Methods to Try at Home (Watson-Guptill Famous Artists) by Melvyn Petterson and Colin Gale
  The focus on printmaking techniques that are easy to do and can be done at home and with accessible supplies is only one of the strengths of this book. The step-by-step directions are very well done and well illustrated, and each technique is also accompanied by a gallery of sample prints made by other artists so that you see a good range of application. The authors also cover some (maybe unusual) basic (and kid friendly) processes like foam prints, vegetable prints, and prints made with oven-baked modeling clay. They've got a section on relief printing with erasers (carving your own erasers to make stamps, basically) that is just fabulous and has totally put a bug in my ear about giving this technique a try. One thing I liked about this book is a feeling of innovation - not everything is brayer-dependent. Lots of brushwork is shown, and the section on "Collagragphs: Printing from a Collage" yields a stunning piece of art. A comprehensive title, in addition to the techniques already mentioned, the book covers Linocuts, Woodcuts, Boxwood Engraving, Screenprinting, Drypoint (on various mediums), Etching (various formats), Aquatints, and Lithography.
  
  
• The Encyclopedia of Printmaking Techniques by Judy Martin
  This book is full of wonderful examples of a wide range of printmaking styles. Each topic covered is accompanied by really good step by step annotation and photographs of what has been added in each step of an often multi-step process. The section on monoprints follows the creation of a really beautiful print. I found the sections on woodcuts and Lino cuts fascinating and really inspiring to watch the prints evolve in the samples. The book also covers Intaglio printing, Lithography, Etching, Drypoint, and Screenprinting. An excellent resource.

Current Reading Stack

• The Art & Craft of Hand Lettering: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration - great information/resource and the examples of sample artwork with hand lettering are quite wonderful and beautiful.

• The Kitchen Knight: A Tale of King Arthur (by Margaret Hodges [Author] and Trina Schart Hyman [Illustrator]) - second from this team that we've read. We just discovered this one. It's wonderful for those with knightly interests - not aimed at the youngest crowd... longer story. But excellent retelling and illustration.

• Saint George and the Dragon (by the same duo noted above) - when we first got this one last year, we had to read it repeatedly, many times, to satisfy the initial enthusiasm for it. Beautiful artwork; great medieval story.

• Nate the Great - If, like us, your child has exhausted the Magic Treehouse series, almost finished the A to Z Mysteries, and is looking for something new, give Nate the Great a try. The stories are a bit shorter than the other two series - but perfect for early reading-on-my-own time - or great for a quick half hour sit with them in your lap and share a mystery moments. Second half of the book (in some versions) has activities prompted by the story (I assumed all versions had this - but the library ones don't - they are nice, hardback, and with full-color illustration - so, versions vary!).

• Watercolor Pencil Magic.
  

Meaningful Chocies (just a few!)

• Bird by Bird
  
• Writing Down the Bones
  
• Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
  
• Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World
  
• Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself
  
• Journal of Solitude
  
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
  
• Daybook: Journal of an Artist
  
• Neverending Story
  
• The Reading Woman (Blank Journal)
  
• Reading Women
  
• Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes
  
• Artist's Way
  
• Artist's Date Book
  
• Creative License
  
• 52 Projects
  
• Illuminated Walden
  
• Living Out Loud
  

Preschool Art

Alphabet Art: With A to Z Animal Art and Fingerplays
Judy Press
This book is an amazing collection of easy-to-make animal projects that mostly use standard preschool craft materials... toilet paper rolls, paper towel tubes, coffee filters, paper plates, paper bags, and so on. Each letter of the alphabet is introduced and includes instructions for tracing, cutting out, and decorating (in a letter-specific manner) each uppercase and lowercase letter of the alphabet. At the end of the book, you would have a full alphabet, neatly patterned, printed, painted, and ready to hang. Each letter is accompanied by an animal project and a song, poem, or fingerplay making this a really well-rounded book and an excellent project resource for those working with the 2-6 crowd. Some of the animal projects: a collage butterfly, a paper-bag cat, toilet-paper roll elephant, muffin cup hummingbird, paper-plate turtle, a vulture, a whale, an x-ray fish, a lion, a jellyfish, a giraffe, a kangaroo, an inchworm, and, yes, a zebra. (And, each of the animals has a letter-appropriate name -- for example, Allan the Alligator and Freddy the Frog!) Seriously, these are wonderful and cute animal projects. If you like 3-dimensional projectmaking with your kids or students, you'll find lots of inspiration and clear, easy instructions here.

Science Play: Beginning Discoveries for 2- to 6-Year-Olds
Jill Frankel Hauser
This book is chock-full of easy projects that demonstrate scientific principles perfect for the preschool crowd. From "wiggly water necklaces" and "sugar crystal necklaces" to "spinners" made from cardboard circles and toothpicks to kites made from ordinary paper and straws to shadow art to wind socks , there are really solid, really fun activities here sure to delight young explorers and scientists. My favorite... the recipe for a "purple cow" - a combination of grape juice and milk that sounds too gross to be true but tickled our young taste testers and demonstrates the concept of a "solution" neatly. Many projects are less craft-oriented and more focused on observation... throw a bunch of things in a bowl of water and see which ones sink and which ones float... but it's a good resource for finding new and innovative ways to introduce science concepts at this level.

Gizmos and Gadgets: Creating Science Contraptions that Work (And Knowing Why)
Jill Frankel Hauser
Following on the heels of Science Play, Gizmos and Gadgets for kids age 7-14 is an excellent "next" book of science-related projects. We love it for both the novelty of the projects included and the in-depth, hands-on scientific explanations and lessons that accompany the projects and discussions. We tried the super easy "flow-and-go boat" made from a cup, a bowl, two plates, and a straw with a set of preschoolers. The project was a big hit, and they all got to watch the boat be powered by the water dumped into the cup flowing through the straw into the water of a small swimming pool and causing the boat to "move" forward. A big hit. From wobble balls to amazing aliens, to more complicated super spinners, to yo-yos, boomerangs, and a marshmallow catapult, there's a wide range of material here... and numerous ideas sure to engage and excite the school-age crowd. You may even find the perfect "science fair" project in here... one your child can do him/herself!

Fun with My 5 Senses: Activities to Build Learning Readiness
Sarah A. Williamson
Great collection of activities for ages 2 to 6, although many of them definitely seem most appropriate for the younger end of that spectrum. There are a few "projects" in the book, like "phoney phones" and "stained glass windows," but most of the activities are more simply acts of "doing" something designed to emphasize the senses... walking in nature, walking in the dark, feeling things, listening. There's less real "science" for preschoolers here than you might expect. But, again, the book is a good compilation of activities for pre-preschoolers especially.

Layer by Layer

Excerpted from the Creative Mom Podcast, Episode 3

Collage Discovery Workshop: Beyond the Unexpected
by Claudine Hellmuth

Hellmuth's intro notes talk about a period when her collage work really changed after a year-long struggle with artistic block. She talks about the process she went throughtrying tofigure out how to recapture the excitement and energetic feeling she'd once had creating art. She studied what she liked and responded to in art - and she made lists, lists, lists.

After determining where she was headed, Hellmuth freed herself from the pressure to do something "amazing" by focusing on simple materials. "It's just paper," she would tell herself. Then, she writes, "I decded to create at least one small collage a day and see where it would lead me. I wanted to make numbers of mini artworks quickly so that I could create without too much right-brained thinking. The only way to grow is to make a lot of art, so I leapt in." It worked.

The style of collage Hellmuth tapped into blends background, texture, pattern, hand drawing, and text with people constructed from photographs, photo copies, or prints of people's heads and clothing made from fabric or paper. She calls these people "poppets." The effect of her collags is whimsical and charming but powerful, too. The juxtaposition of the black and white photos with brightly colored hats, skirts, pants, and surrounding objects like houses trees, birds contribute to the narrative of each piece.

This is a beautifully done book. It's full of photographs of Hellmuth's work, but at it's core, this is a real how-to book. The book walks you step by step through the process of making a collage in Hellmuth's style. She teaches you 7 textural and easy to do backgrounds to add dimension, weathering, and visual depth to projects and then she shows 3 projects that use combinations of those background techniques. There is a section on printmaking (either by spoon or pasta machine). There are sections on working with fabric and color. And there's an extended section on using your own personal photos and stories. She gives concrete, hands-on suggestions for coming up with your own narrative theme for a piece or series and explains the thinking behind some of her works. The lessons feature clear and well-photographed directions that make it easy to reproduce the steps shown. (Even if poppets are not your style, the wealth of info on creating backgrounds here is excellent and can easily be used with other types of collage or mixed-media projects.)

Living Color

Excerpted from the book review segment of The Creative Mom Podcast, Episode 2

LIVING COLOR: A Writer Paints Her World
Natalie Goldberg

Those of you who are writers are likely familiar with Goldberg. Her Writing Down the Bones has been a seminal book for many writers, and Goldberg sort of ushered in the whole "freewriting" movement that ended up being used by many creative writers and even in many college writing and English classes in the 90’s.

Goldberg is known as a writer – both fiction and non-fiction. But Living Color chronicles her exploration of painting. I pick the book up from time to time, and every time, I'm really drawn to her paintings as well as to the way she writes about painting. The book is full of photos of her painting, and they are wonderful... quirky, full of color, and life, and unusual perspective. She painted many many many cars, trucks, and buildings.

I had to laugh that she got started painting by borrowing kids watercolor sets from the art teacher at an elementary school where she was teaching. Such a basic beginning, but interesting, too, because to her, at the time, painting was a real side-line. As she writes, "Mostly I was playing. Writing was the eldest son being groomed to succeed. I put all my effort into writing. Painting was a younger child left alone by an exhausted parent. Each day after I wrote and taught at the school in Taos, I could go out in the late afternoon and paint green chickens and cockeyed red goats."

Her whole approach to painting and color and form is really refreshing. It wasn't what she studied. Instead, she went with her gut and let her love of color flow. The result is really cool and fresh and unedited feeling. I love looking at her paintings, and every time I open the book, I get really inspired, again, to start painting. I read her words, and I think, "I just have to do it."

Lving Color is a really inspirational book. I encourage you to spend time getting lost flipping through the photos. They’re saturated with color. They leap off the page with color and life and a bold creative eye that makes me want to smile. Then, read the book. Goldberg is a master at weaving together story and self-reflection and philosophy into a unified thread that is at once both personal and instructive.

Goldberg has made many, including me, want to write. But with Living Color, Goldberg makes me ache to paint.

Cukoo for Klutz

This morning, we spent time building a football kicker from the Lego Crazy Action Contraptions: A Lego Inventions Book (published by Klutz. If I haven’t mentioned recently how much I love Klutz, let me just say it here. For the record, I am head over heels stoked on Klutz right now. I would go to work for Klutz in a heartbeat.

I remember Klutz from when I was younger. I remember the “how to juggle” books, followed, I think, by a “how to hackie-sack” book. Remember those? They were cool, but the Klutz lineup today is just knock-your-socks off cool. I wish we’d had books like these when I was a kid. Somehow, all of a sudden, we’ve fallen into Klutz world. For the last few months, I’ve been repeatedly hit in the head by books showing how totally cool Klutz books are. The LEGO book, which I got Matthew for Christmas, was the first Klutz book for us – my first as a parent, in other words. It’s fabulous. The creations are totally out of the ordinary, totally cool, and totally work.

Then, I ordered a "lacing" book for Spencer: Amazing Lacing Activity Book, also by Klutz. Very, very cool. As a creative type who has spent a lot of time with a needle of one form or another in my hand, I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of lacing exercises and activities. Lacing cards have always been popular in my house, and this book is like a spiral bound set of uber-cool lacing cards with a little pouch of cool, sparkly, curly, reach-out-and-touch me laces designed to get your kid’s attention. (Warning: Be careful with the corkscrew one. That one can snap at you sort of like an elastic band.)

Next, we stumbled over the hands-down worlds greatest color-by-number book ever, again, by Klutz: Paper Stained Glass: Color-By-Number Art for Your Windows. With transparent openings framed by black, the projects have a stained-glass effect, and the book offers suggestions for different ways to display or “use” many of the projects. (A snake one, for example, has instructions for cutting it and hanging it as a mobile.) Each page can be colored one of two different ways by simply flipping the sheet to one side or the other of the two-page spread. Or, you can come up with your own color-scheme for the page, and do something totally different. It’s a fabulous book, well-executed, comes with a pouch of numbered colored markers, and the drawings themselves are challenging and full of color.

Now, I find myself looking for Klutz. I spent some time oohing and ahhing over the "Twirled Paper" Klutz book the other day. It’s amazing. It will, no doubt, someday end up on my shelf. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you haven’t seen Klutz since the time of the juggle book, it’s definitely time for another look. For your own kids, grandkids, or gifts for friends, the bulging Klutz shelf or results page should be your first stop.

Here are a few other titles (many in the new Chicken Socks line) that caught our attention:

• Penny Games

• Melty Beads Activity Book

• Super Scissors Book

• Totally Tape

• Rescue Trucks

Watercolor Workbook : A Complete Course in Ten Lessons by Anne Elsworth

This is a wonderful introduction to watercolor painting. The lessons are multi-faceted, full of color, and accompanied by excellent examples and clear and concise instruction. Unlike other books on watercolor, Elsworth's begins not with washes but lets budding painters dive right in with an assortment of flowers and whimsical birds that encourage a feel for brushes and a love for the way watercolor paint works on the page. One of the best beginning watercolor books we've reviewed!

The Decorated Page

What an inspirational book! There are a number of visual, multimedia journal books out there, and many of them contain fabulous examples of multi-textured, multi-dimensional combinations of journal and sketchbook. The Decorated Page is a visual feast of such works and contains page after page of great examples that give the artist a taste of what's possible. The book also offers a series of step-by-step, hands on projects designed to guide the journalist through creating a specific type of page. While these projects take the book to a new how-to level, the projects themselves don't feel quite on par with the examples shown throughout the book and end up feeling a little forced and simplistic. That's not to say the book isn't a great reference, however. It is. Sections on modifying books, approaching multi-media journaling, to name just two, are exellent. You'll close this book inspired and ready to tackle your own journal or sketchbook and take it to the next level. Author Gwen Diehn also has a new book out, The Decorated Journal : Creating Beautifully Expressive Journal Pages. Our guess is this is one you'll want to check out.