I'm Moving -- to a New Blog Address!

Please join me at my newly re-designed website and blog, now integrated into one.

Come on over to www.janedavila.com for all the latest news on products, workshops, books and magazine articles, and events.

This blog will remain live to preserve all of its great content, but all new posts will appear on the new blog.

Please remember to update your blog readers too. Thanks! See you at my new place. :)

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials starts now!

Does surface design summer camp sound like fun to you? Then join me in my online course Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials on Craft University! Registration is open through August 29.

The supplies needed are simple to find, non-toxic, and mostly inexpensive - and you'll be creating unique and interesting fabrics with everyday materials like artichokes, onions, ferns, lace, even fish!

Treat yourself, sign up with a friend, and work through the lessons. I'll be standing by to answer questions, lend encouragement, and dish even more tips and tricks.

Use coupon code PRINT20 for a 20% discount on the price of the class. See you at camp!

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials - online course!

Back at the beginning of May I took a trip out to the Denver area and recorded an online video workshop for Craft University called Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials. Working with the team there was a blast and I'm so proud of the content of this workshop.

In the workshop I teach you all about how to sun print with acrylic paints and inks, how to direct print leaves, fruits, and veggies, how to print 3D objects like seashells and bumpy leaves, how to print fish, and even how to print your own photos with UV reactive dyes.

The team put together a preview of the workshop and you can watch it here:

Printing on Fabric with Natural Materials starts on July 25 and runs through Sept 5, but you own it forever, in case your summer gets busy. But! If you want to play along in real time, I'll be around to cheerlead, answer questions and troubleshoot, and share some more fun tips, tricks, and resources. You all are encouraged to post photos from the lessons and ask as many questions as your heart desires. I'll be right there guiding you!

You can use coupon code PRINT20 to save 20% on the course, and I'll be giving away a free gyotaku rubber fish for printing on Facebook and Instagram, so make sure you friend and follow me there too!

Summer is the best time to Nature Print - head out into the backyard to gather some supplies and then come join me in class!

The store is now open!

At long last, and after some much appreciated nagging from my daughter Sam, my etsy store is once again fully stocked and ready for shopping. I added some gyotaku fish prints (which come matted and ready to frame) and some collage jewelry. I have a few more items to add this week and then I can cross something big off my ToDo list.

Please head over to Etsy and check me out!

Housing Starts

Last year, the uber-talented and enthusiastic Kathy York got a brainstorm to gather a group of artists to create a village of Fiber Houses. The resulting village is so vibrant and interesting, isn't it?

I built three houses for the project and at the time I thought they were on the large side, but looking at the village now I can tell they're not. My houses are in the center right in the village above.

First side of my pointy house 

Second side of my pointy house

Side one of my squatty house

Side two of my squatty house

Side one of my tall house

Side two of my tall house

I had a lot of fun playing with roof lines and proportion. Maybe it's my frustrated architectural tendencies?
Each of my houses is composed of both fabric and art/found papers and incorporates some printmaking.

Following along on the rest of the blog tour to learn more about the houses and their artists.

Susan Else (website) May 2 http://www.susanelse.com/

Frances Holliday Alford May 3 http://www.franceshollidayalford.com/weblog/

Pamela Allen (website) May 4 http://pamelart.homestead.com/titlepage.html

Frieda Anderson May 5 http://friestyle.blogspot.com/

Lisa Call May 6 http://blog.lisacall.com/

Jane Davila May 9 http://janedavila.blogspot.com/

Naomi Adams May 10 http://killerbeedesigns.com/blog1/

Jamie Fingal May 11 http://jamiefingaldesigns.blogspot.com/

Barb Forrister May 12 http://www.freespiritartstudio.blogspot.com/

Vickie Hallmark May 13 http://fiberartglass.blogspot.com/

Connie Hudson May 16 http://beyondtherail2010.blogspot.com/

Leslie Jenison May 17 http://leslietuckerjenison.blogspot.com/

Sherri McCauley May 18 http://sherrilipmanmccauley.blogspot.com/

Judy Perez May 19 http://judyperez.blogspot.com/

Melanie Testa May 20 http://www.melanietesta.com/mtype/

Laura Wasilowski May 23 http://artfabrik.blogspot.com/

Kathy York May 24 http://aquamoonartquilts.blogspot.com/

PS: Sorry about the wonky formatting in this post. Blogger is being a pain in the patootie and won't bend to my will this morning...

Sisters Oregon & A Quilter's Affair

This summer I will once again be teaching at the phenomenal Quilter's Affair conference in Sisters, Oregon. I am so looking forward to it! This event is really well-organized and the week is topped off by the most amazing outdoor quilt show.

This year I'll be teaching two sessions of my workshop, Project Patchwork. I love this class and I get to be Tim Gunn to all of the designers in the room. I issue three challenges throughout the day and participants create 3 small quilts using their favorite techniques. It's a tremendous amount of fun and very inspiring for all!

I'll also be teaching a Nature Printing workshop (with, among other goodies, rubber fishies!) and a nifty Stampmaking for Quilters workshop, plus an intense day I call Outer Limits where you'll learn more than 20 non-traditional ways to finish off the edges of your art quilts. Look Ma, No Binding!

I hope you can join me - the setting is glorious and the entire week is delightful.

Art on Exhibit!

I spent the morning hanging my solo show. I have been working all summer to get ready for this exhibit -- making new work, and matting, framing and mounting existing work. It was fantastic to see it all hanging together on big white walls!

The opening reception is tomorrow night, Thursday September 23rd from 7 - 8:30 pm. The exhibition is held at the Edward J Duffy Art Gallery at the Canterbury School in New Milford CT. The show runs through October 14 and the gallery is open to the public weekdays from 8 -3 and Saturdays from 8-12 or by appt (860-210-3800).


On exhibit are over 50 pieces, including the first public showing of the first half of the Loteria series and many other new works. I've discovered one drawback to working on a small scale - it takes a LOT of work to fill a gallery!

Many of the Loteria series are on display, as well as an assortment of gyotaku fiber and paper collages, insect work in a variety of formats, some new pieces inspired by cell phone photography and a few three-dimensional fiber houses.

I hope you can stop by!

Rubber Fish Chronicles

Have a hankering to paint some rubber fish?  Holy mackerel! You'll have your chance in Chicago this August with me at the Cloth Paper Scissors Create conference. I'll be bringing all of my fishy friends for a day of gyotaku painting fun!

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish - big fish, small fish and a seahorse and starfish too. Don't let this one get away. :)

I'll also be teaching a 3D fiber house plus a workshop on Jump Starting Your Art Career - now's the time to get serious about your art and I can help you. This is an evening workshop with lots of hands-on activities to help you develop your personal marketing plan for your career. Tons of useful, practical information about branding, dreaming big, approaching galleries, selling more art and much more.

AED - reboot

So now that I'm getting over the over-thinking and subsequent self-sabotage from a week ago, I'm back to posting again. And no longer worried about the relative importance of the output, just the doing.

A fun little collage with a fun little Indonesian stamp I picked up on a jaunt today that also included a Wolf Kahn exhibit and excellent chocolate gelato (not all at the same time).

AED - screenprinting

Why yes, that is a plaster fish head on my kitchen counter.



Today was much more about process than a finished project. I was working on fabric postcards - I snapped this photo just before I screenprinted some insects onto the painted and stamped backgrounds.

And I did pack the car rather creatively in preparation for vending at the Brownstone Quilter's Guild show in Allendale, NJ this weekend.

An afternoon at the aquarium

As a special treat, Tracey Brookshier took me to the Monterey Bay Aquarium after we finished teaching on Friday. What a feast for the eyes! The aquarium is famous for its jellyfish exhibits and rightly so. I need to go back with my good camera, the jellies are hard to photograph with a point-and-shoot.







I found myself completely captivated with a tank of sea anemone. The colors were amazing. I feel a new series coming on...





Some of the pictures I took were disappointingly blurry - the leafy sea dragons (unbelievably cool and surreal-looking), the river and sea otters, and the sand dollars (we stared at these a long time while they moved in s l o w motion) so I'll need to try again next time. We bumped into some of my students who were practicing their observational skills at the aquarium before their flight home.

After we had our fill of the fishies, we headed to Cha-ya, a Japanese tea, art and antique store in an old part of Monterey, where I found origami paper, small dragonfly dishes, a couple of pretty chirimen bags and a tiny metal jizō statue (that caused my luggage to be searched at security the next day, I guess it looked more menacing in the x-ray machine than it does in real life!) Then on to an art supply store for a paper fix, gorgeous handmade paper with Thai writing on it, a vintage-looking map and more handmade paper with newspaper inclusions. And finally back to Tracey's house for a home-cooked meal with her family. All in all, a fantastic ending to a fantastic week.

Almost...

The new office area in the barn studio is nearly complete. Sometimes I think I should have been an interior designer, the decorating part of any project really floats my boat (bad metaphor, I get seasick really easily, but you know what I mean). Or, putting my reno and carpentry skills together with the decorating, a contestant on one of those reality shows where you get two days, $100, half a sheet of plywood, six old planks of knotty pine, two rubber bands and one copy of the Sunday New York Times to make over a room. I would totally rock that.



This project did involve trips to Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe's and an office supply store, and didn't involve any rubber bands, but it still looks hot. The shelves on the other side of the room are getting containers and labels. I need another trip to Ikea to finish it up.



And yeah, it's snowing again. Even with the snow, the view is better with the window.

More art, another collage made in December:



pescados musicales

Text as design and inspiration

Artist Trading Card with a background of newspaper from India and a Chinese fortune cookie fortune

I love the use of text as a design element. I know that a lot of other artists are also inspired by and incorporate text into their work. I adore the way Karen Stiehl Osborn uses text, Rayna Gillman does beautiful things with letters, and Virginia Spiegel has a way with words, just to name a few. I don't know whether my affinity for the use of all things alphabetical is linked to my colored-grapheme synesthesia or not but I do know that I find it a very satisfying inspiration.

Sometimes the forms of the letters are pure design elements for their shapes, used as background noise, as in this piece from my Climate series.

Sometimes the letters or numbers are large and central to the piece but don't "say" anything.

Sometimes the letters spell something relevant.

I can't get enough letters and numbers. I have over 600 fonts installed on my computer and subscribe to a bunch of font newsletters. You might say that I'm a font junkie. I'm such a letter nerd in fact that I print out and collect the Type Trading Cards from ITC (International Typeface Corporation) each month. They're like ATCs, but with font history and fun facts.

I also collect lots of things that have text on them to use in my work. I have scores of fortune cookie fortunes -

Maps -



Old music scores -



Pages from falling-apart books -



Reproductions of old money or letters -



Postage stamps -



And of course, paper and stamps with other languages.

Handmade paper with Korean characters -



A newspaper from India -



And more alphabet stamp sets than you can shake a stick at - in every size from 1/4" to 3" high, and several character sets.



I've been playing with layering text of different scales, different languages, different colors, to say something and just for the forms. I can think of so many more directions to explore.





I found some really neat letters made of recycled tin cans in a catalog recently. The letters are about 8" high and 1.5" deep. Because they were on sale, the company was out of a lot of letters and only had two vowels left (u and o). It made spelling something out a little challenging, but I did think of a great word for my studio, as you can see!



My husband walked in right after I hung them up (probably attracted by the hammering) and wanted to know why the wall said "spout". Silly boy...