The First of the Painted Boxes

Painted tea box.

As I had blogged recently, I have started to experiment with painting boxes.  I had seen an article in GreenCrafts magazine in which someone had started painting boxes to use as gift boxes.  The idea intrigued me because it gives me an opportunity to learn to paint as well as recycling materials into a useful object; in this case a box to use when giving someone a gift.

I am more of a crafter than a painter, but I would like to learn to paint better than I do.  I guess at the moment you could say I am an impressionistic painter.  I get the impression that I am not very good at it.  (Pardon the pun.)    However, the only way to get better at painting is to paint frequently, so I'm giving it my best shot. 

I once read an article somewhere, ( I can't remember where) that a particular artist used to throw his canvas on the ground and walk all over it before starting to paint.  He did this because a blank canvas without a mark on it was so disconcerting that he had trouble starting a painting.  I can totally relate to that.  I stared at the blank box for two days before I said to myself, "Pick a subject, pick up a paintbrush and get started."  Then I did.

To recap from the first blog on painted boxes, I picked three boxes from the assorted boxes left over from products in the kitchen.  They were a tea box, a cracker box, and a box that held disposable cups.  They just happened to be the first boxes that came along when I started the project.  The boxes were different weights of cardboard, which also allows me to experiment to find out if one weight of cardboard is better than another.  I painted each box with Gesso.  Even two coats of Gesso were not enough to cover the printing on the boxes completely.  I had to paint the boxes with Titanium White in order to blank out the box completely.  I am using acrylic paints: artist's paints not craft paints.  Most of the paints are Liquitex, but some are Windsor & Newton.

The result is my painting, "Storm Breaking Up at Sunset".  The painting is on the top panel.  The bottom and side panels are just muddled in.  Actually, only the bottom and part of the sides are painted at this point.  When I started I was not sure whether I wanted to continue the painting along the sides or not.  At this point, since it is only an experiment, I think I will just muddle in all the sides.  But, if I wanted to continue the painting, I could.

My conclusion so far is that the tea box was a little flimsy, but that did not pose any real difficulty in painting it.  One of the inner flaps did rip a bit while I was holding it while painting.  A sturdier box might be a better investment of time.  I guess it depends on what size you need for the gift.

Instead of Boxes...A Carousel Synchronicity

One for the bucket list.

If you are a regular reader, you were probably expecting a picture of a painted box today.  I needed a little playtime after my carousel project.  I have started painting a box, but today I have something much more interesting to write about: a synchronicity.  And also an interesting trip.

Whether you call it a synchronicity or a coincidence, it is just amazing how things happen sometimes.  As many readers know, I just completed a small folk art carousel.  In my last blog post I mentioned that going around the country to ride carousels was one of the things I was going to put on my bucket list.  I had not yet given any thought as to how this might be accomplished.  I just wrote it and went on to my life.  Within a week, things started to happen.

My husband and I decided to take a road trip (more on that in a moment).  We stopped at a rest stop in Maryland.  Inside the tourist information center they had a carousel horse on display.  This was a recently carved horse.  It was wonderful to see such beautiful carving.  We did not have the camera with us in the rest stop. The information said it was done by a local carousel group.    I thought that was a wonderful treat.  However, that was not the end of the synchronicity.  More was to come.

The reason we were on a road trip is because I had wanted to go to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.  (More on that in a moment.)  After we went to the museum, we had lunch and took a stroll along Baltimore's inner harbor.  To my absolute delight, there were some workmen installing a carousel.  It was absolutely beautiful.  It was a real treat to see it.  My husband snapped the picture from his phone.

I don't know if the carousel will be there as a permanent feature.  Baltimore is having some type of festival next week and I'm thinking it might be installed for the festival.  But if you live in Baltimore now, or are planning on going to the National Aquarium soon, check out this carousel. 

The museum was also a treat.  Some of the art was what I expected, as I have seen Visionary Art before.  Visionary Art tends to deal with apocalyptic themes.  Other types of art in this category are art that do not fit into neatly defined categories. They had a kinetic sculpture by Vollis Simpson, a throne and crowns decorated with bottle caps, hand made automatons, fiber art, and lots of mosaics featuring mirrors and broken bottles and plates.  Strange stuff, but beautiful in its own way.  I don't have pictures to show you because they do not allow photography at the museum.  I'm providing a link to the museum's web site for those who would like to see what they are willing to post on the internet:  http://www.avam.org/  If you happen to be going to Baltimore, it is worth the time to take a tour of the museum.   It is worth the trip just to see the facade of the building, which is decorated in bottle and mirror mosaics. 

We were also very enamored of the "tree" decorated in mirror glass.  The cone shaped tree was decorated with strands of small mirror tiles.  It flashed and sparkled in the sun.  The breeze caused the mirror strands to act like wind chimes.  There was a constant tinkling sound.

Well, next blog post will be about the painting I'm doing on a box.  Check back on Wednesday.

Onward to New Projects!-Boxes - Photo

The carousel project is complete and I'm getting ready to start a new project.  As I stated in the blog at the beginning of the year, my goal for this year was to create a carousel and make a new walking stick.  That is still the plan, but I need a little bit of a break before I take on the second project.  The carousel was a long term project.  When I finish one of those, I need to play for a while before I take on another intense project.  For the next couple of weeks, I am planning on just doing some small, quick, fun things.  Once I've had a chance to mess around a bit I'll be ready to settle into another serious endeavor.  I plan to start the walking stick in mid-August.

Until then, I'm giving myself permission to play.  One of the projects I plan to work on are painted boxes.  I saw an article in GreenCraft magazine about a woman who started to paint boxes to use as gift boxes.  The idea intrigued me.  Recycling boxes such as cracker boxes or heavier cardboard boxes that I receive in the mail has a certain appeal.  It will prevent waste and it will give me some time to work on my painting skills.  Although I paint the paper mache' items I make, I don't have fine art painting skills or even folk art painting skills for that matter.  I thought I'd try painting on the boxes.  If they come out okay, someone gets a present in a unique box.  If they are terrible, they get tossed.  It will only cost a little time and a bit of paint.  Maybe I will learn something. 

With that in mind, I saved three boxes.  I've already learned something.  I started by giving them a coat of Gesso to help the next layers of paint adhere to the shiny surface of the boxes and to obscure the boxes product information.  The colors on the boxes were so vivid that you could still see them through the Gesso.  So I added a second coat and I could still see the original printing.  Next I tried some white craft paint.  It was too thin and I could still see the print.  I decided to get serious and painted the boxes with a tube of Titanium White.  That more or less covered it.  I can barely see the colors from the box.  At this point, I think I can start painting and feel confident that none of the original colors of the box will show through.

Now I just have to figure out what I am going to paint.  Check back to see how things are going.  Otherwise, look for me to begin the next walking stick in mid-August.

Carousel Part 37- Folk Art Carousel Completed

My Folk Art Carousel is now complete.  I'm pleased out how it turned out.  I must admit that once I started this project that I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew.  It was an ambitious project to say the least.  The small size of the project added to the difficulty.  It took a lot of fine motor movements to work with something this small.  The finished size of the project is twelve inches in diameter and nine and a half inches high.  Now I know why most carousel carving projects start at one eighth size.  You can't put a lot of detail into anything much smaller.  However, the size of this carousel makes it a very usable decorative item.  Not everyone has the room for a decorative item that is three or more feet across.

 As usual in my projects, I always try to incorporate some technique that I have not tried before.  In this case, almost the whole thing was experimental.  I had not tried the technique of creating three dimensional menagerie animals by using poster board and wooden braces.  I also experimented with using cloth with paper mache' to create the rugs that sit atop the camel.  This worked out very well, and I plan to use it in future projects.  This is also the first project in which I have incorporated moving parts; the spinner mechanism that allows the carousel to turn.  Movement within a project has opened up a lot of possibilities for future works.

The Johnny Cake faces were fun to make.  I also make dolls, so faces are not totally new to faces, but I really put a lot into trying to make certain kinds of expressions on this project.  Up until now, the faces I've done have not showed a lot of personality, emotion, or intent.  I was too busy concentrating on making a proportional face.  I'm definitely going to have to explore developing an expression the next time I make a doll.  I realize now how much expression can enhance the doll or project.  

I learned a good deal about the history of carousels for this project.  Now that there are so few around I feel really privileged to have ridden so many during my lifetime.  Like the song says, "You never miss a thing till its gone."  If I had the funds for it, I think I would tour the country riding carousels the way some people do to ride roller coasters.  I think it would be a great trip, or more likely trips.  Well, you never know, I'll put it on my bucket list.  

I also learned that the outside of a menagerie animal is called the Romance side and is more highly decorated than the inside of the figure.  The inside also has a name, but it escapes me just this moment.  I wish I had put more decoration on the animals, but I was somewhat limited by the size.  Trying to do decorative painting on something so small was quite difficult.  The brass rods that serve as poles and the brass bead findings were purchased.  The balls that sit atop the brass beads I made and painted myself.  I wanted to put as much of my own work into this project as possible.

If I had any advice to give to someone making a carousel, it would be to build the carousel structure first and do the menagerie animals at the end.  Although it is reasonable to make the animals first to make sure your sizing of the carousel is right, I found that once the menagerie animals were complete, the romance of this project was over.  (Pardon the pun.)  The proper size of the animals could have been determined by the cardboard mock ups made at the beginning.  Once I had completed the menagerie animals, it was an effort of the will to stay on track with the project.  I just had to keep plugging away at it until the project was finished.

The part I enjoyed the most on this project was the memories it allowed me to access from my past.  Carousels and amusement parks don't come to mind that frequently.  I've recaptured more memories with this project than I have with others.  It is amazing what you remember once you stop and pay attention.  Memories that are buried deeply come to the surface when you take the time to observe what is going through your mind while you are working on a project.  So I guess I will end this blog post with one more memory: a small hand tightly clutching a ticket, eagerly waiting to get on the carousel.

Carousel 36- Johnny Cake Faces Completed

Well, completed but not yet adhered to the carousel housing.  I worked all day trying to get the faces completed.  It took longer than I expected for being as small as they are.  Actually, it was the small size of the faces that was part of the reason for it taking so long.  Each face is only an inch and three quarters in diameter.  They were hard to keep in place while I was painting.  Some of the time I messed up what had already been painted and had to go back and repair something I thought was finished.

My old nemesis of getting the eyes in the right position came back.  On a couple of the faces I had to repaint the flesh tones and start over.   Another problem I ran into was that the features had a distinctly feminine cast to them.  I had to repaint some of the faces to make them more masculine looking.  I had to resort to adding beards and mustaches to emphasize that some of the faces were male.  I really had not intended to have a full beard on one of the faces, it happened because I could not get a smaller beard to come out right.  A little too much on one side, a little to much on the other side trying to correct the problem.  Then the other side needed to be evened up, etc.  I finally had to decide whether to have a full beard or repaint the whole face again.  I chose the beard because I had been working at the faces all day.  It wasn't exactly what I intended, but I'll consider it a happy accident.

As I had mentioned in previous blog posts, the inspiration for having the faces on the carousel was an antique Johnny Cake face that belonged to my mother.  None of the pieces looks exactly as I remember it.  My mother no longer has the piece, so there is no going back to check now.  As far as I know, we don't even have a photograph of it.  It is just a part of my childhood that has stayed in memory. 

Another inspiration for these faces was a ride and some of the amusements and decorations at the Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, VA.  The amusement park was torn down years ago.  I used to go there both as a child and as a teenager.  The amusement park had rides that were probably from the 1950s because they were old and worn in the 1960s and 1970s.   I remember that some of the decorations had over sized heads with big eyes and leering, lascivious grins.  Some of the amusements, such as the fortune teller, were mechanized.  For a quarter or perhaps it was fifty cents, you could have your fortune read by an automaton.  As a kid, I used to think the expressions were really creepy.

The faces also appeared in a boat ride.  I think its name was the Tunnel of Fun, but most people referred to it as the the Tunnel of Love.  (Norfolk is a navy town, [city actually] sailors took their girlfriends [or ladies of the evening] and used the darkness to...well you get the picture.)  The boat ride started outside at an entry gate.  The swift current rapidly took you into a tunnel in complete darkness.  I can still remember the dank smell of brackish water and wet concrete; and the sound and feel of the boat bumping into the concrete walls.  (The sign saying "Keep your hands inside the boat" was not just a suggestion.  Holding onto the side of the boat might have caused injuries to your fingers.)  In the dark, you never knew what was coming next.  Every once in a while lights would flash on and grinning devil, skeleton, or eerie tableau would be illuminated while amplified shrieks filled the air. I remember it as being a really scary ride.  It was very similar to the haunted houses that are around today, but because it was done in complete darkness and in water, it made
people feel very much out of their element.  Probably the ride was not all that long, but it seemed to go on forever, as the boat went bumping along in the darkness. 

Anyway, the carnival faces from years ago have influenced my faces for the carousel.  Many of the old carnival canvas paintings had very suggestive overtones.  I have tried to reproduce that element of the past into the faces on the carousel.  The plaques will be placed on the carousel tomorrow.

I also tried some embellishment on the roof of the carousel, but I did not care for it.  I used a hole punch to punch out circles of prismatic paper to put on the roof.  I had hoped it would sparkle like lights on a carousel.  The problem was that it was too much sparkle.  I moved your eye from the menagerie animals to the roof as the main feature.  I decided that it was just too much.  It may have worked if I could have cut the pieces smaller, but there is only so much I can do when working in such a small scale.  I'm thinking that I will leave the roof just as it is.  Once the Johnny Cake faces are glued to the housing, it will be time to attach the roof and call the project finished.

Johnny Cake Face Update

Some people might consider a Johnny Cake face to be a Man in the Moon face, but the antique plaque my mother owned was definitely a version of the folk tale of the Johnny Cake.  So that is what I am calling my face plaques.   As far as I can tell, the Johnny Cake faces had more color on them than Man in the Moon faces.  I suppose people interpret it as they choose when they see it.

I don't have any new pictures today, although progress has been made.  I could take a picture, but all you would see would be a lumpy white disk.  All of the faces now have the first layer of paper mache' on them, and some have the second layer on one side.  It takes a while for the paper mache' to dry, especially in the humid weather we have been having here. 

I plan to finish up adding layers of paper mache' tomorrow.  Then it will be on to sanding and painting.  Hopefully, the faces will be mounted onto the carousel housing within a week to a week and a half.  It depends on drying time and how much time I have available to work on the project.  I am really looking forward getting them finished. 

While waiting for the paper mache' to dry, I plan to be experimenting with some embellishment for the roof of the carousel.  I have an idea of using some prismatic paper to imitate the lights that are generally on the carousel.  My big question right now is how to permanently adhere it to the surface and whether covering it with varnish will affect its reflective properties.  I will know whether the paper will do what I want by the end of the day.  If it doesn't, I have a second idea that I may try.  If neither is satisfactory, I'll leave the roof as it is.  More on this in the next blog post.

Carousel-Part 35-The Johnny Cake Faces-Photos

July 4th is a holiday here.  I did not get a chance to post on Wednesday because I was busy with holiday preparations.  Some of the festivities took place on the actual day, and more are going on this weekend.  I've enjoyed the time with family and friends.  It has unfortunately put me behind on working on the carousel.  I am getting back to work, and hope to complete this phase of the work shortly.

What I have been up to this week is making the face plaques that will go above the mirrors on each side of the housing.  You may have read in a previous blog that my mother had once owned a Johnny Cake face that had been on an antique carousel.  It is this type of face that I am trying to reproduce for my carousel.  If you read my earlier blog post, you may remember that my Plan A for making the plaques did not work out to well. The pieces are so small that attempting to make the features out of clay produced a face that was way out of proportion to the carousel.  Now I am working on my Plan B.  It seems to be working.

This blog post will show the development of one of the faces.  (Each face will be different.)  To make the base of the plaque, I cut out three circles of poster board and glued them together.  I also traced circles onto a piece of paper and used those circles to sketch some rudimentary faces.  You can see some of the sketched face in the first picture.  I didn't want to show the whole sketch at this point.  I like to keep a few surprises.  Actually, the face may not turn out to look exactly like the sketch.  However, I now have a reference for placing the features, and that's what matters at this point.

Once the face was glued to the base, I began to cover the face with little bits of foil and tape to build up the features.  I painted each area with glue before placing the bit of foil on it.  Because the face is so tiny, I had to hold onto these small pieces of foil with tweezers in order to place them properly. Sometimes I used a small piece of masking tape to help hold a bit of foil in place.  The process of building the face has taken a fair amount of time, because I sometimes had to stop and let the glue set up before I could proceed.  Otherwise, the piece I had so carefully placed would slide out of its spot.

Once the facial features had been build up to my satisfaction, the face was covered with a layer of strip paper mache'.  Although in this case, strips are a bit of a misnomer.  The "strips" are only about a quarter of an inc long by 3/8 of an inch wide.  I guess it would be more accurate to describe it as patches of paper mache'.  I did not take a picture of it covered with paper mache' at this point because it would be a big disappointment.  Right now it is very hard to distinguish the features that I so laboriously placed.  But, once the faces are completed and painted, the contours created will enhance the painted features.  At least that is the plan.  It sounds good on paper.  I hope it comes off well in practice.  If not, its on to Plan C.