All kinds of excitement

Of both the realized and unrealized kind.

Earlier in the day, I was watching the birds enjoying the holly berries and the sunflower seeds sprinkled over the snow, when all of a sudden they all flew off. And what do I see but this, a falcon?, sitting in the tree:



Then it was a quick run to the grocery store to stock up, in case we do get iced in for the next few days. And I got SO close to accomplishing my goal! The car just couldn't make it back up the hill about a block and half away. It really wanted to turn around and head back down, so OK, if that was what it wanted to do, that was what I'd do. I managed to park it by the curb and then walked home with my two bags of groceries.

Having had that experience, I decided that going into town for my interview with the Oregonian feature writer this afternoon was probably not the best idea, despite that the publicity would be so very lovely! I was planning on busing in anyhow, but I could just see that the bus wouldn't be able to make it, and if it was really slick, I may not be able to walk back up the hill either. Then someone would discover my frozen corpse tomorrow morning, slowly sliding down Capital Highway...

Hopefully, we'll be able to reschedule when the weather cooperates.

Spent the rest of the afternoon floundering a bit, unmoored from my original plans. Finally got my act together around 4pm or so and started gesso'ing my birch boards for my experiments.

I've been wanting to try mounting gouache on paper on board, and even bought the airbrush so that I could try putting on a protective coat over the gouache. I gesso'ed the boards as a buffer, and also to get a smooth surface to attach the paper. I had 2 boards to play with. I wanted to try attaching both dry and dampened paper.

Anyhow, after 4 coats of gesso, I sanded both boards to a smooth finish. If I remember correctly, the Birgit O'Connor dvd showed her using PVA to attach her paper to the clayboards, so that was what I did too. But in retrospect, I wonder if mat medium may not have been a better adhesive? But maybe she used mat medium and I just got confused. (And now that I'm thinking about it, she did use mat medium; I got confused.) [It's now the next day...and of course I meant MATTE medium...I really was confused.]

But back to the PVA—I brush the PVA on the gesso'ed board, and it films up almost instantly! I've never seen PVA do that before! I thought, huh, that's weird. So like the insane person that I am, I wipe it off and I do the exact same thing again. And it films up instantly again!

Okay! So the PVA goes on the back of the paper instead, and I attach the paper to the board. I do both the dampened and the dry sheets and weigh both down with some bricks.

Then I watch my 2 dvds that came with the airbrush kit. That takes a while. Then I check on my paper+board. And the dampened paper definitely adheres a LOT better. The dry paper is peeling easily off the corners.

Next—I paint some color swatches, airbrush it with GAC 500+ airbrush transparent extender, and see what happens!