The beat goes on with my new upcycled drum head mandalas

I'm excited to share a new product I'm working on.  This is a large hand painted mandala suncatcher made from an upcycled drum head!  It's a faux stained glass window!

I've been collecting drum heads from all the drummers in my life for some time now, and I'm finally inspired to go forward with the idea.  I'm feeling super inspired lately - maybe it was the amazing visit with one of my old best friends who stayed with me last weekend (she lives in England and we hadn't seen each other for 16 years) or maybe it was my recent session in a sensory deprivation tank at Float On...or maybe it's the fact that I'm going to be vending at Crafty Wonderland's spring sale on May 11 and I really need some new work for my booth!

At any rate, I'm going for it!

Above you see the clear drum head with my original design on it. I drew it with a black marker and then went over it with "liquid leading." That stuff is kind of a pain to use. You are supposed to squeeze it out so that it looks like actual leading. Unfortunately my hand doesn't like doing all that squeezing. It hurts - I've tried it on some of my small CD spacers that I use to make my regular Mandala Suncatchers and found it to be quite painful and unsatisfactory. The lines ended up looking kind of shaky anyway and I just couldn't make them perfect. This is one of the reasons why I never went on to do the drum head art that I'd been planning for so long - the experiments with clear CDs were too disappointing. 

So, this time around, I decided to draw it with a marker and then apply the leading over the top with a paintbrush.  This worked out just fine!

Above is a shot of what the liquid glass paint looks like when it is being laid down on the surface.  Obviously this is a plastic drum head, not glass, so I'm really not sure how different this is from actually painting on glass - but I found it pretty cool and fairly easy to work with.  The paint goes on really thick and puffy and opaque from a little squirt bottle - it flows like crazy, almost too fast, but I managed to control it.  As it dries, it becomes flat and clear.  I like it because it goes on fast, only needs one coat, and you don't have to go back and outline afterwards.

Whoa - I managed to get a little bit of BLUE SKY in this one!!!

(Close-up of the design)

I love my kitchen!

So, I am still in the process of working out this product idea.  I know that I need to figure out a way to make them hang-able, and I also need to get some more colors of paint!  I will be experimenting with adding hardware (perhaps a chain) so that it can be hung from a hook at the top of your window frame.  I hope to have a good selection of these for Crafty Wonderland and will be adding them to my Etsy shop too!

I'd love to hear what you think - please leave a comment and let me know!

Psychedelic City! (The pinwheels at Live Debris)

Above is a super-oversaturated photo of my Mandala Pinwheels at the Eastbank Esplanade on Saturday morning. Psychedelic city, I say!



I was really happy with the way they looked planted on the riverbank like this for the Live Debris opening day event, with the Willamette River, Morrison Bridge, and buildings of downtown Portland in the background.

I did go back in the evening and removed all but three of them. I was just too worried about them being stolen, vandalized, or damaged. The three that remain will be there through the 26th if you want to go see them. I am hoping to get them listed in my Etsy shop soon, as I know that there are several people who already want to buy them. I just need to figure out how they can be shipped.

Here's what they looked like at about 7:00 in the evening:

Mandala Pinwheels - WHEEEE!

Just a quick peek at my new Mandala Pinwheels! They're made from recycled vinyl records and vintage radio knobs. Made in collaboration with Anitra Cameron of Coffee Pot People.

I'm so excited about these, I can hardly stand it! I even left them outside in the rain last night and they held up great. (They will be outdoors for a week during the Live Debris installation.)

I have 7 finished and will be working on the last 5 today. Here are a couple of quick videos if you'd like to watch them spin!

New techniques for Live Debris project

I'm working on some new Mandala Spinners for the upcoming Live Debris event which opens Saturday, September 19. The installations will be up through September 26.

For this project, I have collaborated with fellow Trillium Artisan Anitra Cameron of Coffee Pot People. She helped me figure out how to mount my painted records onto metal "stems" and provided me with a treasure trove of vintage radio knobs which I will be using to hold the records in place on the stick. She also gave me the idea of cutting and shaping the records to make them like pinwheels.

I've been working on this for the last couple of weeks and am getting very excited about it! It has been way too long since I've made anything totally new. If these survive the installation, I am hoping they will be a new product for Eye Pop Art - finally, I will have a garden art product!

I don't have any pictures of the finished products yet (because they aren't finished!) but I wanted to share my new painting technique because I am super happy with it. It is making it much easier and faster for me to paint the records.

After priming the record, I simply draw the design with a black Sharpie.

Then, I paint right over the design with my acrylic paints. I add gel blending medium to each color in order to make it dry slowly so that I can blend the colors together without them getting all chunky. Then I add a good deal of water to the paint to make it nice and thin and transparent. I am going for a watercolor-type "wash." This keeps the paint from obscuring the design underneath.Once I've laid on all my colors, I use a clean brush to blend the edges where the colors meet. This gives it a soft, blended look. It also makes the records look amazing when they are spinning, especially the ones with the swirling rainbow designs.



I love this process because it is SO much less time-consuming than my usual method, which involves drawing a design, painting it, and then outlining the design with black paint using a small brush. That takes forever. I'm really pleased about discovering this time-saving alternative.

The next step for me is to cut and bend the edges of the painted records to form them into pinwheels, and mount them onto the metal stems. I'll have 12 of them planted at the Eastbank Esplanade (east end of the Hawthorne Bridge) starting next Saturday.

I hope you can make it down to see them along with lots of other cool art and activities, including a Dandelion Bench by my friend Tim Combs of the Reclamation Project, and all kinds of other great stuff to help promote the wonderful concept of making art from discarded materials.

Check it out! All the info about Live Debris is here.

Here are some more photos of my process:

An easy technique

I recently completed some new designs for fall. The colors were chosen by Jean at Grasshopper 510 in Chicago.


For this design, "Rose," I used a different technique than I normally do, and I thought I would share it here. It's super easy.

I wanted to give the background some texture and depth, instead of just looking flat. Also, I was getting tired of mixing colors and thought I would try layering them for a change.

Above you see the kind of texture that I ended up with. So here's how I did it:

First I painted the record with two coats of medium magenta (Golden brand), which is a good opaque color but not the pink I needed, and let it dry.

I took some permanent magenta (Winsor & Newton brand), which is pretty transparent, and mixed it with some water until it was fairly thin but not watery.

Then I quickly brushed this over the top of my painted magenta record. A bigger brush could have gotten the job done even faster, I suppose.

Working quickly while the paint was still wet (and watch out because it dries really quickly!), I dabbed at it with a crumpled-up paper towel which was very lightly moistened. (Sorry, my photos didn't come out so great.)

Dab all over the record with quick stabbing motions until you've achieved the kind of texture you want. But work quickly because the paint could start peeling off as it dries, and/or your paper towel could start sticking to the paint and leaving little bits of fuzz on the surface - yuck!

And that's that. Pretty basic, I know. But it gives the background some depth and makes it look a little more interesting, I think.

Anyway, once that has dried I proceeded to paint my mandala design and then transform the record into a bowl, as you see here:

You can find more of my bowls here.

"This is Wild!" - Mandala Records on AM Northwest

This morning I did a live craft demo on the local Portland tv show AM Northwest. It was a blast! Helen Raptis (on the left) and I had a great time painting mandalas on vinyl records (in five minutes!) Here's what Helen's mandala looked like:

In her introduction, Helen called this "one of the brightest and most unique techniques we have ever seen."

I showed off this clock during the segment:

Wanna watch the video? Click here and check it out!

New Mandala Record Clocks in the shop!

Yay! These three clocks are now available in my shop - please click here to check them out!

My original designs are hand painted using high quality acrylics on upcycled 12" vinyl LP records. Reduce, reuse, and recycle! These clocks are good for the environment. Buying one of my clocks is a great step towards going "green" for your next interior decorating purchase, or wedding or housewarming gift.

The painted records are assembled with new quartz clock movements and simple white or black clock hands. There's a heavy duty hanger on the back for hanging. The clocks take one "AA" battery and they measure 12" (30.48 cm) in diameter.

I love my clocks and hope you will too! I'm happy to take custom orders if there's a particular color scheme you'd like.