Mixing Colors - Part One: PINK

As I often do, I turned to the Pantone website for color inspiration when I needed to come up with some new pieces to take to the recent Recycled Arts Festival.

I was hoping to find some good bright colors for summer, and I was thrilled to discover the Independent-ism palette. "With its tart, bold and gregarious colors, Independent-ism is geared toward creative artisans who are unafraid of true originality." Perfect!

So I decided to share the process by which I come up with my own creative version of these colors. It is by no means scientific. It is probably weird. What can I say, I am totally self-taught, and I can only use the materials I have at hand. With a mixture of good quality acrylic paints plus a bunch of inexpensive craft paints, I've been able to duplicate these colors pretty well, I think, although I don't know what Payne's gray is for and have never learned the correct way to mix colors. And I am by no means claiming that these colors are the equivalent of the Pantone system! Heavens no. This is just my personal take inspired by this fresh and fabulous palette. So, if you are interested in my DIY approach, I am planning to share it in a series of posts documenting the creation of the eight new Mandala Record Bowl designs I've made for Summer 2009.

Starting with...Pink!

Here is my finished product:

Well, it's not really all that complicated. To make this shade of pink, I used (roughly!) 3 parts Permanent Rose (Winsor & Newton) to one part each Titanium White (Liquitex), Medium Magenta (Golden), Quinacridone Red (Golden), and "Pretty Pink" (a fairly obnoxious Ceramcoat brand craft paint).

I printed the Pantone color palette out on my inkjet. The colors come out much truer on glossy paper, and the only glossy stock I had was some CD Labels (hence the random printing):

I basically started mixing colors and lining them up against the chart until I was satisfied. I started at the right side of the square and worked toward the left - so the color you see on the far left was my final mix.

And so I painted my record!





And that is the story of Pink.

The Carnation Pink Mandala Record Bowl is now available in my Etsy shop - please click here to check it out.

Happy Earth Day!

Just a quick post to wish you a very happy Earth Day today! Hope you are doing your part to make the earth a better place.

The above treasury is filled with lovely green items made from recycled materials - click here to check it out before it expires.

The Story of 100 Mandala Record Bowls

Today is the day, I am finally going to ship out my big wholesale order of 100 Mandala Record Bowls for Viva Terra. I worked on this order during September, October, and November, finished it on Thanksgiving Day, and now I can finally ship it (they wanted me to wait until after Christmas). After reading the vendor guidelines about 5o times, I am pretty sure I have done everything right with the packing list, box labels, etc., so all I need to do is get it dropped off and I can breathe a big sigh of relief to have it off my hands, allowing me to look ahead to my new spring line.

I have posted some of these pictures in previous blog entires, but I wanted to consolidate the entire process into one story, so here you go, this is how I did it.

I started out with lots and lots of vinyl records. I got a 4' x 8' board at the Home Depot and had them cut it in half to make two manageable 4' x 4' boards. I pounded nails into the board every 12" so that I could hang 16 records on each one. (Here's Julius.)

Then I sprayed the records, 32 at a time, with white primer.

I allowed the primer to dry.

I carefully sealed up the spindle holes of each record, and allowed that to dry.

Here is what a stack of 100 primed, sealed records looked like:

The next step was to paint the base coats. 50 of them were to be green, and 50 of them cream-colored. Each one took two coats of the base color, which meant a lot of drying in between times.

My best friend Melodie helped with the base-coat painting. Thanks, Melle!

Soon the disks were taking over the house. I didn't want to stack them, so it was a bit crazy for a while...

...until I went to Goodwill and got several of these vertical files, which saved the day.

So yeah, the next step (and the most time consuming!) was the painting of the mandala designs onto the record. That's a lot of the same mandala, over and over again. Each one was painted freehand, and a lot of them required two coats, too.

Once I finished the 50 green records, the next step was to form them into bowls, and each one was individually heated and sculpted by hand to make 50 groovy bowls.

The next step was to paint my signature on the bottom of each bowl. I used white and black paint to paint a psychedelic eyeball over each spindle hole, and to paint the words Eye Pop Art somwhere on the record label.

After that dried, I coated the bottoms of the bowls with a protective semi-gloss finish and allowed that to dry.

Then I flipped 'em and proceeded to do the same thing to the tops of the bowls.

Here are the 50 finished bowls, peeking out of their boxes.

Once the 50 greens were out of the way, I had to repeat the whole deal all over again, painting the same mandala design 50 times in green on the cream-colored records.

These also were heated, shaped, etc...

Vanna!

...and the bottoms were done...

...and the tops were done...

...and they were all wrapped in tissue paper and put to bed for a month.

These are the temporary boxes that the order has been living in for the last month. I have since repacked them uniformly into four large boxes, each containing 25 bowls.

Today the 100 bowls will go on a journey, and some time very soon they will make their appearance in the Spring 2009 catalog by Viva Terra! I can't wait to get a copy.

Rave review from the Green Diva

My Mandala Bowls got a rave review today from the Green Diva! Check out the post, "Green Diva's Guide to Fresh Style: Recycled Rod Stewart?" on the blog Feelgood Style from Green Options Media.

Apparently this blogger picked up my Raspberry Bowl from the BuyGreen website, and she loves it! She says, "This is recycled music at its best...Could make a nice, colorful, interesting and green holiday gift."

In the studio...

I have two big wholesale orders that I am working on right now - one of them is for a great store in Berkeley, CA called Treehouse Green Gifts, and the other is for a gentleman in Montreal who is getting ready to open an upcycled-arts gallery. In total, it's about 40 records worth of Eye Pop Art. I am doing my best to get these cranked out so I can focus on creating new pieces for the upcoming SE Area Art Walk. Plus the band is going into a REAL studio this weekend to make our own record! And my Cool School classes at Duniway start up in a couple of weeks as well (I'll be doing another mural painting class, and continuing to be the advisor for the school newspaper, the Duniway Dragonian).

Busy, busy, busy! When I have this much going on, I sometimes invite my friends over to help me paint. I was so glad that Melodie was able to put in a couple of hours of pure YELLOW.
I had already drawn the design out so she just had to look at a picture of the finished product and go for it. I still have to fill in more areas and do the black outline and everything, but it is just so great to have a little bit of extra help!
This is about what my workspace looks like right now:Oh, by the way - I just noticed that I have surpassed 100 blog posts! Yay for me! So, is anybody reading this? Leave me a comment and let me know you're there!!!

My work is in Venus Magazine!

I received the new issue of Venus Zine in the mail and found my Ruby Red Mandala Record Bowl in the feature on upcycling! I am so excited.

An Etsy seller whom I truly admire, theblackapple, was also featured in this issue for having topped the Venus Hott List for Best Indie Business! I have to echo what she said: "I couldn't hope to appear in an issue with a cooler cover girl. "

Here's what they had to say about my bowl:

2. Set the record straight
Christine Claringbold of Eye Pop Art has got me singing a whole new tune. She turns 12-inch vinyl records into water-tight, sculpture-like bowls. The designs are beautiful, functional, and green. ($48 plus shipping, eyepopart.etsy.com)

Also, if you aren't familiar with the term "upcycling," here's the definition Venus offers:
"Upcycle is a term coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The writers use "upcycle" as a term to describe the process of converting waste materials into something of similar or greater value than the original substance.

I first heard this term when I participated in Etsy's upcycling contest in early 2007.

Newly listed - two new Record Bowls

I listed two new Mandala Record Bowls in my shop. Click over and check 'em out!