Great Canadian Art Project

I belong to a daily chat group of fellow Canadian etsyians. After a few months on Etsy I found them in the forums and it was an essential support tool for me. At first it was great to meet a friendly bunch while increasing product exposure and gaining Etsy tips. But it evolved into much more. They are my friends, we do support each in our shops and online selling but we support each other on a daily basis through our triumphs and daily struggles, kids, illnesses and family holidays. Behind the computer they can be my only human interaction until the school bells ring.

Earlier last year one of the members, Gabriele Maurus, of emmarts and fluur started an art project amongst the thread members and TheScribbleGroup was born. My first participation was in the 2nd project. This one involved childhood portraits of ourselves, transferred onto artboard and essentially embellished by someone else. Here's a good link to understand the process of photo transfers.

So this is how it started, all photos were scanned and sent to Gabriele where she transferred them onto artboard and then mailed out to everyone. You did not receive your own back. In fact, you didn't know who you were going to find underneath and that was the fun part. Even if we have seen pictures of each other these art projects were of childhood pictures so it made the guessing even harder.

This is the start of mine. Dipping the cloth carefully into water you start to rub off the top layer of paper to reveal the image underneath.

I was sure I had taken a picture mid-point in the project but I cannot find it. But once the image is revealed and all the paper bits are removed you are left with a black and white image of your mystery person. At this point I was not sure who it was but I had this feeling it was Cara from Bovine Bubbles.

Now it's time to start to embellish with anything you like, paints, collage really anything you wanted. It was definitely difficult to start for me. What if I ruined it? With encouragement from Gabriele to let our worries go and be free I finally had brush in hand I began to paint. For some reason, almost immediately after revealing the cute little face on the paper I wanted to do an outdoor scene at night. I clipped pictures and captions from magazines and this is what I ended up with.

So did I guess the right person? No, turns out it is Emily from Emms Gems. Of course, once told I don't know how I missed it.

For this project the portraits were not sold but returned to the person. Through interesting circumstances, Emily visiting Ontario from Winnipeg, we had tickets to Stratford and let's face it the stars must have been aligned that weekend, I was able to hand deliver the portrait to Emily at an art show she was participating in. What fun it was to meet her!

If you would like to see some other projects done by our group you can find them at The Scribble Group. Money generated from these sales are donated to charity. In the next while you'll see some new projects being listed from our last "Rip-Off" project.

Stay tuned for my own portrait revealed and more art projects.