French gesso recutting tools

True art teacher's kid complex, I guess. I glued them together with a hot glue gun and then glued them onto a dowel. The tulle was a final flourish to make sure these wands help to spread love and kindness with a little pizzazz. Poor kid ended up sick with this nasty flu virus and missed her school Valentine party. She can't wait to give them to her friends post-puke fest. Winning flu quote after finding her post-puking: "I threw up. Wash me, but my pants and socks are clean!

Sunday, March 6, Reclaimed Wood Miniatures. We've been testing out different media on all kinds of surfaces in the French Fry house lately.

And I mean all surfaces. I have a feeling I'm going to keep plowing through Magic Erasers with this busy little artist. Our new favorite tools are the Crayola Slick Stix , which are the closest thing to drawing with rainbow colored lipstick. So, we tested them out on some lumber scraps we had left from a recent bathroom reno.

Labels: baby art , painting. Wednesday, March 2, Mondrian Masterpieces. I don't often repeat projects, but when I do, it's usually because I heart them big time. And this is one of those favorites. For step by steps on this one, check it out here. Since having a baby artist in the house, I'm loving process-y art and projects that give children more of an option in terms of color choices and media.

My Kinder artists loved reading Perfect Square and really knocked our study of Mondrian's artwork out of the art park. During the summer and well into we had the pleasure of working on the resulting hand-carved and gilded French frame. The original gilding of this by Though most of the ornament was intact, there were hundreds of areas of gesso loss and loose and lifting gesso, the plaster-like material that covers the wood in preparation for gilding.

With this technique, details that are not in the wood base are carved into the gesso. In the treatment of this frame we first secured the gesso layer where it was lifting from the carved wood base. The next task was to fill gesso losses and recut them to match the surround areas. To make sure that our fills would be detectable and reversible from the original, an X-ray dense isolating material was applied before filling the losses with gesso putty containing a UV fluorescent material.

When recutting our gesso fills, we used a combination of traditional repareur tools and regular carving tools. We then gilded the fills and toned them to match the original surface.