Home Decor Archives - Page 5 of 8

Mid-Century Modern Style for Art Journals

Posted on May 4, 2016April 8, 2018Posted in Home DecorTagged acrylic paints, drawing pen, markers4 Comments

This spring, I have published a new art journaling mini-course each month for Imagine Monthly. May’s mini-course is called Modern Mid-Century. This mini-course is all about mid-century modern style. You can use it to create decorative art journal pages that are not only flowers and hearts but show a wider range of designs.

Discovering a Magic Formula of Mid-Century Modern

The main inspiration for the Modern Mid-Century mini-course came from Annikki Hovisaari’s ceramic Peacock (“riikinkukko” in Finnish). Annikki Hovisaari was a designer in the Finnish ceramic factory Arabia in 1960s. We have the peacock on the living room wall. I look at it each day, admiring. So much can be expressed with simple shapes and thin lines! The mini-course includes plenty of samples.

When I begin examining a new style, I try to see what’s essential there. What could be removed without changing the impression. And also: what could be added without loosing it. It’s like calculating a formula for a certain style. The secret is not trying to solve the whole big equation. It would be too difficult and highly argumentative. Even the experts of 20th century styles argue whether something is mid-century modern or not. I try to avoid that and just pick few of the central features. Then I focus on their relationship, forgetting the rest.

The best art classes give you ideas that you can expand and adjust to your liking. Whether you like mid-century modern or not, you can use the basic formula. With that, you can move forward towards your own ideas and aesthetics. This kind of conceptual approach will bring focus to more personal than to the style itself. Instead of trying to follow the style, you will be making new discoveries through it.

I made a couple of small pieces after finishing the mini-course. The first one, on the left below, is a birthday card made for my husband’s nephew. The second is a digital piece combining the idea of mid-century modern and the concept of a watch.

Create Your Own Mid-Century Modern Art

Sign up for Imagine Monthly! You will not only get Modern Mid-Century, but all the mini-courses published so far, immediately after the purchase.

Imagine Monthly also has a private discussion group at Facebook. It’s fun to see what everyone has created from the mini-courses. In the middle of the month, I also lead a discussion topic related to the month’s theme.

I believe that every art journal needs pages that are handpainted and handdrawn. It is joyful to browse pages that are more like illustrations than just layers of paint. With Imagine Monthly you will get new formulas for stretching your skills and discovering new techniques. Sign up now!

Tribute to Finnish Art Rugs

Posted on January 14, 2016April 7, 2018Posted in Home DecorTagged colored pencils, watercolors15 Comments

I made this painting just before Christmas but as it has a special story, I wanted to blog about it later when I had more time to write. Actually, I didn’t even plan for creating anything in the middle of holiday cleaning and cooking. But I just had to.

Finnish Art Rugs

Namely, my husband bought a wall art rug (“ryijy” in Finnish) from an online auction and it happened to arrive just before Christmas eve. We had been searching for one for some time. It had to suit with the colors and style of our living room and not be enormous (as many of them often are). We had a designer in mind too – Ritva Puotila, a Finnish woman who has recently designed carpets for her own company Woodnotes. In 1950-60s, she used to design beautiful, painterly Finnish art rugs. The rug that my husband found was her design called “Fireside Evening” and I think it looks wonderful in our mid-century modern living room (which has a fireplace in the opposite wall).

As you can see from the close-up photo, the rug is not only black and red but has many colors to create the painterly effect. At those times, in 1950-60s, wall rugs were fashionable in Finland and especially these kind of rugs that are as much modern art as home textiles. Many women bought the patterns and sewed or weaved their rugs by themselves. My mother was one of them. She chose a rug design called “Ruutrikki” (a made-up word that resembles “broken squares”) and the designer might have been Päikki Briha, if I remember correctly. Here’s an old photo of me and my father showing the rug in the background. That rug also has a lots of colors. It was difficult to zoom in, but hopefully you get the idea.

While touching and admiring our new red rug, I got very emotional. My mind was filled with mixed emotions. I was happy about the new art textile that would bring a warm atmosphere to our living room. On the other hand, while browsing the old photos, I saw people that have passed a way, photographed in front of my mother’s rug. When I remembered that many of those art rugs were sketched with watercolors and then transformed to a grid pattern, I just couldn’t help it. I had to take out my watercolor set and start a new painting even if it was getting late and I felt pretty tired.

Creating a Mixed Media Painting

While painting, I didn’t think about anything particular, but of course, the rugs found their way to the end result …

The painting turned out to be some kind of still life with a dark vase and few sad-looking carnations. Carnations were my mother’s favorite flowers and my father used to buy them for her every year, at their wedding anniversary.

If you look at Finnish art rugs at my Pinterest board, many of them have some kind of melancholy in them. Maybe it’s caused by a combination of muted colors, high contrasts and simplified, abstract approach. These were the elements that used in my painting too.

I finished the painting with colored pencils and named it as “Ryijyneilikat” – “Rug Carnations”. They are imaginary flowers that grow downwards, that are not used to be centerpieces, that blend in the background. They enforce other elements of the still life to step up and go forward. Just like my modest mother did for her children.

Create midcentury modern designs from simple shapes!
See more of my living room and get step-by-step introductions!
>> Buy Modern Midcentury!

Art Quilts in a Modern Way

Posted on June 12, 2015April 8, 2018Posted in Big Projects, Digital, Home DecorTagged decorated papers, fabric, software22 Comments

Here’s something that I have wanted to show you for a long time! I have been working with a custom order which made me think of a new idea: to create fabric prints and make quilted wall hangings from them. This idea is very versatile as you don’t have to be a quilter, you can print your art on fabric and use it for bags, purses, clothes – anything!

The artwork above has been composed digitally of various art pieces that I have made. The person who ordered the wall hanging is a fan of modern folk music and the color red. (If you have not listened to modern folk songs, try Hanneke Cassel for example!)

I created one new collage piece for the artwork. All the other details are picked from my archives.

It was pretty exciting to send the artwork to Spoonflower. When I received the fabric, the print quality was really sharp and detailed! I already knew from the previous experiences that big areas of black don’t print well, so I avoided those.

If you are a quilter, you know that the fabric will look so much better when quilted! I sandwiched cotton wadding, two layers of fusible interfacing and backing fabric and took out my sewing machine.

I am not very experienced with free-motion quilting using the free-motion foot, so I used even-feed foot instead. But with patience, I was able to create quilting that enhanced my brush strokes.

The finished quilt is about 45 x 39 inches.

I used various colors of shiny embroidery threads for quilting. Using black thread brings the real black that was not produced by digital printing.

Quilting on watercolor!

Entering the flow state when playing modern folk was in the center of my inspiration.

I added the label to the printing file too.

Here’s another project that I actually made earlier to test the idea. This one does not contain much digital processing, I only took a good photo of the original art and enhanced it a little bit.

I think this artwork looks really good on fabric! The actual idea when creating the original was to mimic hand embroidery! Read about creating the original artwork: When Pens Replace Needles

I added some embroidery before quilting but found out that quilting works well as decoration.

A printed fabric label can be found from here too.

I also have more fabric prints waiting to be transferred into art quilts!

Paper prints news: New card sets have arrived at my Etsy shop.

Life can never be too colorful!

Stella and Cosmo send their greetings to all artists and quilters: Have a relaxing weekend!

Let me be your art teacher: Subscribe to my weekly emails!

Scrap Wood Collage

Posted on December 10, 2014April 7, 2018Posted in Home DecorTagged wood2 Comments

After working day and night with Folk Bag Workbook, it was time to relax. But honestly, I am not very good at doing nothing, so I decided to put my mind in rest by finishing the scrap wood collage. It is a project I have been making with my husband. I talked about the project first time in one of the video blog posts.

Background of the Project

While renovating the studio, we ran out of the ceiling panels. (You can see the hole in the ceiling on the video.) My husband had a box of wooden pieces collected from the past woodworking projects. We decided to use them to create an artwork together.

We had been talking about a project like this for a long time. My husband is an avid woodworker and I love to draw and paint. We are both extremely interested in art and design, so we thought this would be the perfect project for combining our strengths.

Planning

When the project started I drew some sketches and we discussed about them. I focused on the concept of how the wooden pieces should be arranged. I knew I wanted to include paint too, but was not too concerned about it yet. We agreed to create a sort of log cabin quilt type design and organize the wooden pieces by color. My husband drew the size of the artwork on the big piece of paper so that we could understand the proportions more accurately.

Making the Blocks

When we began to make the blocks, it dawned on us that I was too impatient to glue and adjust the pieces. And my husband had not much ideas about how the pieces should be composed visually. So I designed each of the block by organizing the wooden pieces on the table and my husband glued and finished the blocks. As every block is unique and most of the small wooden pieces are different sizes, my husband had a lot of work!

When all the blocks were glued, I wanted to add paint on them. I did not want to cover the wooden surfaces but add some color to the edges. As the theme of the studio is 1960s, I mixed colors from that era and painted each of the edges in different color.

Attaching the Blocks

After the blocks were painted, the artwork was ready to be put in place. My husband had made a wooden panel where he glued each of the blocks.

A Special Feature

If you watched the video carefully, you might have noticed that there is a power plug on the ceiling. The artwork is designed so that there is a flap in one of the blocks that can be slided away!

Lessons Learned?

All in all, this was a great project! This is what I learned here:

1) Let the creativity correct the mistakes.
We could have just ordered few more ceiling panels but we did the exact opposite!
2) Make it meaningful.
Many of the scraps carry memories themselves. And we created more memories by working together.
3) Search for new territories.
My approach for wood was totally different from traditional woodworker’s. The artwork was designed like a modern quilt even if it has been made from wood. For me, various wood species represented various colors. The wood grains were combined so that they formed rhytmic lines and ornaments. I also wanted to create a texture, but not by carving like a woodworker had done, but by playing with the height differences of each piece.

The fourth lesson is:
4) It’s good when it looks like it’s alive.
The end result might look terrible if you look at it like a traditional woodworker. While we made the project, my husband had some problems to get over the fact that every wooden piece does not fit exactly and there will be so much variety on the artwork. But in the end it all looks alive. I love the uneven, colorful edge. Combined with the texture, it all looks very organic even if there are clear, graphic blocks.

While creating this, I began to think of wood as a new art supply. Then I realized that most of the things in the world can be seen as an art supply! Mind-blowing, isn’t it!

P.S. Soon after we finished our artwork, my husband saw a woodworking video about making a wall-decoration from scrap wood. Does it differ from ours? Leave a comment and tell what do you think!

Color the Emotion

Category: Home Decor