The Art of Joy Alyssa Day

I really wish I had more time to myself to paint these little watercolors. I am quite enjoying them. I think it’s not only the learning a new process thing, but also that I don’t have to make them look like anything. Most of our art pieces have to end up looking like something (a rocket or portrait…)  or performing some function (like holding up a table). I have always wanted to be more loose in my paintings, to paint or create more abstract or impressionist pieces, but that so rarely happens.

I made my own gear yesterday!!  I’m so proud of it I could just burst.

A little background – I’m building on orrery (model of the solar system) for the astronomy department of a college in San Mateo, CA.  We’ve built similar things, but of course, every new project requires new skills and stuff that we’ve never done before. For this piece – http://celestialgears.com/, it is going to be motorized with a computer driving the planets with correctly timed orbits. The whole piece is 6 feet in diameter.

Solar System Model - Orrery

I am trying new techniques in my watercolor paintings. The result I’m hoping for is to figure out which would be best for an upcoming childrens’ book that I’m writing. It has a lot of flowers and bunnies and such in it, but the simplistic, very muted colors that I see in most bunny childrens books just doesn’t do it for me. I want vivid, rich, beautiful, so I’m trying various things with these ACEOs to see what I like best for my new book.

I‘ve been having fun with both the small format of ACEOs (art cards), and also the watrcolor techniques. Since most of my paintings are usually done with acrylics on glass, having the white paper as a start and then having the paints absorb into it are new for me. It takes a lot of getting used to.  The biggest thing is getting used to working from back to front instead of details first like I have to do in my glass paintings. I find that I keep putting details down and then they get overrun or covered completely when I have to lay in a bigger wash of color. There are a lot of D’Oh! moments learning a new medium.  But it is fun too.

Well, I said I was going to do it… It just took me a bit longer to rev up the time to sit down and actually get started. In my defense, though, we had that huge conference that takes over the whole studio for a good month or two – getting ready, getting stuff shipped, going and then the two weeks of recovery because I always seem to catch some hideous disease there or on the way back.

While we were at the National Space Symposium, a next door exhibitor asked if we could put together some small awards for students. The catch was he didn’t have much time. I came back to the studio and looked around for something that I had already in stock that would do well as awards, but I only had two or three of each appropriate thingie, and he needed 5 – 4 regular sized and one a bit larger.

We recently had a booth set up at the National Space Symposium. We are usually the only artists that have a booth – the anomoly. We do a lot of work for the Space Foundation, which runs the symposium, including moving the large sculpture that goes on display for this symposium, so we have an exhibit in the hall during the week while we’re taking care of their big glass sculpture.

I wanted to experiment with my sandblasting and deep carving on glass. My cast glass pieces are usually in the 3/8-1/2 inch thick range, with the colors swirling through the entire depth of the piece. This would make for some great carving, as some of the colors would be opened up, while others would remain untouched.

Since I was getting ready for a space conference, I decided to go with a spacey design. I had a section of glass that for all the world looks like boiling fire, so chose to carve a rocketship taking off into the front of it. This would be just a display piece, as an example of the type of work we can do on countertops, sinks, doors, etc.

I have never been a fast painter. I see friends who bang out piece after piece during a day. Why can’t I get the hang of trusting what I feel and slapping it down? Instead, I tend to linger, plot out the strokes, the colors. In the end, I often end up ruining a perfectly good painting by overworking it. Being a good artist is also knowing when to quit, so I guess I’m not such a good artist sometimes.

Previous posts have focused on the rocket that is the center column for our orrery. The one pictured here doesn’t have the bottom section with the fins, but our new one does. Now that the rocket has been carved and the holes bored into it to accept the drive tubes, it can be put aside for a bit and we move on to the next section – The arms.