Category: Art

Posts in this category include descriptions about my art, artwork, and collages.

Finding Buried Treasure in my House!

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The Kingdom of Pinaré © 1997 Laine (Sefick) DiNoto and Pinaré Assemblage © 2015 Alis Wintle Sefick

Like I wrote in my last post about finding buried treasure in my “catch-all” closet, once again, stuffed on the top shelf, I discovered another shoe box.  The contents of this box were unfamiliar, small parts of polymer clay (Sculpy) and some pieces of velvet and brocade.  I thought, “A lot of junk”!  But upon further investigation, I realized I had uncovered a box of  figurines my daughter had made when she was in grade school.

As I sorted the contents, it became clear that these were not random figurines but an entire community, a kingdom, to be exact, complete with a royal family – the “Royal Tudoras”!  The sculpted empire included knights, woodsmen, ladies-in-waiting, “Subjects”, “Visitors” and “Animals”,  almost 30 in all including miniature buckets, trays and bowls of food, candlesticks and goblets.  Little did I know that one could be  an archaeologist in their own home for I had unearthed the lost kingdom of “Pinaré”!  I had to keep this collection and find a way to display it!

Pinaré close up: King and Queen Tudoras with the High Priest

A baseball bat frame was the only three-dimensional/shadow box frame I could find to house the whole “kingdom”.  It ended up providing  a nice way to lay out the complete collection.   With the “Head Priest” presiding over all,  “King John and Queen Isabella Tudoras” reign from the center of the frame with their family members and “Subjects” flanking them on either side. 

Pinaré close up: Ladies in Waiting and the Cooks
Pinaré close up: The Prince and Princess Tudoras

Included with the collection was a “Kingdom Log” and a list of “Things to be Done for Pinaré”.   In the log, my daughter had given each figure a name with an identifying code that she then inked on the bottom of  each figurine.  On the Pinaré to-do list, all items were checked as complete except for a “Map made with labeled coordinates with people/things in their own main righteous place” and a plan to “Make crutches…”.  Since my daughter never got to making the map, I had a blast creating one for the frame’s backdrop (and, while I was at it, found a cool, huge, fantasy map-making community online).  I also had fun coming up with names of the places on the map using some of my daughter’s made-up Pinaré  names such as Gooseberg, River Oddyseuss Telahumus and Golosh Gap.  Plus, I added some of my own fictional places – Sea of Sculpy, Port Pinaré, and Lake Effect.  (I never made the crutches either!)

Pinaré close up: The Knights and Woodsmen
Pinaré close up: Subjects, Visitors and Animals

To complete the display, I made a name placard for each figurine using the kingdom log and the tattooed codes.  I then happily found out about “UHU Tac” (a mounting putty museums use for projects like these) and secured each figurine and placard to its place in the frame.  Since the frame was black and dark, I  also added mini, battery-operated lights to the frame’s “ceiling”.  They were a nice feature until, after a couple of years, they stopped working (and have since been removed).

The Kingdom of Pinaré © 1997 Laine (Sefick) DiNoto and Pinaré Assemblage © 2015 Alis Wintle Sefick

I certainly had a lot of fun creating this assemblage.  In the future, if  my children or  grandchildren don’t want to display “Pinaré” in their homes, I would love to see it displayed in The Strong: National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY!  That would be a dream come true!

Assemblage, a way to organize and display collections

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Alice and friends. © Alis Wintle Sefick, my “Little People”.

Most of my art in the last few years has been in collage – “painting” with pieces of fabric or paper and gluing to a hard surface to create a picture.  In addition to collage, I have also been doing assemblage often described as three-dimensional collage.    Assemblage “assembles” objects onto a canvas or board or as free-standing sculpture.   Picasso is attributed with creating one of the first assemblages in his 1912 “painting”, “Still life with Chair Caning”, where he used rope and oil cloth in addition to oil paints.  Collage and assemblage at that time was considered by many to be avant-guard and a “sharp break with previous modes of aesthetic coherence”.  In other words, like the Impressionist style of art before them, these new artistic methods shook the long-standing convention of oil painting, long thought of as the only way to make true art – imitations of “life” done as realistically as possible.  “Collage”, stated MOMA Exhibit Director Margaret Miller in 1948, “has been a means through which an artist incorporates reality in a picture without  imitating it”.  Now, that’s my style – a little avant-guard and representing reality without exact imitation, allowing for a bit of the artist themselves in the art! 

“Still Life with Chair Caning”, Pablo Picasso, 1912

Often assemblage is described as assembling “disparate” “every-day objects” but my assemblages are different.  I do not use “disparate” objects.  My assemblages are  of collections – objects that are intended to go together.  My assemblage art making  grew from my desire to organize my home which grew out of my obsession watching home organization shows on HGTV back when the network first aired in the mid-90s!  To clean out my home and organize, I immediately latched onto the widely promoted organizational mantra to create piles of “stuff” to either keep, donate, decide about later, or throw in the trash.  I began with my studio closet. 

The studio closet was my “junk drawer” closet, a lot of filled shoe boxes crammed in haphazardly because I didn’t know what else to do with it.  (Sound familiar?)  Disorganized closets like these, though,  can be sources of hidden treasure and with this one, I struck gold.   One of the boxes held my forgotten plastic doll house furniture I played with as a child and the “Little People” (what I called the Disney figurines I used as my dollhouse dolls).   I didn’t want to “trash” or “donate” this collection.  I wanted to keep it but was unsure how.  One of the organizing directives from the shows was that if you have collections, you either need to display or get rid of them.  They do no good sitting in a closet or attic, never to be seen.  (One way around this is to stash extras and rotate them in and out of display areas, kind of like what we do with Christmas and Halloween decorations.  It’s also what most museums do; they don’t show everything they own but bring art out now and then to display from their “collections”).

Doll house

I decided I would definitely “keep” my dollhouse collection and find a way to display them.  Looking through my stash of frames, I came across two that sparked ideas for how I could display my collection.  I would use one for the furniture and one for the Little People.  I had the most fun with the display I made for the furniture.  I loved how the recycled “collage” style frame seemed to naturally create “rooms” of a house –  kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room and den.  I also enjoyed researching and finding  wallpaper to use in each of the rooms and I like how the paper fits the era of the furniture too. 

I look forward to doing more “collection” assemblage.  In 1961, art critic Lawrence Alloway defined assemblage as a result of what he called “junk culture” or “city art”.  Said Alloway of the method, “its source [is] obsolescence, the throwaway material of cities… as it collects in drawers, cupboards, [and] attics…  Objects have a history, first they are brand new; then they are possessions, accessible to a few, subjected often to intimate and repeated use; then as waste, they are scarred by use but available again… Assemblage of such material come at the spectator as bits of life, bits of the environment.”  And Lynne Perrella in, “Art Making: Collections and obsessions”, says that making art with “objects [of our collections] find a new life  and chance to shine…the objects speak and provide a spark”.   After they become “scarred” with use, a framed assemblage is a great way to give our collection obsessions a new life, a chance to shine and speak again.

Do you have a collection you think would present well as a framed assemblage?    Contact me and tell me a little bit about your collection.  I’d love to hear about it and create a one-of-a-kind assemblage for you!

A Different Kind of “Self-Publishing”

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DIY Picture Book

With “How-To” Download!

“Adventures with phearnik!™” hardcover
Trimming the edges
Covers folded and glued to inside
Applying white glue with a brush
End pages hold the stitched pages in the book
The overnight pressing
Completed hardcover book!

A couple of posts ago, I “debuted”, “Lucy’s Pocket” © 2020, a black and white picture book. I created the book for my granddaughter. It was one of her Christmas presents. 

In my last post, I unveiled another picture book, “Adventures with phearnik!™” © 2021. I wrote and illustrated this one too. It was for the same granddaughter. This time for her birthday. (Hopefully, it will be a less chaotic time than Christmas to present her with a special book!)  

I needed a copy of the book for the gift (soon!). I also wanted another for myself. I would use it to have on hand to show and shop around.  I’m looking for an  agent to help me shop the book to publishers.  I’m not travelling the “conventional” self-publishing route. If I were, having just finished all the illustrations this past month, there would not be enough time to get the books printed by mid-November.   

Book Building

I also costed  “photo books” made by online photo book printers but the cost was a bit beyond my budget – around $50 per book for a 32 page 8” x 9” picture book.    So, I decided to travel a different “self-publishing” route and made built the books by hand.

I have been through the process of putting my own picture books together before with “Lucy’s Pocket” and another book I made for a nutrition unit for a family daycare provider training I developed. For both of those books, I took the original pages of text and illustrations I had laid out, one on card stock and the other on paper printed from my home printer and laminated, to Staples for copying and binding.

Not Spiral Bound, Hardcover

With “Lucy’s Pocket,” Staples Print Services made a copy of the original  8” x 8” pages and spiral bound both the original and the copy into two books for less than $20 each. (More like two-for-one compared to a 32-page photo book from an online printer!)  Because many of the illustrations in “Adventures …” are full page spreads (occupying the whole of two facing pages), I did not want the book to be spiral bound (the full page spread illustrations would have a gap between the two facing pages) and  I wanted to try my hand at making my own hardcover book.

Tools of the Trade

I started by using my personal home scanner and scanning my illustrations to the computer, saving them as jpeg photos. Then, I used Microsoft Publisher to layout the pages of the book. Publisher does not have book or booklet templates for custom sizes, so I had to create my own.  I made an 8” x 9” “Custom” “Blank” page and used this to lay out all 32 pages of the book.  I then imported my scanned illustrations onto the pages and copied and pasted my text from Word into text boxes in Publisher.

At first, my pages were presenting with a white border around each page.  Although it looked nice, I couldn’t have a border where the two pages came together in the center to make the full-page spread.  I finally figured out how to remove the borders and was able to layout the spreads.  Once the layout was complete, I used Staples again to print out the pages, but this time, I did it myself on one of their “self-copiers” using a pdf of the Publisher file saved on a thumb/jump drive. 

Learn From my Mistakes

Because the “Adventures…” book pages are 8” x 9” and they were printed on 8 ½” x 11” paper, I had to cut each page down to size.  I unfortunately made the mistake of printing each page one sided instead of two-sided!  I can’t believe I did that!  (Even my husband said, “All book pages are two-sided”.  Like, “Duh”!)  I had to glue all the pages together to make them two sided, making sure each “front” page was glued to its corresponding “back” page.  Next time, I will be sure to print the pages two-sided!    After that, I laid out the pages, taped them together with Magic Tape, added the “end pages” (the ones that get glued to the inside of the cover) and stitched them together with my trusty, old metal Kenmore sewing machine and pressed them folded overnight. 

I then made the hard cover for the book.  I used an old, stained piece of 4 ply (1/16”) mat board (it was getting covered so the stains wouldn’t matter) cutting two pieces to the size of the finished book – 8” x 9” and a thin, ¼” x 8” piece for the spine.  I  covered the board with the front and back cover pictures.  This was tricky because the pictures only measured 8.5” x 11” so there was not enough “cover” to fold around to the inside of the board.  Because of this, I glued more paper onto the cover pictures so they could fold into the inside nicely.  Once the front and back covers were glued down, I glued down the end pages covering up the folded parts of the covers.  And after another overnight pressing, the book was complete!  I’m really pleased with how it came out. 

Now that I have “built” a hard cover picture book from start to finish, I am no longer intimidated by the process.  I recommend it as a good experience for any picture book illustrator.   (You may gain a new appreciation for publishers and printers! I certainly did.)   Plus, I may have started an annual tradition – giving a very special granddaughter a Nana book for her birthday (or maybe even Christmas)!

Have you ever put a hardcover book together from scratch?  Did you run into any issues?  Were you pleased with the results?  I’d love to hear about it in Comments!

Get the “how to” steps here!
This is a picture of the inside spread of the Beyond the Gate at Casey Key See and Say booklet by aws Studios

“Beyond the Gate on Casey Key” © 2020, A children’s “See and Say ™ ” booklet

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In the winter, my husband and I leave our cherished cottage on “The Great Sodus Bay” (as it’s termed in Google Maps) off Lake Ontario for the warmer climes of the Gulf of Mexico.  My favorite bike ride there is to leave my home in Venice, Florida, hop on the wonderful “Legacy Trail” and make my way over to Casey Key.  Casey Key is one of the many unique Keys running along the intercostal waterway on Florida’s “Gulf” side.  Casey Key in Nokomis, Florida is known for its narrow motorway with gorgeous views of the Gulf and its spectacular and lovely oceanside (and intercostal side) mansions (it’s also a winter home to Steven King).  On one of my biweekly rides, I finally took the time to snap some shots along the way.  The picture of the iron gate inspired me to make a “See and Say” booklet for my toddler granddaughter. 

The “Beyond the Gate on Casey Key See and Say” booklet’s front cover is the shot of the gate beckoning the reader to open the gate to “see” what’s beyond.  Once open, I collaged a fantasy view of the Gulf with, well, like the rhyme says, the sun, the waves, the sand and shells, sailboats, dolphins and seagulls.  I enjoyed making this fun booklet and made a few copies for friends’ children and grandchildren and a few of my adult friends received a copy as a greeting card.  If you are interested in a copy of the “Beyond the Gate on Casey Key See and Say” booklet, contact me here.

Have you been to Casey Key?  If so, have you ever spotted the gate there?  

Beyond the gate on Casey Key, tell me now, what do you see?

Do you see a butterfly kite? And a big yellow sun shining bright?

On the shore some seashells gather while dancing waves make a lather.

Count the starfish if you can. They are hiding in the sand!

Out on the Gulf of Mexico, where the winds begin to blow,

Sailboats chase the dolphins gray all through the blue green ocean spray.

Feathery gulls fly up high as the clouds go drifting by.

It’s a beautiful day for you and me beyond the gate on Casey Key!

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This is a picture of the cover of the children's picture book "Lucy's Pocket." A great book to help celebrate Grandparents' Day.

Debut of “Lucy’s Pocket”, a new picture book!

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  • “Lucy’s Pocket” © 2020
  • Excerpt from “Lucy’s Pocket”
  • Page from “Lucy’s Pocket”

Can a great-grandmother’s warm, furry coat transform into a fantastic surprise for an unsuspecting granddaughter?

Great grandmother Lucy had a very special coat.  And, like “The Giving Tree”, the unassuming coat obtained 80 years ago (with a secret spot to hold special memories), still to this day, keeps on giving.

From social and emotional health curriculum developer honoree Alis Wintle Sefick, “Lucy’s Pocket” is an endearing story about a treasured family heirloom – a special coat – that travels through the generations into the future and heart of its youngest family member. 

“Lucy’s Pocket” is a “book and plushie” package.  It is a 8 x 8 inch, comfortable to hold, spiral bound, “touch and feel” picture book for children ages 3 – 5.  Using bold and simple, black and white clip-art illustrations, the tastefully designed book maintains an easy page-turning cadence that keeps children – and adults – coming back to the story again and again.  The plushie “surprise” is a replica of the coat’s transformation (but we’re not giving the surprise away here)!

Sure to delight readers and plushie lovers young and old, the “Lucy’s Pocket” package is a perfect anecdote for anyone needing a little warm and fuzzy grand-mothering.  These days, who doesn’t need a little bit of that now and then!

If you are a picture book agent interested in seeing more of “Lucy’s Pocket” or if you are interested in purchasing a copy of the book or book package, contact me here .

DIY Kitchen Sign

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My Kitchen Sign

My very own “kitchen sign”
My great grandfather’s grocery wagon
Layout for the grocer chalkboard sign
My Aunt Evelyn (left) and my mother Lucy in front of my family’s grocery store

A Personal Kitchen Sign

For a while, I was obsessed with watching home renovation shows (I think my interest is finally waning, but I continue to love a good transformation).  Framed signs hanging in the kitchen became quite the thing on those shows and I wanted one.

 Most of these signs said things like, “FARM” or “Kitchen”, “Eats”, or “Ma’s Diner” etc.  But, as an artist and someone who often tries to be different than the mainstream, I wanted my sign to be unique, maybe something more personal. 

I remembered a photo my sister Sue had of my great grandfather’s horse-drawn grocery wagon with a sign on the side advertising his business.  It became the inspiration for my very own “kitchen sign”.

My Great Grandfather’s Sign

I used the photo of the sign on the wagon as the basis for my sign design.  Since the photo was old and out of focus, I could only follow the general layout of the original. 

I found fonts on Word to assimilate those used on the original sign and printed them out in extra-large point.  I then traced the text onto a chalkboard I had prepared with chalkboard paint on an old, recycled framed board. 

I had made chalkboard signs before and had tried using just chalk with a sealer (so the chalk would not smudge) and using white paint pens that give the look of chalk.  The sealer on the chalk never seemed to do its job so I ended up choosing the paint pens.  I also designed the filigree-like ornamentation adorning the middle and corners of the sign. 

Learning Family History

One of the best outcomes of this project was learning more about my great grandfather from my sister who is a genealogist.  She told me my great grandfather William Fisher ran a grocery business in Glendon, Pennsylvania, a small town along the Lehigh River, north of Philadelphia. 

At 18, he ran away from his home in England to America and, once in the states, he changed his last name from Woods to Fisher (my mother claimed it was because he thought it was more “American”; how that is, I’m not sure).  He started working at an iron factory and in 1874, he married a widow with two young daughters who both died about ten years later. 

Elizabeth (the widow) and William had a child of their own named Evelyn Hepzibah (they called her “Eppie”).  Eppie was my grandmother.   In the 1890s, William became a farmer, started a grocery delivery business and bought a grocery store in Easton, PA.  When he retired, my grandparents, Eppie and her husband John Edinger took over the store.

I liked creating my own kitchen sign and, even better, I enjoyed learning more about my family history and my great grandfather William.

see more of my aws studios art here

Welcome to aws Studios!

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Welcome to the first installment of the aws Studios blog! Here are stories about the art I make. Enjoy!

A New Collage

alis’s like vincent’s

alis’s like vincent’s is one of my most recent works. It’s a mixed media paper collage that I did for the Salvador Dali Museum’s “Paint Your Bedroom Contest”, a promotional event for the “Van Gogh Alive” exhibit they had there earlier this year. I was thankful for the contest. It came at a time when I needed some motivation, an idea of what to work on next and, alas, the contest appeared! (We were going to the Van Gogh show and I was looking for information about it and the museum online and found the contest).

It’s Not the Destination, It’s the Journey

By the way, I didn’t win (boo hoo!) but, really, it didn’t matter. For me, making art is more, if not all, in the thrill and enjoyment of the process and not so much in the final destination. It’s the engaging and challenging journey of getting to completion – especially one that you like in the end (rather than judges) – that keeps me keepin’ on!

My Studio to Look Like Vincent’s Bedroom

The idea of the contest was to share a Van Gogh-inspired painting of your bedroom based on Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles painting. For me, I was inspired by the colors in his painting, the blue on the walls (which I learned was a result of the original painting’s walls fading from purple to blue), the green of the window, the yellow bed with a red blanket and the brown (also originally more pink) of the wooden plank floor.

I tried to incorporate these colors into my “painting” (actually a collage – maybe that’s why I didn’t win!). Instead of my actual bedroom in our home in Venice, Florida, I used my studio as the basis for my composition. The room is pretty much represented as it is except I took liberty to make the window green, turned my blue sofa into a yellow bed with a red blanket (like Vincent’s), the carpet into a wooden plank floor and made the French doors blue.

Overall Success

A lot of this collage, I felt was a success. I especially liked how the St. Petersburg sailboat poster came out and the brown plank floor (I even added green along the planks of the floors like Vincent did in his). With collage, it’s fun to add typical pictures or text found in a variety of papers. With this collage, I mainly used paper from magazines.

Since I was just starting a paper collection for my Venice studio and it was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and shopping for paper was difficult, I started using magazines for my collage papers. I liked using text from the magazines to represent the keys of the piano, though it didn’t come out as perfectly as I wanted. The collage is built on a small base, a 9″x12″ board, and it was often difficult to cut shapes as small as I needed. I truly challenged myself with cutting out the pair of black eye glasses that sit on top of the cabinet in the background on the right and was pretty happy with the end result!

All in all, I was pleased with the overall outcome, a great feeling for an artist! And thank goodness for the many years of doing art that I have come to realize that this – pleasing yourself and not basing the value of your work on what other people think- is one of the most important and satisfying results in making art.

Onward, ho!

See more aws Studios art here!