Hand – Work

I have had an American Flag flying on the front of my house since I moved in, in May of 1997.

About three years ago, I saw a class offered that looked like fun, at one of those week-long art workshops that has many classes. I wanted to take that class, but it was at the opposite end of the week from the class I was mainly going for. Too expensive to stay away from home for a whole week. I did print out the photo from the online brochure of the finished product – a flag decorated with ribbons.

That photo joined my long list of “some-day-maybe” projects.

With the sewing machine open and ready last week, I decided it was time to do this project. I had a faded flag in the garage waiting for a second life. It was one of those projects that feels like “where to begin?” The obvious place was to go through my sewing and craft stash, gathering red and white ribbons and lace.

Once I got started it came together quickly. I pinned the ends of ribbons to a wide stiff floral ribbon with the flag underneath to get the spacing correct. Stitching across the ribbon ends was surprisingly easy.

I stitched the whole band onto the flag, and covered it with a gold ribbon across the ends for a finished look.

While sewing, I thought about where I would hang this flag. I considered the front of the garage, but decided that might be a mistake if I wanted to open the garage door.

Sitting on the patio the evening I had finished sewing, I noticed a large section of wall with no window. I can see this wall from inside my studio. Perfect.

I’m ready to Celebrate the Fourth with my best friend, Robert, eating on the patio and watching the neighbors all around us shooting fireworks.

Have fun, but be safe and careful. And remember we are celebrating that we the people have a nation – all of it.  And together, we can make it better.

In January, I set up a drawing board with supplies to make a series of small 5.5 in x 5.5 in. collages, with the hope I would make one a day if I wasn’t working on a larger piece of art. The first one is the photo above. I had done some of these several years ago and enjoyed the activity.

I started cleaning up the yard and working on organizing my shell collection, so I managed to make the great sum of two mini-collages by mid-March.

When the collage artist, Crystal Neubauer, offered a free online workshop beginning the last day in March, I decided to participate, hoping to get myself making some kind of art, as I began to switch from winter cleanup to spot weeding and enjoying the first flowers in my yard.

Crystal had us working on 4 x 4-inch watercolor paper, and assembling one from a pile of scrap papers in, Gasp! five minutes. My first one did not get done in five minutes, but I think it does reflect our national state of mind on April first.

Her videos are archived, so I was viewing them the next day. In the second session, we were to use only neutral colors.

On the third lesson, we were to paste up two during the five minutes. The idea is to quickly select the scrap we are most drawn to and glue it somewhere in the square, then add other scraps that catch our attention to fill the space. These 4 x 4’s I used had some splotches of paint on them from some old work, and I glued the scraps so that some of the paint color was seen.

I still wasn’t able to do them in the five-minute time because I was using very small pieces. I noticed that I started by gluing a scrap I liked at an angle to the edges which left me with small white spaces that needed to be filled. But Crystal usually used only three or four pieces and filled up the corners first.

The next lesson she talked about using some mark making on the pieces to add interest. We did a 4 x 4 as a warm up.

Then we were to make a collage on 8 x 8-inches, using only three large pieces, again in five minutes. Mine turned out so awful I won’t even take a photo of it. Again, I had put things at angles to the edges and they didn’t connect in the center.

During all these sessions, Crystal was telling us to pay attention to the voices in our head that were saying things like “don’t use THAT piece, it’s too special, save it for later.”

The last video is where we slowed things down. Before the lesson we planned out what we wanted to use in an 8 x 8-inch, but didn’t glue. We looked at it in the next lesson before we glued it down, to see if we still liked it or wanted to change something.

I’m still thinking about what I’ve learned about my usual approach to art making. One idea this workshop generated is that I don’t have a ready selection of neutral papers to use for collage so that the accent or “special” material can really stand out. Gathering a box of neutral papers is a good place for me to start, because my collage box is loaded with the accent pieces.

I have also become more aware that I have a huge variety of materials to use all over my house. Estate sale finds, fabric scraps, shell fragments, rusty yard finds, lace, paper, old books, and basket making materials to name a few, but I have trouble focusing on what is inside my consciousness that wants to be given expression.

Crystal’s free online workshop is still available for another week or so if you want to check it out at Crystal Marie: Canary Rising here.

 

 

 

Last week I had the opportunity to be a participant in a research study being done by a graduate art therapy student at Notre Dame in Belmont. She is asking people who now have, or have had, a parent who developed dementia to explore how their identity may have changed during the time they were caring for them.

She sent me a package of supplies to make a collage, (not that I needed any supplies), but to have some consistency in size for the participants. As she interviewed me, I worked on the collage. We did this interview on FaceTime, so neither of us had to travel. I had about a week to prepare; to copy some photos, and find some words.

I thought about how my emotions and sense of self changed as my mother and I went through stages of change in her cognitive function from my not realizing what was going on with her, to seeing her not caring about how she looked, to bossing her peers about their behavior, to being called “you old bag” one morning before breakfast.

I found it odd that I was struggling to remember dates when certain things happened, when they had been crystal clear while I was writing my book a little over two years ago. I made some notes with dates so I could answer questions I might be asked.

I didn’t quite know what to expect. I found that I couldn’t talk about my experiences and focus on the collage at the same time. I would stop arranging and gluing if I was talking, or I would stop talking if I was placing images in the collage.

I started in the upper left corner with photos of my parents and me as a baby, and as a three-year-old. I added a woman’s hands knitting and handicraft images because my mother enjoyed those activities all her life.

I noted that at the time my mother started not paying her bills and not remembering to go to lunch, I was becoming ill as well and didn’t realize it.

There is a photo of her with her young great-granddaughters, me and my son. A photo of her holding my cat during the ten weeks I had her living with me before she fell and broke her hip.

The stages sort of move in a clock-wise manner until the last image is of her 95^th birthday, her last, at the nursing home where she lived because she was no longer able to get in and out of bed or use the bathroom without assistance.

The collage is not as well done as I had intended, but the overall feel of it is how that time felt to me. Chaotic, thrown together as best as I could. The red background represents the underlying emotion in my life as a child, and as an adult.

The bright pink pointed area is about the time she was living at my home when I couldn’t allow my anger to be expressed even as I observed her, through a window from the garden, going through my clothing and jewelry, and found the lipstick from my purse smeared all over its case.

After my mother died at the very end of 2010, I began to read about Adult Attachment from some books I happened to see at the UOP Library where I was working. In 2012, I worked with a book by Ruth King titled “Healing Rage”. Sometime after that I started writing my memoir, Looking for Connection.

In the process of reviewing the relationship I had with my mother and dealing with her as she could no longer take care of her affairs, and eventually herself, and explaining all this to another person I had never met, I became aware that I haven’t been ruminating about all those past events anymore. The underlying well of anger is gone. Does this mean that I never get angry now? No, I sometimes feel irritated and angry about things that happen, but it’s not a constant thing, waiting to erupt.

It is an amazing sensation to be standing in my kitchen making breakfast and notice that I am smiling and feeling happy.

Thank you, Lord, for your healing grace.

Meanwhile, my garden is waking up and things are blooming even though I’m still cleaning up piles of leaves from last fall.

Ten years ago, I carefully shortened the sleeves on a jacket I had made on a knitting machine some years before. I didn’t want the whole sleeve to unravel, so I sewed bias tape on each of them before I cut them. Of course, the discarded part did start to unravel, and I was fascinated to watch the loops relax and let go.

I used that fabric in a large, forty inch square collage. The base was three sheets of heavy corrugated cardboard glued together that had been some of the packing on something we bought while remodeling the apartment that is attached behind my free standing garage. I covered this with a knitted dress-weight material that has a free-form design in sky blue, coral, and yellow on white, which folds around to the back side. The collage is framed with a piece of rope sewn to the fabric around the edge.

At the time we were being told that light bulbs would no longer be made— only those squiggly fluorescent things, that we could no longer use our fireplaces, that GMO foods were going to replace what we were eating, and people were buying “carbon footprints” so they could travel on airplanes without feeling guilty.

Magazine photos were pasted randomly on the fabric. The unraveling sleeve was added along the left side. The chaos in the center is a tangle of red bias tape and strips of a basket-making material from some kind of grass woven together.

At a give-a-way of basketry materials, I had picked up a sheaf of gold construction paper that had been stored rolled up for a long time, and had gotten wet on one side and corroded nicely so you can see the layers. I positioned this on the right side of the board on top of a photo copy of our founding documents—“We the People . . .”

I was surprised and pleased that it made it into one of the Lodi Art Center’s annual shows when they were being held at Woodbridge Winery.

This collage has been hanging above the clothes dryer in the utility room in back of the apartment behind the garage for the last five years because there was enough wall space next to the attached shelving.

While I was rummaging around in that room last week, I took the time to stand there and remember making this collage. It had felt like life as I knew it was unraveling when I made it. I was ahead of my time—now it feels like that again, but for different reasons.

I learned about recycling at a very early age. I remember stepping on vegetable cans, probably before I went to kindergarten. The procedure was to empty the vegetables into a pan, rinse the can, remove the bottom with the hand crank can opener, step on the can to flatten it, and insert the top and bottom into the flattened can. I was the person who flattened the can.  “They need it for the war,” Mother said.

When I was weaving, I recall reading how Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz scavenged the docks near her home for sections of rope for her sculptures because she couldn’t buy materials.

I’ve always picked up stuff from the ground and brought it home – shells, sticks, pine cones, stones. When I started making baskets, I picked up more stuff. As near as I can remember, my junk collecting went into high gear when I bought my house in Stockton. The house had been cleaned and freshly painted in parts of the inside.

But the garage was full of things the previous owners, and before that her parents, didn’t take with them. Drawers of screws, nails, nuts, thing-a-ma-jigs, rusty old tools, and scraps of wood, as well as a shed full of clay pots.

At an estate sale, I got a set of old army flat files that just happened to have handfuls of rusty little parts of things which got added to my growing collection. A few years ago, I started noticing interesting junk in parking lots, like eye-glass frames now flattened by traffic. All those little plastic pieces that come with electronics as part of the packaging also get added to my stash.

Almost twenty years ago at a National Basketry Organization conference, I was in a workshop taught by John Garrett who worked with metals. From time to time I checked his website and saw that he had moved on to making large wall pieces using what looked like metal and plastic items hanging in strings.

Fascinated, I decided someday I would try to make something similar using some of this junk I’ve collected. I’ve reached the point where, if I plan to do it someday, I’d best get on with it soon!

Early last year the florescent ceiling light in my kitchen broke and my sons installed a new LED fixture. The rigid plastic cover was about to go into my recycling bin when I decided it might be useful to make that junk piece I wanted to do. I was on the lookout at estate sales for something that would work as a base. I found a former towel rack that was the perfect size. I had some kind of a dish rack I picked up years ago that became the top to hold the strings.

Little by little I thought my way through the project. I bought four 100 count packs of slip rings online.

I found hose clamps at Harbor Freight to hold the slip rings to the top. I drilled holes every 3/8ths of an inch across the top of the kitchen light cover, and wired the dish rack to the plastic with wire I had kept from my father’s workbench.

I had planned to hang some small white plastic scoops that come in a supplement on the rings, but realized that they wouldn’t show up against the plastic back. Reds and oranges worked best so I went through my stash again. The main problems were how to attach things that didn’t have any holes in them. Old keys worked well, colored cable ties were easy. I had a box of blue plastic rings that came with bottles of milk, which my cats used to love to play with. They went onto the slip rings easily.

The whole construction measures roughly 45 inches tall by 14 inches across. It is sitting against a wall of my storage shed under an overhanging roof where it gets a gentle breeze but not a lot of wind. Maybe I should add some jingle bells to it.

The front view photo above may look like there is something else behind it, but that is the shadow because I took some photos in full sun, hoping to get the shine on the rings.

 

I was surprised how quickly it went together on one of those 100+ days when I worked indoors on it.

 

My boyfriend teases me, that when I’m gone my sons will toss all my junk into a dumpster. That’s okay with me, but before that happens I should think up some other junk projects.

I returned from my June trip to Florida with a large envelope of papers from my week at the American Conchologists annual convention, so of course, I needed to make a collage with them.

I had the beautiful green and blue resort guide and the mandatory wrist band, along with the light blue convention brochure with shells and a pair of glasses like R. Tucker Abbott wore, whose 100th birthday we were celebrating. Parking tickets from the beach, as well as the one week fishing license I bought in case I happened to pick up a shell inhabited by a hermit crab. I had a dozen bidding tags from the silent auctions of beautiful shells, papers from the Parade of Snails where I had two entries, and raffle tickets.

 

I used Yes Paste to adhere some of these items onto a sheet of watercolor paper for my first layer. I added green and yellow acrylic paint to blend the edges with the base.

I still had all the papers from the flights to and from Ft. Myers, Florida. I had two boarding passes and a transfer tag going to Florida. Coming back I had a total of seven boarding passes. Having checked our of my room and turned in my rental car, the curb agent printed out the first boarding pass, but couldn’t print one for the second flight because it had been cancelled.

The indoor agent, after spending forty minutes on the phone to get advise on how to get me back to California, printed out three boarding passes and hand wrote on a blank pass – at my request – the arrival time and departure time for each flight. When I got to the gate, I inquired about the pre-boarding option because I’m always holding up the aisle getting my carry on stuff settled. She printed out a new set of boarding passes.

Going through security in Ft. Myers, my carry-on was selected for a random search, so I was handed a form on heavy paper telling me that my bag had been inspected, even though I was standing right there watching her plow through my precious new shells from the auctions.

I checked two bags on the trip home. The small one, containing my dirty laundry, didn’t make the third flight due to the tight schedule which generated a full page “Courtesy Lost/Delayed Incident Receipt” as well as another tag on the bag when it was delivered the next day.

I added a second layer of some parts of these papers and more paint. When I looked at my work the next day, I saw that I had light and medium areas, but almost no dark areas. To solve this problem I went out into the yard and cleaned up some areas that needed attention for several days.

When I got back to my collage, I experimented with turning the work around to see which way I like best. I still didn’t have a good focal point. Mostly a blue card stood out as the main focus!

A few days later while thinking about the trip as a whole, I realized that the most memorable moment was early Wednesday evening as I was waiting with others in the lobby for the Welcome Party to begin. Suddenly, I was greeted by a man I had met in January of 2013 when the shelling trip I was on had lodging at his beach-side guest house in Panama. He and his wife had spotted me in the crowd. They proceeded to tell me all about the year long round-the-world trip they were about to begin. Half an hour later, I was listening to him give a piano concert for all of us.  Such a wonderful memory.

The next day, still not knowing how to fix the collage, I remembered that the Conchologists magazine had written about his performance at the convention and had a photo of him at the piano. Why not make him the focal point? I made a color copy of the photo to add to the collage. I even used the trimmings from the photo as dark elements along with a bit of dark paint.

Yes, I know he is upside down. I like it best that way.

 

I can hardly believe it has been two months since I wrote anything here. No excuses – I just haven’t felt I had anything much to say. When I wrote on June 5th, I talked about managing my energy, and I’m still working on that.

The week after my last blog I was getting ready for a cross country trip to the Conchologists of America convention on Captiva Island, Florida. I was gathering together things I wanted to take, a few each day, which turned out to be a really good thing. The day before I left, I heard yard-work noise in my next door neighbor’s yard. When I checked, I saw that a man was pulling vegetation off the low hanging wires that run behind both of our houses.

I had been fretting about this vine growing in the neighbor’s yard that had somehow gotten up into these wires years ago. Each year the mass of vines got larger and was advancing westward to where they now were about six feet into my back lot line, climbing into the tree in the yard behind mine which was hanging over the fence and beginning to touch the roof of my storage shed. Fortunately, I was able to get the man to remove the mess from my yard for a small amount of money.

Shortly after he left, another man came by to discuss the problems I am having with some of the sprinklers in the yard. I was very glad I had almost finished packing the day before.

In the June 5 blog I also talked about how driving seemed more difficult than I was used to. I may have discovered the reason. In December last year I got new glasses and contacts. I was frustrated with the new contacts but couldn’t figure out why and decided that maybe it was just a getting older thing. If I was in a familiar place, like the grocery I go to most of the time, things seemed okay except that I noticed I was more comfortable wearing my prescription sunglasses while in the store. But if I went into a store I didn’t know, I was having trouble finding things. Everything looked fuzzy and I was just more comfortable staying at home. And at home I couldn’t read what I was writing on my desktop computer unless I leaned way over the desk.

I arrived in Florida after dark, got in an unfamiliar rental car, and started the forty mile drive to the resort on Captiva Island. I had a simple map with the main roads on it, but needed to make the correct turns to reach the causeway to the islands. On the roads that had large well lighted overhead signs I was doing okay, but the local signs on the side of the road were not readable until I was right next to them.

I did make the correct turn and located the road to the causeway. As I was driving, I remembered that my old contacts from last year were now my spare ones and were in my suitcase. In the morning I put those on and I could see a lot better. Since I’ve been home I’ve been seeing my eye doctor as he tries to figure out what is off with the new lenses. This is still a work in progress.

I have a number of other situations going on that seem to require numerous steps to resolve and need the help of other people, so nothing is happening quickly, and the issues hang out in the back of my mind.

My yard, being a mini fruit farm, takes a lot of time in early summer. First were the apricots in May. It is always a game of how long can I leave the fruit on the tree to ripen and still get some of it before the squirrels take them all. They managed to eat all the early crop of figs before any of them ripened. With the pleasant weather we had in June, I was picking strawberries and blackberries every day, and so were the birds.

When I saw how fast the white nectarines were disappearing from the tree, I picked the largest ones, and the next day the tree was completely empty. I guess squirrels don’t like plums as much as other fruits because there were more than enough for both of us. Of course it helped that the tree hadn’t been trimmed the last two years.

So a week ago my son, Chris, and grandson, Vinnie, came to Stockton and we trimmed all the fruit trees, and other growth hanging over the fence, which had grown too big and too high for me to reach. We moved an amazing amount of foliage out of my yard.

I started a collage on July 13 using items from my April trip to Camas, Washington. (See photo at top of blog.) I worked on it three days in a row, and then couldn’t get back to it until last weekend, when it was too hot to be outside. I’m not one of those artists who can do ten minutes a day and come up with wonderful work. But I think I’m about finished with it now.

For the rest of the summer – August and September – I have ivy to cut back the full length of my yard on the west side, and drawers and closets to clean out of things I don’t use. My shell collector self wants to continue organizing the collection every day, while my inner teenager wants to sit around reading, with ice tea and ice cream. I hope you are enjoying your summer.

In a watercolor class about four years ago the instructor was demonstrating working in a series. If I had heard this idea before, the concept and reasoning had not lodged in my brain. She explained that if you worked on three paintings at a time they would likely have some similar colors and perhaps some similar content, which would look good, grouped together in an exhibit.

Since then, I keep hearing the word “series” from all sorts of artists, in reviews, in workshops, and technique books.  Thinking back, I did some limited series when I was weaving chenille fabric and draping it around driftwood, and when I was weaving baskets out of kelp.

If you are working with specific materials using requisite tools, it makes sense to make several items at a time using those materials and tools.

One of my goals for rainy weather this last winter was to work with the palm bark that comes off my neighbor’s two towering palm trees. This is the stuff that is flexible like a fabric, but also sheds little scraps all over when you handle it.

One day I picked up so much of this in my yard that I spread it across my drawing board to dry out. I never put it away, and one week I finally sat down with some colored cord called gimp, a needle, some beads, and a stack of handmade paper.

I started shaping the bark and adding a sheet of the paper, stitching them together, making a loop on the backside for hanging. Once the two surfaces were attached, I left hanging threads for adding beads.

I made seven of these over two or three days. To some I added a feather or two. I find a lot of feathers in my yard from the jays, doves, and other birds. And then they sat on my drawing board waiting for . . .?  I didn’t know what else to do with them. They needed something to be a focal point.

The leader of my local art group was all enthused about making “inchies” at that time. An inchie is a one inch square painting on paper, usually abstract and colorful, which can be used in a mosaic of some sort, or to cover an ugly box.

Ah- ha! I had some inchies left from the last time we did this. I rummaged through them and selected a few to complement the colors of my bark and paper constructions. Those tiny bits of color made all difference.

 

Now we are headed for summer, I hope, and my bark and paper series is hanging next to my drawing board, or still laying on it, waiting for me to decide what to do with these somewhat fragile creations.

 

I’ve learned the hard way that this type of hanging does not survive well for a show if it has to be packed up, moved from place to place, and handled by others. I need to find a place in my house where I can hang them for awhile, until I gift them to my friends.

 

Working in a series is fun, generates new ideas, and may produce a volume of work more quickly than doing one piece at a time.

Shortly before the beginning of March, the leader for my local art group sent us an email asking for ideas for projects for the next meeting or two. I reminded her about the time our group had fun making collage by starting a piece, and then passing it to the person on our right, who would add some elements until time was called, and the piece moved again to the right.

I provided 11” x 11” watercolor paper for the substrate, and brought an assortment of printed papers, old book pages, maps, corrugated cardboard pieces, and fabric scraps. Members were told to bring scissors and glue of some kind.

Several of our new members had never done collage before, but quickly got the hang of adding a scrap of color here and there before passing it on. We did this until we got our own piece back, with a chance to add some finishing touches.  I should have taken a photo of the collage I came home with, but I didn’t think of it until after I added a few more pieces.

I had started out with some large pieces of aqua colored paper sprinkled with white star shapes, and a page from a foreign language book. When it came back to me, someone had added a 3-D orange fan shape out of some stiff vellum, a small dark red shape topped with a yellow button, and a good size purple bird shape made of crumpled tissue paper. Someone added a fairly large piece of purple netting. Another member had found my name on one of the papers I brought, cut it into pieces and scattered them about.

At home, I sat it up on the end of my work table for several days, so I could glance at it through the day. What could I do with all these bits of color and shape so it didn’t look like the world was flying apart?  Eventually, I added a few dark pieces along parts of three edges, as well as a layer of green tissue paper over two sections to try and “pull things together”, which allowed the purple bird to be the main focal point.

I must admit there are some days when my mind feels like this collage!

Two weeks later, our group met again and we each worked on our own collage. Some members had thought about what they wanted to make, and had brought papers to create their vision.

I didn’t plan ahead. I rummaged through papers when I got to the group and selected them mainly on colors that appealed at that moment. I paired them with some of my yellow handmade paper, torn into shapes to go with the large pieces. The paper substrate I was working on had a few black lines someone had painted long ago. I decided to let them show between the pieces I added.

Once I had the main elements pasted down, I couldn’t decide what to add next. Someone in the group encouraged us to use some tissue paper she had painted with watercolors. Adding a random piece to connect my larger shapes produced a really exciting element. After I got home, I added a small rust colored image about one third down the left side. Up close it is a set of keys tossed on a small tray.

By April, our leader was full of new ideas for the group. Perhaps working with collage has an organizing effect on the mind.

One of the companies making premium art mediums is Golden. They have Reps who give demos of their products to groups of artists at stores that sell their stuff. I’ve actually been to two of these, but it was some years back. The Rep talks about each medium, showing on a canvass board, what it is designed to do. This sample is then passed around the room while she demos another product.

By the end of the presentation the audience has oh-d and awed at the beautiful colors, the creamy gels, and special effects that can be produced. What we don’t see is how to integrate these products into a complete work of art.

I have a drawer of different gels in matte and gloss, with beads, will crackle, make a raised image with a stencil, or shine a different color in a certain light. I have papers, canvas, brushes, stencils, stamps, and almost anything else you can think of, but I rarely know with any certainty what to use to get the effect I have in mind.

During our rainy winter, I began reading a book about using these mediums and paints which is written like a workshop, so you can follow along step by step with the author. She started by covering her work surface with a variety of papers to provide texture, such as a page from an old book, a photo copy, corrugated cardboard, and crumpled rice paper. She also added some stencil images.

I rummaged through my scrap box for similar items. I found some pages from a psych-nurse’s pocket guide, one of which was titled “Decisional Conflict” which in normal language means the person can’t decide between two or more options. I experience this quite often in my studio. I also found some corrugated paper from a cookie box, a strip of rice paper I could crumple, and a single Tarot card. They didn’t look like what was in the book, but close enough.

Arranging them on the paper was easy now that I have been doing a lot of collage.

The next step was to add paint. The book’s finished collage was crimson and orange with white and black accents. I had paint, just not the colors she was using. So I used what I had that I thought might be close to hers. Didn’t quite work the same way. The red color was close, but the yellow was too intense. She used a transparent yellow color which I didn’t have. The white paint she added to lighten up some areas was zinc white, which I also didn’t have, so I used an Iridescent Pearl.

One of my goals is to use up the acrylic paint I have so I can get some new paint. Of course, the colors I really like are pretty much gone. I rarely use reds and yellows, preferring greens and blues.

The yellow paint over the dark photo copy and the black on the Tarot card turned a green shade. I liked how that went with the red and yellow, so I added some paint in a lime shade here and there.

Over all, I was pleased with the finished product. Looking ahead to the next project in the book, I saw that the author continues to use the zinc white and transparent yellow. In order to alleviate some of my “Decisional Conflict”, I have ordered them online because they are not available in Stockton.