DIY: Painting on a Denim jacket with acrylic

I’m going to be honest, I’ve been slow to jump back on the denim / jean jacket bandwagon. Is it possibly because a gang of highschoolers made fun of my jean jacket ten years ago (Jess! Shhh!!) but denim jackets are back and I couldn’t help but be won over when I saw the idea that you could paint beautiful things on jean jackets. I know that it’s been POSSIBLE since before the bedazzled was a thing, but I’d never seen something that made me ITCH to do it until this year.

So I thought I’d take on something completely different and give it a shot.

I’m not making you wait — here’s the end result!

My base jean jacket was found on sale at the Gap for $20. Remember, this is an experiment and if it was expensive I never would have built up the nerve to paint on it.

Why this one? I liked that it had blossoms embroidered in the sleeves. It had a happy face on it that I didn’t really love and, once it arrived, I hate that the smiley goes through each side thereby rendering the pocket useless.

What have a learned? That there are tips and rules, and for every rule there’s a person out there who says that rule doesn’t matter, so take everything on here with a grain of salt.

TIPS:

  • Make sure your jean jacket is solid and not the stretchy kind

  • Paint layers thinly and allow them to dry. I used the same kind of acrylic paint that I use for making canvas paintings.

  • If you’re paranoid like me / want to help make sure it doesn’t crack or look like crap, maybe it’s a good idea to get clothing medium (Golden GAC 900) to mix into your paint to help it bend. I used about 1 part medium to 2 parts paint. I am a heathen who likes to add water to paint generally, but absolutely try to only add minimal water to your paint! In lieu of excessive water, the medium helped a lot.

  • Heat set your jean jacket after it’s all done. I tried to do this with an iron — I think (?) successfully? Full disclosure, I have not tried to wash my denim jacket yet, as I generally try to wash denim as little as possible unless you fall in mud or something. Other people use their clothing dryer to set by running it for 30 mins.

How did it turn out?

Well this jean jacket survived a month in Australia with me wearing it once in a while and tolerated me bending it to try to cram it into a carry-on suitcase several times. It has not cracked!!

Owl Magic Cards! (Augmented Reality / AR)

To read more about my beginner adventures with magic cards, please jump here!. PM me if you’d like me to make a how-to on how to make layered, animated magic prints that work using instagram/fb.

Editor’s note: Some of the tech has changed since I first published these series of blogs and so the AR is no longer active. I have removed these from my downloads page.

Sample magic card in action! Check out my TikTok for more vids @jessjchampagne

BUILDING CAT STAIRS PT 1 & 2

I love my little studio cats Mina & Coco. They’re growing fast and it’s been hard trying to keep them indoors. They are very curious, whiley cats. Mina has already taught herself to push down on door knobs. They want out, but I’m trying to keep them safe. We have future plans to build them a catio. But in the meantime, I thought why don’t we take advantage of the vertical space we have in the house and build them some cat stairs to use and hang out on?

I’ve always admired how cute cat stairs are. However they’re also super expensive to buy — I just can’t justify $100 per piece of a cat shelf / stairs setup. So why not try building my own? At this step Pinterest was my best friend. There were so many cute ideas online, though some of them were really unclear in terms of how they were properly supporting a cat’s weight. So take that as my advice to only use ideas online (including mine!) as a base idea, but it’s up to you to make sure that a structure is strong and that it is supported by studs in your walls.

My fave example, from Homedit.com

Normally I find sketching building ideas to be quite easy, however the space I had in mind had a few new challenges. First, getting the heights over widths correct — I wanted stairs that would both meet the second floor beam, and reach the second floor high window. (Note, the cats were already debating about jumping from this beam TO the high window, so these stairs would be a way to keep them safer than if they were attempting this Darwan-award level jump.)

The second challenge was that I wanted to use the corner area, which would also help is solidifying the whole thing. But drawing across three dimensions in this way was unique for me. It’s not like building a deck, where I can just focus on one plane at a time.

After a lot of research and a lot of sketching I found something I thought could work and we got to building! You should customize your design to your own space. Things to keep in mind: cats feel more comfortable climbing steps that are not too high or to smooshed, and this will change as they grow up, if they are currently young cats. We may end up changing the distance of the stairs if our cats get very large.

Materials we used: Screws Wood 1” x 8”  , 1”x 12”, 1”x1”s , Saw, Drill, shelf supports ours were extras from Home Hardware, Scrap carpet pieces, or something you can use as grips for the tops of the wood so that it is less slippery for kitty feet.

Deliberate Practice | Accepting your weaknesses & working on them! (Practicing People)

Being a creative person professionally is an awkward balancing act of wrangling ‘creativity’ and applying the technical skill of putting out into the world the thing that’s in your head, but in a way that people respond to in the way you want them to. What happens to your art once it’s out in the world is a whole other blog post.

In regards to skill, a lot of people think art skill is something you’re born with, but it’s really, really not. So to continue to grow as artists on a technical level, we need to be able to see, accept and decide to work on those elements we still feel awkward about. The part we feel shame about. Ugh. In order words, we need to practice “deliberate practice”. (For a great podcast on this, see my fave episode of Freakonomics: How to Become Great at Just About Anything. )

When it comes to visual art, we all have things we just like to draw, and things we just… happen to ignore conveniently. My love and hate is drawing people. I think this is sort of universally a challenge for a lot of artists because the human brain is so in tune with how people should look and is on high alert for ‘bad people’ (See the Uncanny Valley effect, for an example, look at the people animation in Toy Story 1, or the re-drawing of Sonic the hedgehog to make him more cute and less human like, including removing his human teeth.)

It’s sort of an ironic love and hate because the first type of art I got very good at as a kid was drawing pencil portraits of classmates and family members. I specifically drew girls, boys felt so much harder because boys weren’t as accepting of flattery that hides mistakes.

In my graphic design and illustration work, we are often trying to think of how to best get across information to people in ways that are easy and intuitive for our brains to process. Often information is emotional, rather than analytical. Now, compared to other things, it’s very easy in campaigns to ignore having to illustrate people. But when it keeps coming up as an idea, that’s when you need to realize you are avoiding it and own that facing it head on will make you stronger. So starting in April 2021, that’s what I decided to do. Make room in my practice for practicing people.

Below are some of my results, and an example of a campaign that it eventually got used it, for social media.

Whale Shark Dark Dreams Colorway

The idea for this print came to me late at night, looking out on the dark forest behind my house, and so I called it the Dark Dreams colorway. Most days on the west coast the ocean is more silver than blue, and this print conveys the feeling of the mist rolling down the hills and over that shimmery icy water.

See the Dark dreams print on the artist collective website Red Bubble in my jesschampagne section.