Works in Progress

As we are officially in the summer, it always seems to be the shortest season.  The longer days make me want to spend more time at the studio but it gets unbearably hot in there even with the air conditioning.  It is also time to take advantage of the ocean.

I have been working on two repurposed canvases that I pulled out of the trash.  I painted over the original work and glued some collage papers.  My original intention was to make a diptych but each one is going off in its own direction.  Here is where I am at now:

Progression of WorkI

I thought I would go step by step on how my latest piece came to be.  I started off with a layer of collage and some gray paint.  I used some pattern pieces, tissue and some hand made paper.  As an afterthought I put some red paint from the top of the tube and then used a small brayer to smear some of it around.

This is actually step 3 because I had painted over the whole thing with transparent yellow oxide and I kind of liked it.  I wanted to get out of my usual thing by making waves with black, white, more gray, burnt sienna and some ugly brown paint.

 

I wanted to get rid of that ugly brown paint so I covered everything over with white and then softened it with a paper towel and water.

This became the final version but the thing I like best about working with paper is that you don't have to like all of it.

This is the final version.  I cropped out the right hand side and I am saving cropped ends of papers for some future project.

Finished

Here is the finished product.  I started with this canvas which was one of my do overs.  I covered it with papers and then sealed it with soft gel gloss medium.

I thought it was a little bright so I toned it down with a couple of coats of thinned Van Dyke brown.  Then I hot glued and sewed the dress to the canvas.  I popped it into a spare frame after I took the picture and we are good to go.

I think I could have done a better of centering it top to bottom but it is too late now.

More Patterning

I am really getting into this patterns thing.  Since I have enough patterns to wallpaper a decent sized room, the ideas for projects just keep coming.  I wanted to do a 2D project and I came up with two ideas.

This was my original idea.  This is a dress pattern for a rabbit doll glued into an 18 x 24 sheet of heavy drawing paper.  The background is red papers collaged into the drawing paper and then the whole thing was coated with soft gel gloss medium.  I am loving the stuff.  I had a tube of it for years but I have managed to blow halfway through an 8oz jar in about three weeks.  I will need to get a frame for this.

This was my PlanB.  I just collaged more dress patterns over a child's dress found at the Salvation Army.  I plan on mounting it onto a canvas with some glue, needle and thread.

Stay tuned for the Big Reveal.

Giving Up

I gave up on one of my children the other day.  No, not the real ones.  It was an art piece I was struggling with.  It was something I started when I was doing  collage with some friends.  I felt that it had potential because I didn't exactly hate it but after struggling with it for a few days and cutting it apart, I tossed it in the trash.  After all, it was only paper.

But the good news is that I had done two pieces.  I cut apart the second piece and I ended up with two pieces that I like a lot.   You can see where they fit together and here they are:

New/Old Work

I finally got around to photographing some finished work.

This is a bowl that I fished out of the trash because one of my studio mates did not like it for some reason.  I can't figure out why so I rescued it.  I painted it with considerable assistance from a friend but of course I overdid it with the red.

This is one of the pieces that came out of the large image transfer class.  It is a photo from the Chincoteague workshop and if you look closely you can see some collage elements. I added the birds to cover up the spots where I rubbed holes in the transfer.  It is about 40 x 28 and it hangs over my sofa for the time being.

This is the last piece from the transfer class.  I was quite pleased with myself until I realized that I flipped one of the panels and I had a hole in the koi's head where I didn't adhere the transfer so well.  I pulled out my trusty water soluble oil pastels and made him a new flipper and filled in the hole in his head and his side.  Not a bad patch job.