Art du Jour 44

Want to see how I got from a blank canvas to this?

I started off gluing miscellaneous weird things like magazine faces, tissue paper and printed pieces, using white glue mixed with water, applied to the canvas and both sides of the paper.  This ended up being too wet, took forever to dry, and made the canvas warp.  Live and learn.

Next comes paint mixed with clear gel medium, so that nothing gets too obliterated and things show  through.  Sometimes I have a definite colour scheme in mind, but not this time.  When that’s dry I do some touch up to the faces with water colour pencil crayons, or oil pastels, or ink, or even charcoal sometimes.

Then I start with the stencils and ink stamps. This is where the layers really begin. Add some, let them dry, come back later, decide what it needs, add more.

This needed something to bring it together, so I did some leaves and some circles that look like bubbles.  Like everywhere.  Then it needed orange applied with a sponge.  And some bugs.

Knowing when to stop is good.  Walking away and coming back gives my brain a rest and I can be more objective.

Until VOILA!  Sign it, spray it, take a picture and blog it.

From this one I learned how to darken a sort of border blending oil pastels.  I learned that next time I will take the paper pieces right to the edges so I don’t have to deal with the empty spaces there. And I learned that bug stamps when overlapped create a strange kind of lace effect.

Next I would like to do something fluffy in pastels.  Maybe without any bugs.   But that’s as far ahead as I like to plan, because my plans rarely work out and whatever vision I have in the beginning turns into something else entirely.    It’s  more fun to just go where the picture takes me.