Art du Jour 45

Woke up this morning to snow (again) so I created my own little patch of spring.

And since its World Poetry Day, here’s one from the archives….

Spring has sprung

The grass is riz 

I wonder where the flowers is

Yeah.  That one is going right back from whence it came.

Our lawn people have called us about spring clean up, so somebody is optimistic.  Hope you’re having a fun Saturday, whatever season you’re stuck in.

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.

Art du Jour 43

life is meant to be
mostly
about sunshine and happiness and light
but when something bad happens
to someone you care about
you feel their pain
and then you wonder
why the sun came up at all

Art du Jour 42

This is what happens when you change your mind sixteen times before, during, and after breakfast.  And a few more times after lunch.  Glad I don’t have to peel the layers off this one.  I watched a lot of YouTube mixed media instructional videos yesterday and apparently decided to try all of them out at once.

Hope you’re having a great Saturday!  And that this didn’t give you a migraine!  Next up – aiming for a focal point.

Art du Jour 40

Here is what appears to be the second piece in a series.  If I get to number three I guess I’ll have to name it something.

Many years ago I purchased a book called House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  It is 700 plus pages of nightmare inducing insanity.  There are many different fonts, margins are all over the place, some pages are blank, some are written sideways or upside down.  It is filled with footnotes and appendices.  Notice I’m not telling you what this novel is about.  Frankly I’m not sure.  However, it is the most perfect mishmash of pages ever to repurpose into art.  I am not destroying a book, I am immortalizing it.  And in the process, not making it any less difficult to read, really.

My process starts with ripping out pages, cutting them up, painting them both sides with a mixture of acrylic paint and matte varnish, and sticking them on a canvas.  In a pleasing artistic fashion, or in a bizarre confusing mess.  Or both.  Then layers are added until it’s time to stop.  That’s actually the hard part, telling myself, okay, this is good, leave it alone and walk away.

This daylight saving thing should not be screwing up my schedule since I don’t even have one anymore, but things like eating and sleeping have not been by the clock this week.  I’m far behind in replying to comments and getting through e-mail and sometimes I watch crime shows first thing in the morning with my coffee.

There, that’s all the secrets you’re getting out of me today.  I have a book to cut up.  And that’s something I never thought I’d say.

Art du Jour 39

If there is such a thing as a serious artist, I’m not it.  If it feels like work, I don’t want to do it.

This was 1% work and 99% fun.  I am in love with the colours.

Maybe I’m going through a phase or maybe I’m still feverish and delirious from a couple of days spent this side of miserable with a stuffed up head.  Or maybe it was the other side of miserable.  It was the bad side, anyway.  I consoled myself by watching multitudinous episodes of Netflix crime shows, congratulating myself on not being a murder victim.  See, there’s always somebody worse off.

It’s a beautiful sunny March weekend!  Hope you’re having a good one.

Art du Jour 37

This was time-consuming and labour intensive.  But also fun, except maybe for all the glue and paint and paper scraps everywhere.  Now I have a greater appreciation for artistic people who put these things together.  In case you don’t notice it on your own, I would like to point out that the main part of the house is strips of paper in basket weave.  That’s how it started.

Yes, I do have a lot of time on my hands and I’m trying many new things to make a dent in using up all the massive amounts of paper I purchased having very few clues at the time about what I would ever do with all of them.  When I take pictures of these finished products,  I set them on my easel so they are leaning back slightly, and the upper left hand corner always looks blurry.  Although maybe the fact that I used a lot of water on this board and it warped a bit could be a factor as well.  Life is full of mysteries.

So, bonus day.  Here’s how it looks on my yellow wall.  Beside something equally strange and in different light.  Why does my wall not look yellow??

The paint on my art room walls is called Elephant Grass and in real life is much nicer than this looks.

Before embarking on this project I watched an artist on YouTube put together an art journal page using paint and paper and stencils with a drawing of a partial face looking rather ghostly and emerging from the background.  She had a whole book full of stencils and took half the video choosing the ones she wanted to use.  With all the stopping and starting and talking and pausing and speeding up and waiting for things to dry, it’s a wonder I learned anything, other than knowing I am not ready to make a video of my own any time soon.  Mine would include too much profanity and hand washing.

I’m happy with this result, even though I don’t think it’s something I’d want hanging over my dining room table.  Good thing I don’t have a dining room table.  It might be nice in a kids room.  I don’t have one of those either any more.

Well, for someone who thought she didn’t have anything much to say today, I’ve managed to write a lot of words, as well as post two pictures of the same thing.  This blogging thing is so easy.  And you can do it most days without glue.

Art du Jour 35

I’ve been admiring all the cut-and-paste collage type cityscape pictures on Pinterest, and this is my attempt at whatever the proper artistic description is for it.

There was going to be a moon in the sky with a face on it, but I found this cat, and there he is.  Cats are notorious for popping up in all the wrong places and looking like they belong exactly where they are.

I have done something to my left foot which is causing a ridiculous amount of pain and making me hobble around whining and feeling sorry for myself.  Google wisdom suggests ice, compression, elevation, rest, and better arch support in shoes.  And as a last resort, go see your doctor.  I have made appointments before for such things, only to have the symptoms disappear before I get there.

A tensor bandage isn’t doing much and last night the pain woke me up.  On the bright side, I have an excuse for sitting around with my feet up all day.  There’s always a bright side.

Knocked Over By A Feather

This badge may call itself silly but it’s something I am now very proudly displaying on my sidebar.  Because silly rules.  After my best stretch of procrastination ever I finally put together a silly picture collage for Merry at KNOCKED OVER BY A FEATHER so that I could be FEATURED there.  OMG, I have never been featured anywhere, so this is a really big deal.

It was a labor of love, because if you know Merry, you love her too.  If you don’t know her, poor you.  Time to find out what you’ve been missing.