Art du Jour 91

It’s the Fish Picture!  Or the Fishing Collage!  Or Angling in Hell!  I haven’t made a final decision on the title.

Normally I do ink spritzes to finish but W was so happy identifying fish species I decided not to obliterate them with colour.  There are no purple pickerel in the real world.

But there could be rainbow cats.

I got a how-to art book from Amazon and the first exercise is to draw a bunch of cats.  HAHA!  I am obviously SO ready to move on.

Hope your weekend was happy and fun!

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 20

I am kind of ridiculously happy with the outcome of this one. White and black on coloured paper. Not bad for a first go using this technique.  I will get a better blending white pencil if there is such a thing and more coloured paper.  This was fun.

Had to abandon an earlier attempt at a baby face which was turning in to a grumpy old man with wispy hair.  They can’t all be masterpieces, right?  When it starts to get either frustrating or simply hilarious, time to let it go.

Well……here we are on the last day of a post-crazy month.  I’m thrilled with all the new blogs and amazing people I’ve come across during this endeavour and with WordPress telling me my site is generating more interest than usual.  They wouldn’t lie to me, would they?  The stats became suspect to me when some fluke in the system indicated my best day having over 800 views.  The average here is probably 50. Unless I mention Johnny Depp.  And that day I didn’t.

The only (considerably less than exciting) news I have today is that I’m going to make Apple Crisp so that I have an excuse to turn the oven on.  The floors are cold and so are my feet.

We’re having ourselves one of those quiet lazy Sundays,  staying in out of the cold.  Watching the daylight disappear.  Along with November.

Thank you Team Pepper for letting me be on the team, even though I didn’t necessarily know or understand or follow all the rules or have much of a clue what game we were playing.

Did we win?

Art du Jour 19

This is what happens when you can’t make up your mind about hair colour.  There’s only so much blending you can do with pencil crayons and then they just refuse to do it anymore.

Eyes that are a foot away from my nose while I’m drawing them tend to look very different at a further distance.  I will just say I’m doing portraits of strabismus patients.

The snow is done falling for now, and the temperature has dropped to 30 below Celsius according to our thermometer which is just outside my “art studio” window.  W was kind enough to let me know this morning how many days it’s been since I left the house.  Who keeps track of these things?  Well obviously he does, and needs to find another hobby.

When I went to work I’d say my fresh air time was two minutes a day tops.  From the house to the warmed up car, car to the workplace, then back to the car and into the house.  I can’t say I’m missing my time spent outdoors at this time of year since it was previously pretty much non-existent.

How long will it take to develop cabin fever?  Well there’s a little project to work on while I’m working on all my other little projects.  Stay tuned for enthralling updates on that.  Plus a perfected recipe for guacamole as soon as I can work out the amount of garlic that is not likely to add its pungent odour to the entire house.

It’s candle season!  Yay!  Last night the living room was a raspberry garlic scented paradise.

Yeah, maybe I do need to get out more.