Art du Jour 58

Just before I went to bed last night I took a little stretched canvas and a couple of hard plastic stencils and some gesso and a pallet knife and mucked about applying texture with raised bits randomly placed.

If that was the beginning of a novel I believe it might be a contender for worst first sentence ever. But if you’ve ever worked with the above mentioned stuff I expect it made some sense.

The method to my madness was knowing that thick gesso would take a long time to dry, and sleeping through that process seemed like a great plan. In the morning, on all the dry bumpy areas I rubbed distress ink with an upside down raised stamp pad.

I am so happy with how this turned out! The predominant colour is rook red, and you can still see the canvas texture in a lot of places. I resisted the (always strong) urge to stamp bugs and butterflies everywhere.  I spray clear acrylic sealer on these things outside and let them dry out there, running the risk of real bugs getting stuck on them. That spray is probably lethal so who knows what I’m killing in the name of art. Hopefully not myself.

There is something very warm and relaxing about these colours, with all the brown, moss green and gold.

Anyway!  I’m done and calling it a success.  Happy mellow Tuesday.

Art du Jour 54

On the weekend my daughter came over to learn some of my mixed media collage making techniques.  She made a lovely picture,  of which I neglected to take a photo,  using predominantly greens, yellows and blues.  At one point during the process I asked her if she wanted to use a picture I had of some oranges which I had cut out of a magazine and with no hesitation at all she said no.  Imagine!

So I used it myself.  I’m still in show and tell mode,  so I’m sharing my latest artistic journey with you. Yes, apparently it is your lucky day.

It all started with a piece of an old road map glued to a flat 11 x 14 canvas.  When it comes to measuring paper and canvas sizes I still prefer inches.  I am THAT old.  Metric hasn’t taken over my life entirely.  And I didn’t really use glue, it was soft gel medium, brushed on front and back.

I have a lot of orange and yellow tissue paper to use up.  This project barely made a dent in it.  The paper is ripped and placed haphazardly and overlapped and stuck on there until I feel like doing something else.

Here is a sideways view.  Please don’t ask me why.  I added some black and white scrap tissue paper pieces over some bald patches.

Isn’t this a lovely picture of oranges?  It went on all wrinkly with the gel medium, just like the tissue paper did. Wrinkles add depth. To canvases. And sophistication to faces.  I should have cut all the black off around it, but I didn’t and it’s too late now.

I finger painted some gesso over the glossy cut out, then let everything dry before adding colour and shading with oil pastels.  My easel has a big lip on it at the bottom, so I balance my canvas on this ruler when I take a picture of it.  Otherwise you can’t see to the very bottom.  Not that there’s a whole lot to see there.

Oil pastels blended with finger tips make a really nice subtle border.  I used orange, crimson, dark green and black in random order around the edge blending them in to each other.  Then I think I did some shading on the oranges and stopped when one of them started to look like a pumpkin.

Finally I went crazy with my stamps using brown and black ink and  green and white paint. This is a close up so you can see how the map shows through all the crap I’ve put on top of it.

And that’s it.  Sign it, spray it with clear acrylic sealer, and call it done.

I am so far behind reading all the blogs I follow that I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.  Please know that my LIKES are very sincere and I am commenting in my head.

Okay, that was pathetic.  I will try harder.

Have a super day!  Colour something orange!

Art du Jour 51

Bird with Balloons to brighten up the start to your weekend!

Which probably doesn’t need any help, because SATURDAY!  Yay!

This was another background I became enamoured of…..with….whatever, and didn’t want to cover up.  But after an expensive trip to Michael’s I got all fired up and finished it.

Before I went through the check out I looked through my cart and removed six items I can probably survive without for the time being, in the interests of not spending a fortune all at once.  And no, I didn’t run around putting them back exactly where they belong.  That’s my secret confession for today.

The secret to the balloons being transparent is tissue paper!  Isn’t that brilliant?  I now have a lifetime supply of it in many colours.

Okay, that’s enough secrets revealed for one day.  Have a great weekend!

Art du Jour 49

Eons ago I bought a beautiful stretched canvas with art on it that I didn’t particularly like. It was the perfect size and shape to cover up anchored screw holes that were no longer needed to hold up a cabinet on my bathroom wall.

I love easy solutions to annoying little problems. I planned to one day paint over it with colours that better matched the weird purple fixtures that the original home owners chose, for reasons I can’t fathom.

One day we are also going to renovate this 1970’s bathroom because the fixtures are looking like hell. Well, they always did, but now they’re worn out as well.

So, the first ‘one day’ finally arrived and the canvas has been repurposed at last.

Here’s the process:
I painted over the original with gesso, added some glued on tissue paper and then sponged on colours I like better for the background.

Added butterfly and more bits of printed tissue.
Almost done.  This is the part where I don’t know when to stop.  Shapes with oil pastels, random stencils, ink stamps, splatter, and on and on until…..

Voila!  Done.  Back on the wall to cover up the holes.  Until the renovation.  Hey, it could happen!  This did.

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 41

Just in case you thought I might be slacking off in the creativity business, here’s number three in my nameless series of egg head girls.   A lot of drying time is involved in the many layers.  There’s more depth to this one and a cooler palette than the first two.

I hoped it would have more of an under water feel, but despite the seaweed hair it looks a little wintry instead.

W is having a rum (that’s like saying he’s breathing) so I am going to wash the paint off my hands and join him.  Let’s just call it celebrating the end of a beautiful spring-ish kind of day.

 

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.