Small Things - Just 5 x 5

New collages --- What great fun it is to make collages!

I posted on Facebook a little while ago about artists being great hoarders. Well, in order to make collages, we just have to be - a little bit, anyway. Otherwise, where would you ever come up with the "stuff" to make a collage?

So I have these big red sunflowers - silk flowers that I have had in a beautiful twisted glass vase with some smooth little pebbles. I decided that the stems were way too long, so my wonderful hubby set about finding some snips to cut through the heavy wire stems. He cut them off, and then asked the crucial question: "What do you want to do with these?" The "these" referred to the remaining stems. At first I said to throw them out, but I saw them just laying there on top of the trash, and I just had to rescue them.

I had just painted these little 5 x 5 canvases black, so I laid a few of the stems on top, and decided they looked pretty cool. So I asked him if he could go and cut me some 5 inch even cuts from the stems, and he's great and cut them for me.

I had rescued a bag of dessicant, you know a bag labeled, "Do Not Eat!" and determined the little stuff inside was clay balls. So I set about mixing up some thinned red acrylic in a small lid to see if I could get the balls to accept the color. After awhile I got some nice red ones, some pink ones and some that lost their shape and were melting.

I had some lovely gold paper that another artist (Thank you, Raquel) had given out to us that she said came from Brazil, and some other paper that I thought was rice paper that I bought in a bargain bag. First I glued on the "rice paper" and the glue showed through after it dried, so out came the gold acrylic to paint this which turned out great. I cut out a round shape from the gold paper and glued it onto the other canvas, then I proceeded to lay on the stems and the little colored balls and glued them down. Voila!

Texture is fun, but more than that the added dimension it adds to a painting is becoming to me like putting salt and spice on my food.










The textures that can be added to every kind of two-dimensional media vary, but more and more I am looking at texture as a necessity rather than an addition to a painting. In this first example entitled Music For Martinis, texturing the background happened before the idea of the painting was hatched.





















In this next example, He Gave Me Flowers some of the background texturing happened as the abstract still life was being painted, but much of it was created after the fact.

The two examples are used to show that texture can happen at any stage of a painting to add interest and excitement to the artwork.

For added information about either painting, you may want to click on the images to read more.

Afternoon Delight Rescuing An Old Painting

Fixing up old paintings is always fun. I can look at them periodically when I am looking for something and never see anything I want to do to change a painting. Then suddenly the inspiration hits me, and I have to "fix it."

I originally created this collage five years ago (dated on the back) and found it again this afternoon. It is a mixture of watercolor, acrylic and things I found in magazines.

It was just way, way too dark over all, so I covered the dark top parts with white gesso and let that dry, then mixed up some pale Hansa yellow acrylic up and proceeded to let the sunshine in. That is the effect I feel now when looking at the painting. It is joyful now, where before it was just kind of dark, but I didn't see it until today.

For additional information or purchase info, click here.

Tree Climber - Painting A Day

Tree Climber once again utilizes one of my favorite little animals, the little kitten. To use a kitten as a subject is completely natural for me, because I just love kitties.

I feel like I just might be getting back into the swing of the painting a day mode. Being sick with a stupid cold just absolutely laid me low, and it completely took any desire I had to paint. It exhausted me so that just the thought of painting made me want to run away. That combined with the fact that it's summer and has really gotten hot here.

A few years ago in my Experimental Painting class, we did some paintings called scrapings. The instructor cautioned us to save the paper towels we scraped the excess paint on. I saved it, and was able to utilize some of it in this painting for my collage materials. The tree in this painting is fabricated out of a drawing of black Sharpie poster paint marker, black permanent Sharpie marker and a Tombow gray pen. The background and sides were painted in a lovely light moonbeam yellow over which the drawing was made and the collage grew on.

This little 8 x 8 inch acrylic on canvas painting is available in my Etsy shop, DreamON. Click here for purchase details.

Summer Colds Are The Worst

For the last week I have been battling this obnoxious cold that started in my chest. I haven't had too many colds in the last few years, so when I got one last fall it laid me low, and I can't believe I now have another one. Cooties, giant blue furry ones have descended upon my head. Blaaaahhhhh ! Yuckeeeeeeee! Eeeeeewwwwwwweeee! I hate being sick; it's such a waste of time! Needless to say it has slowed down my work, but I tell you what, I read in the Parade section of the newspaper this Sunday about some of the military who are coming home with horrible, horrible injuries and amputations to solve some of their problems. The ones featured go through these things and keep a great can-do attitude about it. That simply fills me with pride and admiration for them, and I feel like my complaining about a little cold is just soooooo pathetic.

After The Chick Fight

On to today's artistic project which was putting the final touches on something I started awhile ago, like so many of my projects. You might ask, why does she always have some old, unfinished project sitting around. Well, it's because I have been taught to have multiple projects going on all of the time. The theory is that it keeps you looser (yeah, complicated art word) because you aren't so wrought up concentrating on one masterpiece at a time.

OK this is not the greatest title, but After The Chick Fight with its empty gold, ornate picture frames and assorted "altered" photos just reminds me what might happen in an extreme situation when two chicks become jealous of one another's interest in what else, a man. We have already heard on the news about one chick's trek across the country in diapers to exact revenge upon another. Havoc is wreaked when anyone loses control, and there is much damage in the fray here.

So anyway, my original mixed-media collage is built upon gessoed masonite, and I have now put it up in my Etsy shop so you can find out more info about it. Click here.

Wind For Sale

Wind For Sale, the title of the painting refers to an old Finnish legend when in ancient times the Finns would offer wind for sale to traders who would wait and wait on their land because of bad sailing weather, and when the sailors paid for knowledge of the winds, the Finns would give them in exchange three magic knots tied in a sturdy leather strap. This is how they were to be utilize the knots: when they untied the first knot, they would have gentle breezes. When they indid the second knot, the winds would be stronger. If they weren't satisfied with the speed they were making and they untied the third knot, they were likely to face hurricane strength winds.

In the painting, the legend is applied to hopes for good sailing weather - full moon, stiff breeze and small boats.

For additional information about the painting or to purchase it, click here.

Caught Looking

It's fun to give some thought to guessing what this little parrot has interrupted his grooming routine to peruse. Is there a hot little parrot chick out there? Maybe there's a human (how dare them) trying to snag him for a photo, or perhaps it's a wild monkey climbing the next tree in search of bananas.

In any event, I painted this guy awhile ago, photographed the painting and stored it on Photoshop. A few days ago I was looking at photos and playing around with the many different treatments you can perform on your pictures. I discovered an unfamiliar one that turns a photo into a monochromatic version of whatever color you have already selected. These looked to me like they should make some interesting collages. This is the first, but I carried it a bit further than I had intended by painting much of the parrot over again with my acrylics, and then did some outlining with marker before varnishing.

Caught Looking is 11 1/2 x 15 1/4 inches on 140-lb. Arches Cold Press Watercolor paper.

For additional comments and purchase info, click here .

George McKim - Freedom of Expression

Today I am featuring the Etsy shop of George McKim, who is also an visual artist.

If you haven' t had a chance to visit George's website, by all means do. It gives so much insight into his process of evolving art. Shown are the numerous steps he goes through to achieve his final product in the different projects he is working on. It's all very interesting.

Shown above is Springtime Explosion, but look to see what it took to create the numerous collages to finally arrive here.

George was born and grew up in Wilmington, NC, USA. For the past 15 years he has lived in Raleigh, NC with his wife Betty who is a jeweler of some renown with her own website and a degree in Metals and Jewelry, his two adult children Edward and Devin who are twins, their golden retriever Sophie and their cat, Woodstock. (Amazing how many Etsians are cat fanciers, isn't it?)

George says, "I studied art in college and have a Masters Degree in Painting and Drawing. My artwork has been shown in galleries and museums in my region. My day job is working as a pre-press graphic artist for a printing company and I make my art in my "spare time". Since I was a kid I have always drawn pictures and painted. I like the freedom of expression of art and have always enjoyed painting."

George has a wonderful description on his blog telling how how he has created his great sunflower linoprints. The intricacies of carving a linoleum block are not lost on me, nor is the process of applying the right amount of ink. However, George seems to have mastered the process. Have I mentioned yet that his day job is in printing?

This is what George has to say about the Pink Cubist Guitar shown at left:

"This collage is a homage to the great art movement known as Cubism, you know with that guy, what's his name? Umm, oh yeah, Picasso and that other guy named Braque. It's an abstract design based on the shape of a guitar. I think this is one of the best collages I've ever done, even if I do say so myself! It's a tip of the hat to the great Cubist painters, but it's light and lively yet subdued and classic. The paper size is 11" x 14" and it has some white border area. With a really nice framing job this collage will look stunning , don't you agree?" And yes, I do.

Be sure to visit George and enjoy his prolific art at:

http://georgemckim.etsy.com/
http://georgemckim.blogspot.com/
http://www.george-mckim.com/