Recycled Art - Why Not?

Just having fun with the idea of making something new out of something old. This is the painting I had to begin with: that is, before I started thinking negatively. Negative painting, being what I'm getting at, and not having a bad attitude. This is a technique that I have used creating successive layers of negative painting, or painting around objects before, but this time I used the existing painting of the deer in the woods and only had a single layer of painting in the negative.

I was inspired by Etsy running the leaf pictures that had been configured into faces, and I thought that idea was very clever!

I have had a stash of painting starts, and paintings that need "something." Sometimes it seems that "starts" are what fits the mood, but in the last few days, I have been in the mood to do the fixing and finishing on a few of these

Over In The Clover

My painting with the deer at the edge of the trees had lost its charm for me, and it became my victim, as I cut the size down a bit and started drawing clover leaves on it, and then I painted around the clover in Indigo Blue. Before the paint was dry, I lifted some additional areas.

This new painting called "Over In The Clover" is what came of it all. It was fun to do, and sometimes doing a painting just for fun is better than struggling with one to fix the details that may never turn out right anyway.

Therapy!

To see more information about this painting in my Etsy shop, please click on the painting title.

Smashing Flowers

OK, I've heard of smashing pumpkins and Smashing Pumpkins. But, have you ever thought about smashing flowers as an art form? A fellow artist sent me an email about Betsy Dillard Stroud's article which you can find by clicking here. Look for Printing with a Hammer, August 07, 2008, by Betsy Dillard Stroud. It looked interesting, so yesterday I gathered some flowers and leaves of different kinds including stems. Then I prepared my watercolor paper, padded it, laid wax paper over it, and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of some innocent plant life. (I'm still not feeling good about this.) Anyway, this first photo on the left is what my initial effort looked like.



Still feeling sorry for the flowers, this morning I thought I needed to make as much as I could out of it, so I grabbed a Tomball pen and my watercolors and went to work. First, I outlined to find the flowers and leaves that were obvious and invented a few more . Then I began to do some negative painting with the watercolors, and by now I'm not feeling so bad about the flowers, now that I've made something that I like a lot more. I hope you will like it too!

It's something different. It really doesn't matter if you use some kind of dillapidated flowers though, so if you get a chance you might try it with some past-their-prime poseys. I guess you could also try it with some blooming weeds you want to clear away anyway or on that bouquet you get from someone you now dislike with a passion (to relieve stress).

Click here for more information about this painting.