I had a random craving to play around in Photoshop today and I came up with a couple of little collages that I was happy with. The diagrams are from an old gardening book and show a compound umbel and corymb (which I had never heard of before). The background textures are a piece of wood and an old piece of fabric. I did the repeats with a custom brush - my favorite thing to do.
I can't seem to stop making collages. These are 4x6" little things. I'm loving the thickness of the papers and how they change things from a 2D composition into a 3D object.
Drawing all these leaves is making me happy. I'm trying to pretend that fall isn't on the way because I'm not sure what I'll do after this big draw-and-paint-all-the-weird-plants project. I should figure that out before winter hits, huh :)
Why do I love regular old graphite pencils so much? In my drawing classes, I always wanted to use pencils for everything and the teachers were always making me use something else. There must be something in art professors' contracts stating that they must always force students to use charcoal. It's probably a big conspiracy with the charcoal mafia...
After finishing off my big research paper last night and turning it in, I thought I deserved some studio time. I put the two collages together pretty quickly and then I felt like I could settle down to do the drawing. Drawing is 8x10" and collages are 9x12". I don't have any wise words about these, I just needed to make something, you know? I had a good afternoon.
So here's two of the collages I was starting on a week ago. Top one is 9x12" and the bottom one is 8x10". I printed out the magazine pictures, some scanned wood, and I did a little spray painting with some little stencils I cut. It's nice working on this kind of project because I could work a little at a time in between doing schoolwork and reading. I'm not sure what I think about them yet...I'll have to let them sit for a little while and look at them again. I definitely had fun messing around with them, though. I've got a few more pieces of paper with spray paint on them so they will end up collaged too.
So this is from a tree that I've been watching all summer that's growing at the edge of the woods next to our house. It had tiny little flowers on it in spring, but I didn't think they were that exciting. Now it has little round berries on it that start out green and turn shiny black. I looked it up and it appears to be a cascara or Rhamnus purshiana (had to cut and paste that - my Latin spelling is not so great). I like the groups of berries and the angles of the leaves...it looks very graceful to me.
