square-ing

I hope you aren't sick of the sight of these mini paintings because I'm having so much fun making them! These are both 6x6" watercolor, gouache, graphite, and image transfers on 300lb. cold press watercolor paper.

I love getting to incorporate some of the things from my digital collages into actual paint-on-paper paintings. I printed several of the bits of handwriting and typography multiple times on the sheets of transfer paper and it's interesting to me to reuse them in a different way each time.

I think if I only made collages out of the original pieces of paper I would never be able to use these things I've inherited. It's one thing to cut up an old book or magazine I bought but I would never cut up my grandma's knitting books or chop into her notes on a knitting pattern.

And totally unrelated: I had a dream about fireflies a few nights ago. I've never seen fireflies in real life but they were unbelievably beautiful in my dream.

new drawing; image transfer update

9x12" on hot press watercolor paper.

I thought I would try incorporating a little of the looser watercolor feel of those little paintings into a full drawing. This is kind of similar to how I was using the watercolor in the plant paintings I was doing a while back. It's nice to mix it up a little - I think I was getting a little rigid with the gouache and sometimes I need to just splash out some watercolor and not worry too much if it might ruin the painting :)

And here's some transfers on the last painting I did. I don't really do image transfers because it seems like you always have to have a laser printer or a copy machine for the usual methods (I don't). Also, one of my friends at school used to do them with acrylic medium and I saw how long it takes to soak and rub off the paper when it's done...I'm not always that patient.

So I got an email from Daniel Smith (local art supply store and maker of awesome paints) that said they were carrying an iron-on transfer paper that works with inkjet prints. Hey, I have an inkjet printer! And an iron! It's called Transfer Artist Paper and apparently you can iron it onto most anything. And you can use it as a drawing surface and then iron that onto something, too. So I went down and bought some and printed up a couple sheets. I ironed little samples onto gesso, fabric, different papers, and acrylic medium on paper.

I thought I worked out how to use it pretty well (by wrecking a few of the samples, naturally) so I put two transfers onto the acrylic medium that's on the top of this little painting. The first one - the handwriting - went on perfectly. The second - the diagram? Not really. :P I ended up having to do the full soak-it-and-rub-like-mad to get the paper backing off. So annoying. It fused the whole thing together so I think I need to start with a much shorter time with the iron before I check if it will peel. So chalk that up to the learning curve, I guess. I do like the effect though so I'll keep trying.

pinhole Hawaii

Cathy mentioned pinhole photography a few months ago and I thought it sounded interesting but I can't really see myself taking photos with film. So as I was poking around looking at pinhole photos I saw something about digital pinhole photography which seems much more like my kind of thing - instant gratification. :) I tried making my own pinhole but it was not working that well so I gave up and bought a commercial version.

I hadn't had time to play with it before we went on vacation so I tried it out on waves and palm trees and such. I kind of love it and I'm going to see what else it can do now that we're back home.

"growing" collages

Digital collages, 6x8".

So the past few weeks have involved a lot of driving around meeting horses that are for sale. I'm desperate for a new therapist (the horse, in case that wasn't obvious).

I've found the right one, though, and she'll be arriving next week! Eeee! I'm sure I'll have lots of photos to show you when she gets here...sorry :)

Anyway, the other project this week was getting a building put up to store hay. Miss Boo was on bagged hay pellets instead of baled hay so we didn't really need much space to store them and now we need a place to keep a couple tons of hay. While the guys were here working on the shed I was working on collages since they're easier to set aside if I needed to pop outside when there's a question about something.

Incidentally, I titled them "Growing 1, 2, and 3" because it seemed appropriate for both springtime and a time when our family is growing. :)

mauve-y? lavender?

More digital collages, 9x12".

I don't know what you call that color there but I'm completely fixated on it lately :) I used to never wear purple or lavender and now all of a sudden I love it. How does that happen?

snow and moss

Digital collages, 9x9".

These are from some pictures I took over the last couple days - one set of pics of snow falling at night, taken with a flash. That's what all the spotty spots are. The other pics were the next day in the snow of some mossy trees.

I took a kitty out in the snow to look around and this is what she did when I actually set her down in the snow. Those little toes all spread out with claws extended mean she was not too sure about all this :)

collages

I scanned these little paper collages before I put them in their frames last week and forgot to post them so you could actually see what they look like :) And obviously I had the digital ones at the top finished before I printed and framed them, too. I've been fighting a cold and I'm not quite on top of things yet, I guess.

The two digital collages are 4x4" which is, let's face it, really tiny. I tried to keep them sort of simple compared to the big pieces so they wouldn't look too cluttered. Trying to keep some white space when there's only four inches to work in is kind of hard :P The purple is derived from photos I took of my hellebores which are just starting to bloom. The sort of scroll-y patterns are out of a 1920s or so copy of Pride & Prejudice. I've been re-reading (and re-watching) Jane Austen lately...very soothing, much like knitting and such to me.

new collages

More photos, more scans, more textures. The colors on these digital pieces are all derived from the photos and scans instead of picking a color that's pretty like I usually do when I'm painting. I'm making the colors more or less saturated and replacing some with other colors from the same piece but it's all there to start with.

The non-photo bits here are from a gardening book of my grandma's. She had cut out articles in the paper with gardening advice and stuck them into the book, so I've used a little of both here. I think I'm gravitating toward the gardening themes again as we get closer to spring.

more layers

Digital collages, 5x7".

Making these is a good excuse to try taking more random pictures and I'm liking my new camera. I haven't had a camera that had a manual focus option in several years so I'm taking a bunch of odd blurry and light-spot-y pictures to use as textures for these collages.

The auto-focus setting is great, too, though. It focuses so much faster than the old camera. I'm taking lots of cute kitty pictures because it will actually focus while the cat is still doing the cute thing! With my old camera, I got lots of pictures 3 seconds after the cat did something cute :P I don't think I (or anyone else) wants this to turn into a cat blog, so I'll try to restrain myself from posting all cat photos.

In believe-it-or-not news, the sun actually was out today.

layering = best in winter

I haven't really been back in the studio since Boo got sick. Something about mustering the concentration I need to work is really hard when things are weird in some way.

This last week or so I've been feeling the itch again a little. Working digitally feels like an easier way to get started again because if it isn't working I can undo what I've done or just delete the file altogether.

So this is what I've been working on the past few days. I've got a better camera now so I thought it would be interesting to incorporate photos (instead of only scans) into digital collage. I'm taking pictures of random things that I wouldn't normally bother to photograph with the idea that they document my days and function as interesting textures in the collage. You probably can't see for sure what they are but I know they're there and what I was doing when I took the photo. So it's sort of like a diary process but less literal. It's interesting to me, anyway :)

The other thing I've been thinking about is how I feel a lot differently about the creativity/crafty pieces now. I liked them before, but I seriously think knitting and sewing and doing simple, repetitive things helped me get through this tough time. And the idea that making these kinds of things might have helped my grandmothers and the women in my family to cope with difficult periods in their lives, too. I've inherited a number of crocheted and embroidered items from both sides of my family and looking at these things makes me think about what else was going on at the time they were made. I'm not sure how these ideas will be reflected differently (if at all) in the drawings I'll make but it's added a whole new layer of meaning to them for me.

I hope that all made some sense...I love reading about other blog-friends' processes and inspirations so I wanted to let you know what's going on with these.

Digital collages

So with this whiplash-inducing change in the weather I'm feeling hot and lazy. What better way to make art during a heat wave than to sit at the computer next to the lovely air conditioning vent? I made these out of scans from my train book and some sewing and knitting directions and diagrams. I notice that my colors suddenly got quite a bit brighter - partly because of the source scans and partly because of the weather, I guess.