new pieces

Here's what the studio table has looked like the past couple of days.

I have an opportunity to show some tiny wee little pieces in a small Seattle gallery and I only had a few things that were within the size guidelines. I put together some more oil paintings on a few panels that I already had and some little collages. I ended up having to order some frames online because I couldn't find any small enough that would let me put in a mat to keep the pieces off the glass. So I cut some really, really tiny mats - apparently I can cut a mat that's half an inch wide which I did not know before! Good to know :)

You've seen a few of these before...

...and these are new. These are 4x6" and 4x4".

Incidentally, these photos were taken during daylight hours. You'd never know it though...so gloomy today :P

painty paint

Oil on canvas on panel, 12 x 12".

I wanted to do a pink oil painting to round out the blues and greens. I think oil painting is very relaxing for me because pretty much the only thing I can do wrong is overwork it. I mean, if I were doing something more detailed or realistic there would be tons of things that could go wrong but with these, any bit of color or pencil or any stray brushstrokes can be blended away. And unlike watercolors, I've got, oh, about three hours to notice that I don't like something and change it :)

I use four or five brushes at a time - one or two for each color I'm using so I can just swap them when I want to move a color back and forth. And I don't get too worried if the colors start getting into other areas - I just let 'em go. I like the sort of scattered effect and I love the brushstrokes that show when this happens.

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.

Creativadoration

Janick over at Creativadoration posted on my work today...thanks, Janick! Check out her shop, too...lovely.

treasury

Here's a little treasury I made. I think I get too attached to them and I'm very disappointed if nobody ever sees them, so I feel the need to post them here on the blog. I love finding new artists from other people's treasuries, so I hope you all don't mind when I share mine :)

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.