Smallish collages

These little guys are 5x7" with all the same materials as the last two. I wanted to do some smaller collages to play with the scale of the text/diagram pieces and I like how they turned out.

I think these give me a chance to just play with composition and not have to spend so much time as the drawings.

Also collage

This is the next collage - same watercolor/pencil/gouache/prints and similar feel.

Making collages is a little more intuitive than drawing and painting. But honestly I just sort of look at what I've put down and start waving my hands around and try to get a feel for where I want to put something next on drawings and collages both :) I often draw in the first figural part of a drawing and don't really love the composition, so I change it up a bit with the diagram-y stuff that I put in last.

Oh, and I realized that if I take a photo with my phone camera of my collage before I have to move anything to glue it down, I can actually put everything where I originally intended.

Collage

I did some collaging over the weekend. I'm trying to keep it cohesive with the other pieces and I think it's actually working :)

This collage is similar to the ones I was doing last summer where I scanned and printed out old magazine photos and used them instead of the original piece of paper. This time I'm using the same book and knitting pattern as the other digital collages and paintings so I hope it reads as part of the same batch of work. I've got watercolor on cold press paper, gouache on hot press paper, pencil lines, and then the printed pieces which I printed out larger than the original scale.

Pretty things

I was messing around with the Etsy treasury again and made a new one a few days ago that I thought was pretty. And I guess someone else thought it was pretty too because it landed on the front page today...yay! I'm all about the nepotism, too - there's Leah, Belinda and Letha all right there :)

Shades of gray

I feel like I need a vacation after people come to visit :) Last weekend we had more family visiting and did a few tourist things - Pike Place Market and such. We took a ferry out to Bainbridge Island which I've been wanting to visit anyway and drove out to a beach. I don't know about you, but I love walking on pebbly, rocky beaches. You can poke around and pick up pretty pebbles and toss rocks into the water to get a lovely splash.

The weather could have been better but I found that all the pebbles that caught my eye were smooth and gray and matched the surroundings. All the more colorful ones stayed on the beach and I brought home the subtle ones. I would have thought that the reverse would be true - on bright days I wouldn't mind the grayer pebbles and on gray days I would seek out the more colorful ones. I especially love that one with the two colors...it makes me happy :)

Weekend(s)

I've been offline a bit lately - two family visits in a row will do that to you :) Last weekend we drove out to Port Townsend to have a look around. I'd never been there before but it's a cool little town.

We took a route that included a ferry ride because it's more fun that way.

Lots of old buildings.

We saw two wooden ships that (if we had known about them) you can go sail around in.

And of course we walked around on the beach.

I'm not sure what we're doing for the next family visit this weekend but I imagine it will be some other tourist-y things :)

And now it's dry

This is another one of those diagrams from my railroad book that I've mangled to suit my purposes :)

I mixed about 5 different greens before settling on this one but I'm not sure what to call it...pale mint? Sage green? It's a little too green to be sage green which I picture as being very gray. I hope the pencil lines show up a bit better now so you can see them wandering around.

I'll try to remember to take more in-progress shots next time I oil paint because I think it's interesting to look back and see what I put down and left alone and what I went back and blended out. I like the roughness of the line I put down at the start of the painting but I don't want all of them to be so dark. It's really hard for me not to want to blend everything out but I feel like when I do the painting loses some energy (although the oils I did last year are very peaceful looking because of this).