Embroidered Collage

I wanted a nice bright green as the first layer of my background.  It felt like a risk, but it seemed like a worthwhile foundation.  As I painted it in I also mixed in some browns for variation.

Then I collaged in the branch pieces.  They don't take up the full space because this is an 11"x14" canvas and the finished piece will be 8"x10".  I'll remove the canvas from the stretcher bars and restretch it.

I didn't wait for the paint to dry fully so using the gel as an adhesive pulled up a bit of the paint in various places.  This was unexpected, but I liked the effect, and the value variation, so I enhanced it on purpose.  Then I wanted to start obscuring the strength of Marissa's design, so painted over the branch portions in translucent yellow with touches of orange using Golden fluid acrylics.

Next, I need to figure out what else I want to do the rest of the background and select fabric or paper for the bird.  I have some ideas on how I want to add stitching to this portion and I know the bird will be relatively heavily embellished.  I'm not sure yet how far I can take that without losing the appealing simplicity of the shape.

See the beginning of this piece at First Layouts for Bird on a Branch.

Why do I always strive for layering and complexity in my art?  Well, I like it!  But this is also a common theme in the altered art world.  What happens if I try to go minimal but stay mixed-media?  What do I need to do to keep the work both effective and mine?

This is my first attempt.  I glued a torn piece of paper to an 8"x10" of watercolor paper and then extended and distorted the patterns with Pitt Artist Pens, essentially colored India Ink.  It's interesting, but I think I can do better.

The dirty little secret here is that the other driver for going more minimalist was the need to have a completed piece every month to display as part of an online art group that I'm in and want to stay in.  That deadline combined with the layered and stitched work that I most want to make, even on an ATC scale, and my limited time was causing me way too much stress.  So I needed something else and that led me to ask the question I started the post with.

Creating this piece was an interesting exercise, but it was pretty spontaneous.  Future pieces should be better if I spend more time conceptualizing as I create.  That can be done during dishes and feeding time.  It will stretch my brain in different ways than my usual work as well as helping me meet a practical goal.

I tend to create my collage compositions by physically arranging and rearranging the components until I find something that works.  This is part of the reason that I find it difficult to consistantly use a sketchbook.

Some time ago I was playing around with some paper I had from when Marissa sold her scraps instead of creating her own collages and realized that some of them fit nicely to form a tree with a branch.  And maybe I could put a bird on that.  For my next project I want to develop the idea more thoroughly on an 8"x10" canvas.

This is my first try, almost the original idea, except I had to keep cutting bird shapes until I realized that maybe a sitting bird would be better than a profiled bird.

I was starting to put the pieces away - since I didn't have time to start working on the background - and realized I had some other pieces in similar colors.  So out they came and I tried again.

My second attempt is more individual and I like it even better.  Putting in the paper elements with the tree echoes interspersed with the building echoes is much more interesting.  I have no idea where the quirky fat bird came from, somehow I just cut it out and started scribbling on it.  I'll be using different paper for that part, of course.  The yellow cardstock was just as a placeholder.  I need the background in place before I can decide on the color, though.

And that's actually rather freeing.

I can only complete so many creative projects in my lifetime, whether I spend much time on them or little. 

There may be more or better projects if I spend much time, but I can't know for sure, and they will still be only a limited fraction of the ideas I have had and the things I would like to have tried.  It sucks, but it's life.  And realizing it makes it easier for me to be at peace with the little amount of time I currently have available.

The idea came from my rewording of a statement by Dan Goodwin in his article at Creativity Portal called One Full Flavor.  His emphasis was on how the concept can be used to bypass the too many options part of creator's block, resulting in multiple completed projects instead of dithering and still wondering where to begin.

I've been having similar problems with too many choices, but because I've been feeling time and space constraints, not because I've been feeling blocked. I used to be able to spread out all over the room and just create what I wanted and know that if it didn't work, then no big deal, because there was always more time. 

Now I have to get in the habit of putting things away for when Alanna is mobile.  Her care takes much of the evening and after her bedtime there are online classes and dishes and spending time with my husband.  If I want to get anything done I need to make choices and if it's messy then I need to actually schedule time for it.

Somehow it makes it better to know that, in the long run, I was always going to have to choose.

What project do I most want to do right now?  I want to do more of the exercises in Keys to Drawing with Imagination.  It stretches me and I can easily slip them in.  I've also just signed up for a butterfly wing themed atc swap, so I'll need to decide how I want to pursue the theme this time. I'm leaning towards acrylics.  I haven't pulled those out in a while and want to do some color studies.

Does knowing that you will only ever complete so many projects change your view of what to do next?

The butterflies were made for a chunky pages swap and by the end I remembered why I had stopped doing these swaps.  I become tired of doing the same thing.  But that was also the very reason I joined this one - to push myself to make variations by giving myself a deadline and a purpose.  I definitely came up with some combinations for wing patterning that didn't initially occur to me.  The last four butterflies are shown below.

This set of doodles is from Exercise 1 in Bert Dodson's Keys to Drawing with Imagination.  Four of the fill patterns are from the book and two I came up with on my own.  I really enjoyed this pattern making exercise and expect to have fun through the rest of Part 1: Doodling and Noodling, but before I can work on Part 2: Drawing a New Reality I may need to go back to his original book Keys to Drawing and spend more time practicing on this reality.

I've not been very good at deliberately following exercises in the past, but I'm going to give it a try as Bert's are laid out so well.  The whole book was very interesting to read through and I picked up some good bits even without actually doing the work.  A number of the creative exercises could be applied to collage, with only a little adaptation, if I hadn't wanted to improve my drawing skills anyway.