Embroidered Collage

I cut up most of the paintings I made in the Rediscovering Color class, since they weren't particularly good in and of themselves.  I turned four of the 4"x6" pieces into small paintings for a swap at the Experimental Acrylics yahoo group.  I enjoyed the play time.  The process had a very different feel to it than when I'd made the originals, more because of the materials I was using than the lack of continual referring between the still-life set-up and the paper.

The easiest one to work with was the pear.  That portion of the painting from class looked good.  I pulled out my Liquitex Basics and went over the entire painting, deliberately going for a thin glaze of color, brightening up and altering what I had already done.  I felt the piece looked too bland, so I abstracted a bit by adding the swirls and dots, but then had to go back and touch up the ground with a  lighter purple, since the original color was now too dark.

I added color to the background behind the flower in the same way, simplifying what I had done before, but in such a way that the previous version shows through a little bit.  I used molding paste to make ridges over the flower, then painted one side of each ridge yellow and the other orange.  The center is paint mixed with tar gel medium.  I added the stripes and dots on the side again to liven the piece up a bit and balance the flower.  I think they make the odd nature of the flower look more deliberate as well, which it was.

I worked with granular gel again for the abstract in red, and underneath most of the blue sections is a bit of texture from molding paste.  I think this piece ended up interesting, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it.  My brain keeps wanting to turn it into a landscape, but it jsut doesn't go.  On the plus side, I'm becoming more and more comfortable with using the textural acrylic mediums.

The last piece definitely reminds me of a landscape and I like that.  It actually started out life as part of the disasterously colored baseball glove, but I added a bit more color and then dribbled tar gel mixed with a brown over the land area.  It dries nicely, although I was almost afraid to touch it to check.  I could definitely go for using a squeeze bottle with a more controlled application than just letting it drip off the knife.  After the gel dried I applied more touches of paint, trying to add a bit more interest and color variation to the land.  I'm pleased with how it turned out.  It would be interesting to do something similar on a canvas and then stitch up against the tar gel swirls.