Embroidered Collage

These ATCs are only the beginning.  I bought a sheet of architectural collage images from ArtChix sized to fit into slides some time back because they intrigued me.  I knew I would probably use them in ATCs and thought about how they would fit with other elements.  Eventually I came up with idea of nesting these photographs into rectangles of greater abstraction.  The idea lingered until I decided that I definitely wanted to try doing some small works in a batch process/pseudo-series format.  I wanted to play with extrapolating pattern from the focal point of the realistic image.

I cut the ATC blanks, then adhered the sixteen slide images in what seemed to be an appropriate position.  I only used the gel medium on the back, in order to make it easier to draw on the surface later.  The next day I extended and echoed lines from the photographs into the rest of the card using markers.  Then, I applied colored pencils, both to fill in the shapes I'd drawn and to add additional information.

I spread the cards out when I was done and started separating them.  I knew I wanted ten of the cards to become part of 5x7 collages.  I bounced around thinking about whether the composition of an individual card was perfect as it was and whether or not I could see ways to extend the patterning into further abstraction.  I ended up discarding one card as not being very good and selected these five to put into my trade folder at www.atcards.com .  You'll be seeing the other ten soon.

I re-used pieces of my own art for both of these calendar spreads for December.  The first one came from an 8"x10" collage I had been making.  It was actually almost finished, but I thought it would fit in well here.  I trimmed the primary image to fit the calendar page then used the strips that I had cut off to make a pattern on the other page.  I embellished further with colored pencils.

When I saw the picture of the Arc de Triomphe in this month I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  I had never listed for sale the collage I had made on the same theme and had to go dig it out.  The piece fit perfectly on the page.  There was even room for a reddish border.  I added paint and a quote and a little pencil to the photo in the calendar so it would be altered just enough to complement the art on the facing page.

As a side note, these pages look off balance because I scanned them and the entire calendar didn't quite fit on the scanner bed.  The calendar is so large and bulging and distorted now from everyone's work that I couldn't get the pages flat enough to take a good photo when they were on the top of the stack instead of the bottom. 

  No, you didn't miss the first one, in this case I'm indicating the order they go in, for a particular reason.  The peacock began as a collage that I'd worked on last year and never finished.  I decided that instead of trying to work it up with my current interests that I'd trim it down, add some painted elements, and use it as the last page of my section in this calendar.  This left me with some strips of tail.  So I used two on top of another background that had once been destined for a collage, along with a little Japanese paper and some paint.  I put one square on my sign-in tag and I'll be putting some more squares on what will be the first spread in my section.

Melissa Shatto is pulling together the altering skills of many mail artists to create large portraits to give some exposure to the subculture.  You can read about it in her words at http://websites4ever.com/members/world/mkshatto/All_for_One.shtml or use her domain name http://www.melissashatto.com .  The first picture is the sets I received.  The second picture shows the alterations that I made.  I contribute much of my initial artistic development to my participation in the swapping mail art communities and hope this major project is completed successfully. 

I still like the first spread best (previous entry), and feel like the second is not quite done, but it will do.   I could add more to the third as well, but somehow it looks done.  I just played with the blues and the ocean theme to go along with the sailor boy.  The third spread is an acrylic painting with a few collage elements and some journaling on focusing that I've been doing lately.  It follows, in part, the steps of an online tutorial I'm participating in.  It's odd, but I like it.

I'm finding these calendars so frustrating.  I just don't feel I'm doing the quality of work that I want to be.  But I know I'm learning and growing by pushing through it.  I'm certainly not bored, and I do enjoy the creating, I'm just not satisfied with most of the results.  Ah well, it will most likely get better.

I actually completed a calendar spread early this month!  I figured maybe I would be happier with the results if I worked on them along with similar projects.  I started this one with a set of green magazine images and built it up from there and I quite like it.  I did try out something new here - interference paint.  I picked up a green last weekend and it does give a neat effect.  It's doesn't so much switch between green and red, as it looked in the sample strip on the tube, as switch between not much there and a shiny green.  At least unmixed overtop this background.  I'll be trying it other places as well to see what happens.