Embroidered Collage

  I'm starting another 8x10 piece with a 11x14 canvas background.  This time I began by laying down papers.  I could have developed a collage simply from here, but that's not what I have in mind.  I have a really cool piece of arched lace that I want to be the focus of the finished piece.  The next step is painting and unifying the background so that all of what you see now fades together.

The bird on a branch piece has a name - "Evening Dawns" - to go with its completion.  The muted background and the owlish appearance of the bird inspired the name.  This picture shows accurately where the "cropping" ended up when I took the canvas off the 11"x14" bars and wrapped it around the 8"x10" bars.  I'm very pleased with how it turned out. 

I actually did the last bits a week or so ago, but have been distracted by other things and mulling over what my next canvas piece should be.

See the most recent posts about the bird and the background.

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 haven't been using many collage images lately because they frustrate me.  Part of me feels like my art should all be raw - using only my own images, and part of me recognizes that my best pieces don't use collage images.  But they're so much FUN.  I love the door and other bits and pieces that I've collected.

So when I saw an all-media 9x12 spiral bound journal in Barnes and Noble I thought I had it made. I could use it for a journal of collages and paintings and just practice, have fun, develop ideas, and, yes, use those collage images.  So I built up a page and had lots of fun.

And then I realized how awkward it was to add stitching to it.  Aaargh.  So now I have to decide if I should be doing my "journaling" on loose sheets, which I have a distressing tendency to trash if they don't turn out as I envisioned, or just not incorporate stitching, which reduces how much learning I can do on each piece. 

I did enjoy the freedom of knowing it didn't matter how the collage turned out, even though not having an end use is also irritating to my engineering side.  Every time I've journaled in the past I had plans for what I'd do with the pages, either because they were to be swapped or because I had secret thoughts of selling reproductions.

And the best part was that by building up around the collage images - I started with the door and the stone head over it - I came up with a bunch of other ideas that I could develop in a sketchbook and turn into a piece of artwork that used only my own imagery, if I was so inclined.

I just have to keep struggling with my own expectations for myself and my art...

When I've created compositions with strata-like layers I often don't vary the widths of the layers too much.  These two collages were created with the intent to push that aspect of the composition a little bit. I love the handmade papers and the variations in texture I can get with them alone, before I even add the stitching.