Embroidered Collage

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.

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.

I have something new to look forward to and to plan for.  Melissa has announced the third Artist Paper Swap over on her yahoo group, RawArt, and I'm excited about the possibilities.  In each of the other two I experimented with techniques to create my own hand-decorated papers and received absolutely amazing pieces to use from other people.  Admittedly I have hoarded them more than used them, but a good portion have been incorporated somewhere.

The big question is what will I create this time?

For the first swap in Fall 2005 I experimented with a little of this and a little of that. 

• colored pencils, outlining shapes, monoprinting
• pseudo-paste papers
• basic hand-carved stamps
• crackle medium

For the second swap in Spring 2006 I focused primarily on printing techniques, but also finally got around to trying marbling. 

•  leaves and spirals created with printfoam
• bubble-wrap printed papers, for which I also wrote a quick tutorial
• marbled papers and a post on my experiences with the process

This time I don't have any specific goals in mind, as yet. 

I could try out the actual paper making - picking up one of the kits at Michael's and some such.  I'm a bit reluctant to go this route because of the additional stuff I'd be bringing in and because I really don't need another media to get into, even if it would be interesting to incorporate into my layered works.

I'm more intrigued by the idea of working on commercially hand-made papers and seeing how they take some of the different decorating techniques.  In the previous swaps I only used drawing paper and watercolor paper and I know from my collage work that hand-made papers can take paints in a very different fashion.

I could also tend the papers towards my fiber side by building up some thicker papers with collaged tulles and laces on large sheets of watercolor paper and then cut them down.  Or maybe I could rev up the sewing machine and do some patterns on lighter weight papers.  If I go that route I'll likely need to get some new needles though, since I've heard that process dulls them considerably.

Whatever I choose, I'll post as I decorate.

I made this roughly 8"x8" piece in late 2004 as a contribution to a fabric book and sent it off, receiving a nifty little art doll as a thank you in return.  I can see so clearly here the seeds of the work that I am pursuing now.  There are layers of media and scale, repetition and variation, and stitching plays an important role.  It has inspired me to wonder if I would like to do some works on ungessoed canvas, putting in the primary color layer with fabric paints and crayons and pens, building up on it with paper, fabric, and stitch, then stretching it over the wooden bars.  It would still be mixed media, but its appearance would lean more towards fiber art. 

I did these four of these little bits for a swap over at the Experimental Acrylics yahoo group. 

I started out by laying in a background of purple, blue, and white on a 9x12 piece of canvas paper with a brush, then dabbed my fingers on the piece, picking up and spreading around the color from the portions still wet.  I imagined four different vessels, which I painted in with white before adding color on top.  I did better on making some 3-d than others.  Sometimes the brush would get away from and I'd lose my line, which didn't help.  I scrubbed some additional white over the background around the vessels intending to make them stand out more by making the background less interesting, which seemed to work.  I added a little greyed out green to the interior and then made a touch of shadow.

My last minute thought was to add the strong green lines echoing the shapes of the vessels and that really made the images for me.  I like the contrast of the representational to the almost symbolic abstraction.  It also provided a nice piece of visual balance. 

I could do better if I repeated the exercise, I'm sure, but this was a good experiment for the swap.  It would be interesting to take a real vessel and a little more time and paint the main image rather flatter and more carefully realistic, then streak that green across it.  I wonder if it would be too much contrast then.  Or what if I did the table and vessel in cut papers, with a little paint for the shadow, then did the abstract line in stitch.  That would likely satisfy more fully my sense of what my work should be, making it mine instead of only something that I did.

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.