Embroidered Collage

I used an alphabet swap as an opportunity to play with color mixing a little, an exercise I'd been meaning to do but hadn't gotten around to.  What struck me most was that even though all the acrylic tubes claimed the colors within to be semi-transparent certain colors were much more transparent than others.  This session of playing I used no mediums.  I did keep track of the mixes and made sample dabs for my sketchbook.  Less than half of the cards are in the picture.  I enjoyed making brown and trying to tone colors down by adding the complement.  I barely scratched the surface, but at least I started.  To complete the atcs, I just used the repetition and variation of the letter shape for my creations.  Plus, the text under the paint is dictionary definitions or lists of words beginning with E.

I stopped by the Michener Art Museum yesterday while I was out and really enjoyed this set of special exhibits.  I definitely have to remember to send in my check for another year of membership.  It's a thrill to be able to stop by and see art only 20 minutes away.

I liked looking at Romare Bearden's monoprints.  The one that struck me the most had huge swoops of watery color.  You could really see the medium.  And then you blinked and saw the jazz band within the swoops and curves.  He also had a number of other prints that made me think about method and how I could do something.

Paul Keene's work made me just want to sit and stare for awhile and I need to make sure I go back before it leaves with the new year.  Bright colors in geometric arrangements with shapes of faces made a striking statement in "Fire on the Slave Ship."  He used some great textural effects in his oils, contrasting the thin layers of almost realism to areas of high texture, dabs of paint, scratches and removals among them.  I don't know the name of my favorite piece but it was a LARGE collage.  It looked like it included papers and drawings and painting from multiple projects all cut and pasted together so that images of the human form repeated in various places.  Painting and scribbling on top brought pieces together, but not by the use of one color, but rather by the use of many.  I was impressed.

While away for Thanksgiving I took an ink pad, a small cork, markers, and colored pencils and made some hand-drawn atcs for a swap.  Five of the atcs I'm happy with.  Three, well, I look at them and think I could do better, even though I was originally satisfied.  They were scattered throughout my atc making time period, not the first nor the last, but are grouped together at the bottom of the page.  I'll keep them for collage elements or paint over them.

I am having thoughts on the making of multiples and what makes work better and in whose opinion but they're just not coalescing into a comprehensive statement.  On a first thought level it was just interesting to see in my own work the results vary.

In addition to being a beautiful magazine, National Geographic is a very useful one for developing artistic skills and sparking imagination.  I sat down and went through a recent issue, May 2005, that I picked up at the library for a quarter.  I found some images to use for practice drawing and pasted them into my sketchbook, which you can go look at.  Here are a couple of the results.  The lizard head on the right was an attempt to duplicate and the one on the left was an attempt to fantasize.

 I also cut out a number of images as collage fodder, with the intent of playing, putting them together in some fashion on a surface in order to stretch myself.  And I did that actually, ending up with a chicken headed piano player.  I'm not sure the piece is done yet, but I'll post it when it is. 

And there were two very inspirational articles I removed almost in their entirety that will take me more time to work through.  One on some western scenery and one on underwater fish.  The latter has some great little square close-ups that would translate well into textures and embroidery samples that will end up having nothing to do the original images.  I might put that one away to work on later and just pull up a few more magazines and do some of the more basic exercises repeatedly.

The one that surprised me most was the dragonfly page.  I used a serendipity square piece that I'd received from a swap and I feel having that complexity in the background really made a difference, enhancing my relatively simple combination of stickers on top of three different colored pieces of mulberry paper.  I need to think about that.

I had the most fun with the Siegried page.  It's for a mythology themed deco and I had the collage image from Altered Pages and realized that the name Siegfried was at the bottom and worked with the text as both visual enhancement and to add significance to the page.

And here are the last four mandalas for the chunky book.  I'm sorry to see them go, but I learned a lot while doing them and am glad I did the hand drawings.  It was fun working from the doodles for most of them.  Three of the ones above I actually worked from a different mandala, since I liked the effect.