Embroidered Collage

  The most striking visual image from Zandvoort was the kite flying.  While I was out on the beach that first afternoon I saw four or five groups of people with these huge kites up in the breeze.  There may be another term for the kites or the sport, but I couldn't find it while googling.  The person would sit on the ground and with the arms up manipulate the arch of fabric in the wind so it swooped and spun.  One person took theirs out on the water with some help and used it to pull them across the waves.  It was quite a sight.

I did this watercolor later in the evening.  The colors are a bit richer than reality, as the sky and sea almost blended together in one shade of steely grey.  I love the composition.  The simple split of thirds with the focal point of a bright color.  This is another image I think I'd like to take a little further into a completed work of art.

  Last night I picked up my crayons again for the first time in about a month and drew a gold swoosh, then a couple more, then thought, hmm, that could be hair, but I was apprehensive about my ability to make a person look good.  Then I reminded myself that this was to enjoy myself and to do it anyway.  So I kept going, first with some light sketching, then putting in layers of color, then finally taking a brush and water to the piece. 

I'm glad I pushed past my own reluctance.  I think that the watching and reading and thinking and sketching is starting to sink in that I could do something this good without a reference!  The face definitely has that "amateur" quality to it, but it's further along that I would have anticipated from myself and rather appealing.  It makes me want to do more sketching and practice drawing and keep moving forward.  I had been intending to just trim the portrait down to a 5"x7" size, but a misplaced cut had me shrugging my shoulders and cutting out the image to apply elsewhere.

I then truly did just play with some greens and a more heavily loaded brush to form the abstract.  I will definitely be adding stitching or some such to this piece before I consider it done but at least I trimmed it to size properly as a start.

  I was wearing slacks and a light jacket and there were people swimming in the ocean.  It made me cold to watch them, but it was nice to stand on the beach and watch the ocean and taste the salt in the air.  The look of the beach itself was much like those I'm more familiar with in North Carolina.  It just happened to be about forty five minutes due west from Amsterdam. 

The second evening of the meeting we spent on the beach playing volleyball and other games and then had dinner at one of the club buildings, still on the beach but above the tide's reach.  I didn't sketch anything that evening, but I did do some visual journaling from memory once I returned to my room.

I'm still doing a little bit of mail art and these atcs are going out to my swap partners this week.  They were supposed to be done for August, but that didn't quite happen, obviously.  The themes are abstract flowers, architectural details, complementary colors, and beads/buttons. 

I took two random pieces of paper that I'd worked on before and pulled flowers out of them using colored pencil.  The details are an archway and a doorknob, drawn in conte, with the background in colored pencils.

The fish atc is stretching the complementary colors theme a bit, as it really has two pairs, but I enjoyed putting it together.  The red atc uses one of the scrap pieces from the wintergreen oil transfers as a background and design base.  I pulled out scraps from previous arting for both of the buttoned atcs as well.  All I added last night was the buttons, intended to complete the previously unfinished cards.

This wasn't quite what I expected when the guidebook said castle.  I usually think fortified structure of stone, but this was more like a large brick manor house.  Yet, it also had a moat along three sides and the entrance to the fourth was protected by a guard post.  It had also been the residence a local noble until the mid 1900s.

It was definitely the most local experience of my trip.  The tour of the house was in Dutch, with English hand outs and the occasional opportunity to ask and have a question answered.  I enjoyed seeing the different rooms and there was some interesting history associated with them.  The way the rooms were put together and furnished had a disctinctly different feel than visiting American homes of quality from a similar era, partly from the additional layers of history in the building, perhaps.

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.