Spring

My art club is having a challenge for our March meeting - create a piece with "spring" as the theme.  Here's the beginning of mine.

I began with a collage of just text, including pieces of pages of old books as well as a bit of hand-writing.  The hand-writing expresses a few of my memories about springtime in the woods near where I grew up in northern Ohio and, drawing on those memories I decided that "spring beauty" wildflowers and baby robins would star in this piece.

After the collage dried, I added glazes with Golden fluid acrylics.  Then I did the drawing directly on the piece.  The dark dots you see are the eyes for the baby robins that I'm planning on including.

I'm painting the flowers by adding white gesso, applying with a side-loaded brush with the load of color on the highlight edges.  Then I added a bit of yellow green in the centers and the dark fuschia vein markings on the petals.  Last, I added the stamens with green stalks and Quin violet heads.  I'm doing the leaves with successive glazes, working light to dark.

The Painting is Done on the Kitty

The painting is done.  Now I need to make it into cards that I can print on my Epson printer.  I'll use Photoshop Elements to size it, add text, and make a full sheet of repeats.  The problem is that I don't really know how to use Elements.  At least I'm having a hard time putting several images on the page.  I don't understand the concept of "layers" so I'm pretty much lost.  Actually, I think I get the concept, just not how to use it.

These cards should be pretty nice if I can get through the computer part!

Making a Trade

Next month I'm going to the Art and Soul retreat in Portland Oregon.  I've been to a few of these retreats before.  As I was looking through their website again I noticed a little blurb about "trades."  Apparently it's a tradition at the retreat to trade little art-related items with people you meet.  They can either be art supplies or little pieces of art.  So I decided to make some.

I'm going to make little button cards with a vintage look.  I'll have a painting of a cat in a dress and I'll sew vintage buttons on them.  So, here's the start of the card.  I'm doing the painting larger than the finished item - I'll shrink it down before I print it.  The piece of paper is about 8" x 10" and I'm aiming for an image size around 5" x 7".  I'm working with Golden fluid acrylics over my pencil drawing on Strathmore Mixed Media paper.

Troubles

I am having so much trouble with this one.  I added more and more glazes to the top part then worked more on the coyotes' shadows, then decided that those shadows were really bad and gesso'd over them.  The whole time I've been working on it I've been thinking to myself "I just can't do this!"  So it's time to put it aside for a while.

A Big Project

I'm starting this piece with the intention of entering it in an art show at a Lutheran church in Sacramento for religious and spiritual art.  The theme of the show is "Let the Spirit Sing."  It will be two young coyotes howling at the moon and will incorporate the text (author: me) "Nature is not mere backdrop.  Each of God's creatures sings his own song, center stage."

So I began with the drawing of the coyotes.  It took quite a while because they;re big (the coyote drawing is about 20" across) and because I had trouble with the legs.  But finally I finished.  Then I was able to determine the size of the entire piece and constructed the cradled board.  I also drew the dove.  I adhered the drawings to the board with Liquitex mat gel and when it had thoroughly dried I began adding glazes of transparent acrylic using Golden fluid acrylics.

A Small Study

I'm planning a large painting of two coyote pups and a night sky with a moon.  The pups were so fun to draw that I decided to do a small piece - partly as a study, and partly just for fun.  This one is 8" x 10"

It's my usual process as of late - begin with a pencil drawing then include it as the main element in a collage, and finally, add color with glazes of Golden Fluid Acrylic.  The top part turned out a bit messy, largely because I put the little foil pieces on too early in the process.  As a result, I needed to add more glazes then more little foil pieces.  But, oh well, live and learn!

My Fox Collage

Although I've been doing a lot of art lately, I haven't been good at taking photos, so all I have are photos of several finished pieces.

I decided I wanted to do a fox with grapes, so I began by drawing the fox.  After I had the fox I could decide what size piece I would do and constructed the cradled board from 1/4" hardboard and pine strips.

This collage portion presented many challenges.  I tried to use papers that related to my subject, and to add to that stash, I ended up hand-writing Aesop's Fox and Grapes fable in Greek.  It's just to the left of the fox's face.  I also used other text fragments as well as pieces of magazine photos for the collage part.  For the photos, I selected mainly skies and centuries old buildings.

For the final layer of the collage, I added some tissue paper that I stenciled with my own designs.  In this case, they're tapestry look designs of flowers and leaves.  Of course the fox drawing was part of the collage also.  I tinted her with glazes of Golden fluid acrylics.  The word "fyxen" that you can see mid-way between the left edge of the painting and the left edge of the fox means "vixen" in old English.

So far, so good.  But the real trouble came with painting the grapes.  I cut a piece of 1/4" hardboard to paint the grapes on and would later glue it in place at the top of the piece.

I coated the grape piece with Golden Coarse Molding Paste, then painted it with Golden fluid acrylic, aiming for the look of a painting on stucco.  I think I achieved that goal, but I found it difficult to paint on this surface - difficult, but, in the end, worth it.