my Teesha Moore-inspired art

Teesha Moore is a wildly creative artist whose style I really like, altho it's way outside my usual comfort (and imagination) zone. Here are a bunch of her journal pages. Crazy, colorful, very inventive. In that ongoing effort to loosen up that I mentioned a few posts back, I watched all her technique videos and then went to work. Thanks, Teesha, for all the help!

She does her pieces in steps - all the painting in one session, then the borders, then middles, the shadowing, etc - so I did the same. I prepped a bunch of watercolor paper, then painted backgrounds with various paints. When they were dry, I chose three and sat myself down at the kitchen table to create! On previous evenings, I'd sat thru DH's incredibly bad how can he watch that stuff? sci-fi shows with scissors and magazines, clipping out all sorts of things - faces, bits of color or pattern that grabbed me, assorted legs - so I went thru that several times, snipping pieces and gluing them down for the borders.

Then I found started building the creatures - the term 'zetti' has been coined for this style - the word was coined by Teesha Moore to describe a new genre, a blend of the ordinary and the fantastic - cutting bodies from whatever looked like fun, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. I don't own the pan pastels that she uses for the shadowing so I faked it with water soluble oil pastels and it worked ok except they're hard to write over afterward. Might try ink pad ink next time. Then I doodled on and off for days until I was happy with the busy-ness of them. They're all 4.5"x6".

<drumroll> Heeeere they are...

This one is obviously a cat's head, women's legs and misc other stuff. That might be a Henry James quote, I forget now. Shoulda wrote it down...

This was the head of an egg person in a food ad and his body is an upside down waffle cone. See the running-uphill mint chocolate chip drip? More ladies' legs. Another quote by another person I neglected to note. I have the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that I page thru when in need of inspiration or a one-liner. 

The girl was pretty before I added weird hair, someone else's eyes, and a blue tongue. Her dress was a purse, her legs from a bathing suit ad. The blue tongue is from a Kool-Aid ad with a bunch of kids sticking their tongues out to show the flavor they'd been drinking. I can see many more zettis with different colored tongues in my future. I love this one.

This 4th one was done a couple weeks after the first three and is the first page in a small journal I made and began working in last week.

This guy was a gorgeous model. He was beautiful enough to be a bit feminine despite the beard, and as soon as I added women's eyes to him, he took on this man/woman feel for me so I put him in a dress with striped tights, a classic zetti feature. 

This quote is all me. I'm plain-featured, with smallish eyes and gray hair, nothing special about my looks at all. Sometimes I just want to be exotic and wear outlandish clothes and lots of jewelry, but only in my mind, I guess, because as soon as I start to actually do something like that, it feels so non-me that I stop. I'm really just the button-down shirt type after all, which is fine. I'll just have to be exotic in my art now and then.