thanks Connie!

My mail art pal Connie has been painting a lot lately and blogging her work. I like almost all of them but one of them really grabbed so I up and asked her if I could have it! The nerve, huh? But I really liked it and she and I have traded enough art that she knows I appreciate her work, so she said sure. In trade for a piece of mine yet to be created. If she spots something I post that she likes, she's say so, and I'll send it off to her. Kinda like a deal with the devil in that you don;'t know the cost until the time comes. But I'm good with that, I like having the things I create go off to live with with someone else who'll enjoy them.

Anyway, it arrived last week and I'm finally getting off my arse to blog about it. I still need to decide how to display it. Don't want to mat it cause I like the deckle edges so maybe need to just mount it in a frame on a dark background. Will play around and see what looks best.

This piece is smallish, only 5"x5" I think, or maybe 5.5" x 5.5". But look at all that's going on in it. The background has under layers of dark under the white that give it a lot of depth. I have no idea of her process to get it to look like this but love the result.

There are torn collaged papers, more paint, more papers, some rusty lines. It's all very cool, and the color scheme of bluey greens and orange is my fave. But the part the really does it for me is that grungy turquoise bit in the middle. It glows.

Just love it. Thanks, Connie, for letting me have it! It'll have a prime spot on my wall once I get the frame sorted.

sketching a la Jane La Fazio

I signed up for Jane's sketching book class and lesson two was yesterday, painting fruit. Didn't have time till today, then got a lot done.

I do enjoy painting persimmons. This one is not bad.
Shadow is too big, didn't occur to me to cur it off with the frame.
Shadow really was that big, from the low morning light.
Wrote a haiku. I ate tons of persimmons last fall but this year
Got a rash around my mouth and it's the only new thing I'd been eating.
It's an unsightly rash, so I'm laying off persimmons just in case.
Bummed.

Next up was a lime, which didn't excite me from the start
cause there just isn't much happening with a lime.
The cross section is better but now the pulp areas look too dark.
Ah well.

So then I tried a banana and I'm really pleased with it.
Was using the overhead light so the shadow is tight and dark.
Coming up with a type face for the words and drawing
a fun frame are as enjoyable as the fruit part.

fossil paintings

My art friend Rhonda introduced me to these. A watercolor artist named David Castle makes what he calls "elementals", paintings composed of smaller elements. One of those elements are 'fossil' paintings that he makes using a flat stone as a resist. By looking at the photos and reading a few of his posts, we were able to (mostly) figure out how he does them and gave it a try a couple Sundays ago.

After reading a bit further today, I realize that he starts with a few layers of wet paint before he sets the rock down in it. I started mine with just setting the rock down, then dribbling paint and ink over it. In any case, I like the ones I made and plan to keep playing with this cause I love the effect.

The first four are all about 3" square and done with one rock on cheap 90lb watercolor paper. The last one had 3 rocks on it and is about 8" square. It was on 140lb watercolor paper which I sprayed with water before dropping the paint over the rock. 

The first one was done with Moon Shadow Mist in Tawny Turquoise. It's gorgeous in person. I bought 4 colors of their spray inks a couple years ago and haven't used them much but will try the other three with more fossils. 

The others are mostly Dyelusions inks and Distress Stains. I didn't do any with watercolors like David does them but will give that a try next.

This is an easy an interesting thing to try. All you need is some heavy paper, a few flat-bottomed rocks, and liquid color of some sort - watercolors, inks, fluid acrylics.


Think I'll cut some postcard sized paper and get some started...

apron face

Julie FFB paints faces that I like. She paints them on purses and canvasses, and today I got a wild hair to paint one on my working apron. Without much more thought than that, I drew a rough outline, put in some features with a black marker and starting adding color. What a hoot!

I had no one in mind, no image in my head that I was working from, but now that she's done, she reminds me of Angelica Houston., with those bangs and that mouth and those high cheekbones.

Sorry, Angelica, if you should happen to read this - no disrespect intended.

in which I paint... more or less

My mom was a good artist. She worked in oils mostly and I grew up with the smell of turpentine in the air. She decorated all the cards she sent me after I moved out of the house and she moved to Ohio. She was doing mail art long before we knew it had a name. I have all those in a drawer and since they mean nothing to anyone but me, I'll begin to use them in my journals.

I also have many of her paintings - some weird avant-garde cats in non-cat colors of turquoise and lime green, scruffy little owls painted on old boards, still lifes of fruit in earthenware bowls, old barns standing in fields. I have them hanging all over my house and enjoy looking at them. I can remember some of them on the easel when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, artistic talent must skip a generation, like baldness, because I don't have much of it, at least in the painting/drawing realm. I haven't worked real hard at it, but I'm definitely not a natural, like she was. But I recently bought the book Nature Inspired by Tracie Lyn Huskamp. In it, she shows a variety of ways to capture nature in your work - photography, leaf rubbings, sun prints, flower pounding, and, yes, painting.

She has you trace the rough form, transfer it to muslin, and then just... paint. I kept the book on my end table for weeks and I'd look at it in the evening while DH watched bad sci-si. (did you know that 'bad sci-fi' is a genre all its own?) and I kept coming back to the painting pages. She uses birds as her examples, and I really wanted to paint a bird. So... the other night I did it. I slowed down my usual rush-thru-things tendency long enough to actually paint something that doesn't look like an alien you can tell is a bird.

The bird in the book on the left - my bird on the right. Can you even tell the difference??!?!?

His head is blurry cause I had too much water at first, but you cut the bird out and glue or stitch it into your journal, so the bad part will be cut away.

I'm ridiculously pleased with him.

Here's the cover of the book with my bird and palette. I had paint left, so since I was channeling Monet on such a roll, I painted some flowers! The pen outline and charcoal shading really help make these look like flowers.

They're on cold press w/c paper that'll eventually be bound into a nature journal, along with this pink flower haiku spread and a few others I've finished so far. I've been collecting garden/nature images, ephemera, etc for a while and am about ready to dive into my envelope of goodies and do some collage spreads.

I recommend this book, by the way. It's full of good tutorials and thoughtful prose about how to collect and preserve bits of nature for your journal or several other projects that she gives directions for. It'd be a nice gift for any artsy nature lover on your Christmas list. No affiliation, yadda, yadda - just happy with the book.