Love Is In The Air

Soon it will be February and most of you will know what the big celebration is for that month.  I have never really been a big fan of Valentine’s Day.  It can make one feel somewhat inadequate if there is no significant other to celebrate with.  My daughter came up with the ingenious idea of celebrating with her girlfriends and calling it ‘Galentine’s Day’!

Although I now have a significant other to celebrate with, we don’t.  We tend to have a nice meal at home and stay in with the dogs.  However, there are those out there who are less cynical than I am and love to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  For you, I have made a few collages.

Lovestruck – 4×4 inches on 140lb watercolor paper.Pucker UP – 4×4 inches on 140lb watercolor paperHugs and Kisses, 4×4 inches on 140lb watercolor paper

I have been working on these over the last few days.  They are now ready to be varnished,  After the varnish has dried, I will need to flatten them out before I can mount and matt them to A4 size.

I have enjoyed making these little collages even though they are time consuming.  Each layer has to dry before adding the next and the paper curls in a different way each time.  I took the names from the paint color samples.  Sometimes one doesn’t need to look that far for inspiration.  I would have liked to make more, but I won’t have enough time if I want to get them onto Etsy by the 1st of February.

Thanks for stopping by!

Playing With Collage

It has been rather busy here on the home front these last couple of weeks.  I have a temp contract at a school and I had a visit from my daughter recently.  With the short days and work, I hadn’t had time to do any arty things except buy a book on collage.  Now, I probably don’t really need a book on collage, but I felt I needed some inspiration.

I had an old painting I wasn’t happy with, so I decided to use it for a collage piece.This mixed media piece is A3 size and I really don’t like it.  Really.  Nothing is ever going to make me like it as it is.  So, I cut it down to two 8×8 inch pieces.  Now they look like this:

For the collage above I used a piece of a gelli print, printed paper, a transfer I made for another painting, paper that I rolled my brayer onto during one of my printing sessions and some Acrylic Painting paper that I used for leftover paint.  For the collage below, I just cut up a piece of Acrylic Painting paper with leftover paint.  I just happened to have a piece of paper that had similar colors to the background piece.

I’m not sure if they are finished, so I will just hang onto them for now.  It is good practice to keep your work even if you don’t like it as you may find some other use for them.  In any event, I like them better this way.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

‘Unsuccessful’ Teapots Monotypes

When I make prints on the gel plate, I don’t always know what I am going to do.  One day I may do circles and ribbon, another some birds, and one day I did teapots.  The teapot came from a photo I took of my Yellow Teapot painting.

I cut out the teapot and used contact paper to water/paint-proof the stencil.  Then I made many prints.  What I considered to be ‘unsuccessful’ went into a pile while I considered what to do with them.

On Boxing Day I ordered the Tonic Stamping platform so that I could easily register my prints.  One of the hardest things to do when printing off of a raised surface is to get it to register properly.  This stamping platform makes it a lot easier as you can line everything up before you add paint to the gel press.  I used a limited palette of acrylic paint with some gold metallic and embellished some with colored pencils.  When printing on the teapot, I had to make a mask for the background.  It was in some ways a complicated procedure as when I used a stencil on the teapot, I put the stencil on first and then the mask.  Sometimes it worked well.  Doing the background was a lot easier as I only had to place the teapot template onto the print to mask it off.

 

Although not perfect, they look much better and I am quite happy with them.  Now when I look at what I considered to be my ‘successful’ prints, I am no longer sure they are.  I am thinking that I may need to  re-visit them and do some more work.  At least I have something to keep me busy for a while!

Until next time, Happy Creating!