Notes to self 2/17

1.  Observation, u need more of it. even though you had decades of it. Do a daily (hahahahaaaha!) from photo or life or some public domain vintage source.
2. Your inner critic is not a clueless mom, a less-than encouraging teacher or your inhibition. It's an honest to god Critic. Un-school for six months. Look at craft, look at anonymously made art.
3.  Make peace with non-proportional folk bodies. You have some kind of meltdown over this, so do some and see if you still feel wrong. Why is it so hard to convincingly go back to what you were doing before you knew what to do?
4. Have you done something bad, derivative or silly this week? If no, what's up?
5. Figure out how to curate yourself later. Do a week's batch at a time maybe.

Getting messy again....gelatos and inktense journal pages

Peace of mind? Really? How journal schmournally. It's a well-trod sentiment. But peeps, my dear peeps, how I really really could use some in my life this week.

This page started with a hand stamp I carved. I call the pattern "cairn" - you can't really see a lot of evidence of it here, but I'll be showing it off a lot.  I'm LOVING carving my own stamps as a starting point - it's a great way to lay down a bunch of information onto that intimidating white page, and it's a nice way to keep the image vocabulary your own.

The flowers are collaged deco paper, though. I thought they went so nicely with the background I worked up with plenty of gelatos dripping. They do tend to migrate down the page in a different way from watercolors, it's hard to explain but you'll notice the difference if you try both.

Used inktense, gesso, posca, acrylic pen and ink, and lots of prismacolor here. It's nice to get messy again and get lot of deep saturated color.

More Hybrid art blocks - analog and digital collage

If this snow doesn't quit I may lose it. They're threatening us with more of it at the end of the week. Sometimes I think the Minnesota art scene is a result of cabin fever. People tend to have one of two relationships with nature here - we're in the land of 10,000 contemplative landscape painters, and 10,000 quirky introverted screenprinters who never leave the studio. And one and only one Scott Seekins, goes without saying.

I've been meaning to get into some camera walks, but sadly my body is not being very helpful lately, and the only visually interesting views I've been getting are doctor's offices. Blah.  I'm not one of those people who's going to blog illness a lot, and no, I'm not going to keel over imminently, but I'll summarize it all with a hearty this sucks and get on to the art. 

Yes, it's my Calgon, my shrink, my transportational key outta here when things are dark.  I do see the work taking a more serious look on, but I'm trying to stay upbeat more often than not.  I'm also wondering how many people would be interested in possibly a course, or a swap or a blog hop or a challenge or some kind of social coming-together around what I'm choosing to call Hybrids (though my sweetie likes "digilog" or "origlicates")

 

More fun still with the hybrid technique.

 

This one is a work in progress, though almost done, I think.

Recognize her?

 

Cut and paste - when bad things happen to good drawings

So I had this rather good drawing that got completely overdone. This happens. I'm very bad at knowing when to stop sometimes. 

This collage, too, is overdone, but I think that works out more OK than not in this case. Overall I think it's a nice artistic save. I want to push my color palette a little bit into less comfortable territory.  I'm enjoying working with decorative papers, also, and I'm thinking about other approaches to patterns.

So, what do you do when you botch it? I also digitized the figure before I glued her in, so I may work with her again in the future. I'm beginning to truly love my printer!

From my surface journal and about stamps in mixed media

All the pages in this journal start with surface treatment. I'm trying to do things I normally don't - in this case really vibrant color and stamps, which I'm generally opposed to. They're great for applying text - my own lettering capabilities are awful - I'm left handed and it shows. So stamped in are some letters.  the rest is watercolor, acrylic resist, Distress Ink, a cut up moment of artistic FAIL in inktense and artbar and acrylic, some inktense pencils, blickcrylic gel (it is a journal page after all.)

Ok, I'm about to drop a snob bomb. Please don't be hurt - if you create with stamps, designer paper, inkjet printouts - more power to your badtastic artistic self - but it's hard for me Momma. HARD. I have hangups.

I know this will sound snobbish in the extreme, but there's something I don't like about using the same imagery as other people, readily available, just ink and press.  I don't like it. I love other people's work that uses stamps sometimes - like any medium, some is great, some is good, some is less so but as long as people are creating, yay.  I don't generally like mine. I've never felt enough connection to the imagery.

Buying a lot of the repro "ephemera" and designer papers feels to me like solving a visual problem by throwing money at it.  It's not that I don't spend money on vintage papers and books that I'm willing to give the chop - and I'm lucky to be near the ULTIMATE source (more on that later) - I find that I think harder and more about what I'm buying.Limiting myself to really having to hunt though things and decide which old things are right for repurposing - which feel "too good" for being remade into art, which have an interesting backstory - this is part of my art process.  I can't get that from a digital collage sheet.

I've even been resistant to using the distress inks - it's not a dis on Tim Holz, whose work is great, I just don't like the whole thing of "and now I shall make a Tim Holz project" that follows from grabbing up the whole line of offerings.   There's a ton of distress ink in this though, the greens and some tea stain tones.  Yes, they're fantastic to use!

Overall, this is probably something I should get over, but it's definitely something I find I think about a lot.

So for me I guess a good challenge piece would be to use only materials from designer lines or something.