A is for ALOUETTE - Simon Mondays

Paperyum presents: A is for ALOUETTE.

I knew right away I wanted to do ALOUETTE for the letter A project over at the Simon Monday blog!

It's such a funny thing, that a song about plucking songbirds has come to stand for all things charming and Francophile. Trouble is, ALOUETTE is literally a Lark and I couldn't find a great lark image at the vintage source blogs - I settled for this random songbird from The Graphics Fairy as the starting point for what was going to be a stamped, painted and embellished mini cushion.

The first step: A little painting. A little stamping! I used lumiere inks and a fiskars border to create a distressed swirly texture to work on, in a copper on cream colorway:

Netxt: print the bird graphic directly onto some June Taylor cotton and heat set that puppy with my heat gun.

Then embellish, layer, stitch - basically I put the project into an embroidery hoop and treated it like I would a mini mixed media canvas! Everything is hand sewn.

Et Voila!

Alouette, gentil Alouette, Alouette, je te brocherai!

Wax On - Mixed Media wax finished collage art

I'm having a blast covering things with wax! Recognize the background images? I love to use up all of my various printer misfires - you never have to waste good paper!

First, I cut them up and tiled them into a background for this girl.

She's also a print out of one of my paintings - the painting is actually in a progress state, and what I'll do is scan the image before I do something silly to it. Every time I hit a stage of the painting that I like, I'll stop what I'm doing and scan. Then, in the event of a problem, I at least have an underpainting I like, or a record of the work when it was at a stage I thought sort of worked.

Anyhow, after collaging her onto the piece, I painted over her to change the hair, painted over the background, drew over things, stamped some butterflies onto her dress, sealed off the work, and added a layer of beeswax for that misty integrated look that I like. I rounded out a few things with sennelier oil pastels over the wax layer.

 

Would you consider a piece like this a print or an original? I think of it as an original - it's a mixed media piece with collage elements printed out - the collage elements happen to be things I've drawn and painted in the past in a lot of cases.

She's available for sale, and only one person will have a shot at her, clearly.  Visit my Etsy Shop . 

Use the code SHIPFTW and you'll get free shipping (it adds up on art!) worldwide - until Valentine's day!

Journal page - The Garden of the World

Some stamping and stenciling with abandon, and a quote. And --- green. Finally broke 40 degrees here!

Simon Says Stamp and Show : Quotable Challenge

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.