Caged Birds

Back to playing. this time with a Sizzix die called Caged Bird.
Birds and cages were cut using thick book board.
Yellow bird painted with acrylic transparent ink, the blue bird uses a distressed stamp ink. Both birds stamped with permanent black ink.
The background are small collages

Weekend Button-making Demo

Spent the past few days preparing for and giving a demo on 1-inch button making at a local art store, RubyDog's Art House. It was a free demo, intended to get people interested in a future, longer workshop on button making. Buttons are basically mini-collages. Techniques used for regular collages can be used in button-making. The only restrictions are that they fit within a 1-inch circle and be relatively flat. Being more a digital collage person, I spent a few days making sample buttons without using a computer. On Saturday I brought boxes full of supplies and about 15 people, young and old, made buttons which they proudly displayed on their lapels.

Quilts My Mother Never Got To Make - India Yellow

Another in the quilt series, this time in yellows.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Quilts My Mother Never Got To Make - Malaysia Green

Another from the quilt series, this one in greens, using the Smilebox website templates.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Quilts My Mother Never Got To Make - China Blue

I'm working on a series of collages: Quilts My Mother Never Got To Make. They're quite small, 8" x 8", in a quilt layout. Each quilt section depicts some aspect from my mother's life. I found this website, Smilebox, that lets you incorporate your own images into templates, so I'm trying it out.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Passion

When asked to create a piece of art on a particular emotion, in this case passion, I started with a colour theme. Colours that immediately came to mind were red, maroon, purple and black. Yes, I realize that's a bit dark, but besides the warm and fuzzy feelings, for me passion also contains some risque, spur-of-the-moment elements. Once I assembled my tubes of paint, I searched through magazines for images that either contributed to the colour or images theme. These images were torn and placed on my background paper. Once happy with the layout, I started adding acrylic paint, both to unify the images and to further enhance the colour theme. I like to use a large flathead paintbrush and a stencil brush to get the initial colours down. At the end, to finetune things, I use various smaller brushes as well as scraps of diecut papers as stencils to add extra spot colours.

Nick Bantock Workshop

This summer I was able to take a workshop with Nick Bantock. The 2-day workshop was in his new studio/gallery on Saltspring Island, aptly named The Forgetting Room. This was not a beginner course, and all 12 participants had some art background.



Nick is a great teacher and very generous with his knowledge and supplies. Throughout the weekend, we raided his store of magazines, postage stamps and rubber stamps, and constantly picked his brain. It was so inspirational to be creating your own art while surrounded by like minded people amid Nick's fantastic art.

The workshop consisted of a number of collage exercises, each increasingly complex, all a la Nick Bantock.

One such exercise ....
1) We were handed an 8-1/2 x 11 section of a nautical chart
2) And then a small image (mine was a fish stamp)
3) Next we cut a triangle window in the chart
4) And found a simple magazine image to add to the back to show through the window
5) Then we found a number in a magazine to add to our artwork
6) We then created another window (any shape, I chose a triangle again)
7) And added another magazine image to show through
8) And then added postage stamp
9) Then from Nick's rubber stamps, we each chose 2
10) And stamped each once onto our artwork
11) Last we added a 1/2" border of our choice

And here's mine ...

The Mind Is A Mansion

This is page 7 from The Mind Is A Mansion, an altered board book. The original book came with the holes. Background consists of washes of acrylic paint. The black and white text and image are transfers. Image is a black and white laser output of a traditional (non digital) collage onto release paper. Mirror image text is also a laser output to release paper. The transfer itself is accomplished using gel medium.

text for The Mind Is A Mansion:

The mind is a mansion that contains many rooms
Each a compilation described by our thoughts, dreams, emotions, ecstasies,
angers and secrets of our deepest selves.
There is so much that remains unseen
until we unlock the door and look inside.
There are infinite questions to be asked.
Much of the mind is cloaked in mystery
The more we look inside each room
the more we realize
that while these paradoxes and enigmas
are infinitely questioned,
they are forever never answered.