painting the feminine

I have been busy with lots of stitching, none of which is finished, and my painting challenges.  I have also started a course with Connie Solera of Dirty Footprints Studio called Painting the feminine.

I am really enjoying the course and I felt the need to share my process with my first (official) page

I picked up an oil pastel and just played and these shapes came up. They could be babies, or women, or even leaves and seeds.  I wasn't sure yet.
I left them for a while and eventually, I started adding paint, and got lost, so no photos.

This is where I got to.  I started colouring the little areas and shapes in the middle, but they felt wrong, so...

I painted over it.  I  tried straight orange and yellow, but they were too transparent,so I added some white to them and added more, making a sort of stucco texture.
I still felt I needed something to connect the two figures

I had an idea of some spirals, but I wasn't sure, so I put a page protector opened up over the top and  tried it out with posca markers.  I liked that, but I added some dots as well.

Finally, I added more dots around each figure and the eyes.  I call this connectedness and for me it is about how the feminine connects us in our hearts.

Whilst I was working on this, which took a while and a lot of reflection, I also started painting over an old canvas, which was covered in flowers and a vase.

The same shape in another incarnation.  I was actually using up all the leftover paint on my palette and was not happy with the colours, but they have given me the form I wanted, so this is a work in process and we will see how it changes over the week!

Happy creating!

Journals everywhere

Yesterday, I spent some time, gong through my huge stash of gelli prints and put together two new journals.

As you can see I am really short on journals!  Hmmm.  Well, I still went ahead and made two more.

I call these "Serendipity" journals, because they have a mix of blank and coloured/printed pages, so it is just fate what you get to work on.  I find I tend to create things I never thought of or planned with these journals.  Here are a few spreads.

As you can see, I have a variety of pages, including deli paper, cartridge paper, watercolour paper, card and even some black card as well as a wide variety of prints and failed prints, all bound together using my old comb binder.  I am quite pleased with these.

Here are a couple of recent art journal pages

This one started with a scrap of watercolour paper with some test painting on it and a tree cut from a page taken out of an altered book.  The branches were cut of in the cutting, but I put them back in with drawing.  The autumn leaf drifts began as bits of gelli prints which I scribbled all over with oil pastel then melted with the heat gun and moved around with a baby wipe.  It turned out very atmospheric!

This page has sat around for nearly a week.  I had "drawn" the tree and grass, with some elmer's glue on a coloured background and intended, when the glue was dry, to wash over black ink and wipe it off from the glue to create a coloured tree on a black background.  But alas, the ink dried too quickly and I couldn't get it off.

today, whilst I was playing with the oil pastels, I thought I could rub over the tree and get the pastel on the glue, but again, that did not work, as the pastel also got onto the background as well in places.  As I was rubbing the background to try uselessly to remove the pastel, it simply created more of a misty background - AND  the cloth rubbed the pastel off the glue!  So I eventually, after many plays, got the opposite effect of what I originally intended, but I really like it and especially love the shiny, black dimensional tree.

Happy Creating!

Art books

 Just a quick mention, that I am going to start posting an ATC a day as a way to play with lots of techniques.  This was an idea put forward by my friend, Lisa  and I have decided to join her in her venture. we shall see!  She also has a great list of techniques which she wants to try.

My art books, as I have said, are recycled/altered books which I use to create little bits of art and experiment in on different themes.
Here are a few pages I have worked on recently.

This is a page from my bird theme book.  The backgrpound is newspaper painted with gesso and then a watercolour wash, which I find easy to paint and draw on and is a cheap and easy way to cover up the page contents underneath.  The bird was inspired by a card.  It is a little hard to see because it is drawn with a metallic pen, but basically each piece of the bird is doodled with a different free motion quilting design.  I have a small quilt based on this page in process, so you see the books are a great design resource..

This is a page in process in my water/oceans book.  Again the background is painted newspaper/gesso.
The seahorses are molding paste applied through a stencil, then painted gold.
This page will be layered again to add some more weeds and depth before it is finished.  I already have ideas about using painted fusible in a small quilt like this.

These ferns in my leaf theme book are stencilled with oil pastel.  Next, I will put a watercolour wash on which will be resisted by the pastel.  This can be mimicked on fabric using shiva sticks and fabric paint, so i do see a batch of fabric comming up.

I have shown this page before.  It is a ripped printout pasted to the page, but here, you can see I have begun to sketch out the missing parts.  I think this page needs a wash for the background, so the leaves will brobably be completed with oil pastel.

Another page from the leaf book, this is a simple layout for a small motif (about 4") I made using couched copper wire on a piece of woven wool fabric.  This page has a piece od non woven paper/fabric (the type florists use on their posies) pasted directly to the page.  It is semi transparent, but I actually like the little views you can see.  The pink/orange paper is paste paper .

I have actually been doing a lot of sewing an textile work, but haven't quite got to the point of something to show yet and a couple of my WIPs are things I can't show until a certain date, but two days untill I start posting ATCs!!!!