More painted pages

As I mentioned in an earlier blogpost I'm slowly making the necessary ingredients for the collages I hope to make for the 14th Collage Exchange next year. I needed more papers so duely set to and painted some more today and again used the wonderful cotton reel which produces two circles in one go. Circles are my favourite shape in all the world and by making more papers using it I know they will all go together well, which is good n ews for the resulting collages. The next thing I need to do is start on fabric to accompany the papers. The above one is also my blip for today and here are two more.

Some of the pages I made today reminded me of the beautiful photographs shown on the news yesterday, made by the ALMA telescope in Chile showing the beginning of the universe. Very hard to get your head around the fact that we can now see this happening many million years later but also awe inspiring and breathtaking! One day we might be able to see the very start of, well, of what exactly, the beginning of the very beginning?! Was there anything prior to that? It truely is almost impossible to graps all the implications.

This last page is very dark although I brightened it up a bit with gold acrylic. It looks very leathery (which could be a good thing!) as I kept on going on it for that little bit too long. I should have stopped when the going was good. I might add wax to it at a later stage to reinforce that leather look before I start using it in collages.

Painted Paper

It sometimes seems to me that I make art in reverse. I started by dying and then painting on fabric, because that's the medium I use mostly for my artwork, but as I'm getting more and more interested in collage I have taken the revolutionary step of also painting on paper! This is where most artists start. As I have a huge collection of fabric paints this is what I mostly use on paper too (there really is no reason why not) but I do augment that with acrylic paint, specially the Golden liquid acrylics. I also love the Mica sprays, which give the work a great sheen, although sadly you loose much of that on the scan or photograph.

I'm probably going to make collages for the 14th Collage Exchange and have started to paint a large collection of watercolour paper to use in my pieces. I didn't paint all these pages today (in fact I didn't paint any pages today) but over the past month or so. They were left to dry in my painting studio ( that's my half of John's shed!) and I collected and ironed them flat this afternoon.

The one above is my favourite to date and that one might well stay in one piece for the moment as a little treasure to be saved for that extra special occasion. Actually that means I'll rediscover it some time in the future in a file folder! But to get over that precious feeling I'm now photographing or scanning such pages so that I can use the resulting digital files to print it out again on any medium I fancy, either fabric, paper or a transparency.

Here are some more:

The circular pattern on this sheet comes from a cone of sewing thread. I was about to throw it in the bin when I spotted it's potential on the bottom. It makes the two lines at the same time. The centre gold dot comes from the end of a pencil.

The numbers you can just about see are from an commercial mask but the large dots come from sequin waste (also known as punchinella) and the smaller dotty pattern from a strip of paper I punched with edge design punches.

This one uses a commercial mask to make the pattern seen on the right but I also used some ribbled packing paper to make the stripy texture you can see middle bottom. I love using things I find in the house as well as " official" art supplies. It somehow makes the work more your own.

I'm an extremely messy worker (which will be no surprise to those of you who know me!) but I do my level best not to dirty up my actual art work and to that purpose I use baby wipes (love the Huggies ones specially). I use them to wipe my hands occasionally (yes, I know I should wear gloves but I simply can't), clean my rubberstamps, wipe off any masks I've used, etc. You name it, I will probably do it with a baby wipe. And sometimes those baby wipes become unintentionally wonderful colour surprises. They do have that pattern already on them (different ones for different brands) but for me that just adds to the attraction. They are also 2-ply so by separating them you get 2 for the price of one! Always a good thing.

This last one is also a baby wipe that was used as a wipe cloth and it has become my favourite one so far. Simply letting it develop by wiping your hands, brush, rubbing over your paper and cleaning your stamps can produce the most beautiful end result. By photographing it I know I can use it again even if I cut the original into pieces to collage with.

11th Collage Exchange

And sometimes good things even come in fourths! Today was also the opening day of the 11th Collage Exchange, where work from 121 artists gets exchanged. We all made 13 collages of which 11 will be swapped. One is exhibited and will go to a permanent collection in due course and one is for sale. Artists came from all over the world although I seem to be the only one from the UK this year.

You can read about my collages by clicking on the Collages label (see the very bottom of this blog) but I'm showing you two here. All of mine were dedicated to the Edwardian actress Marie Studholme, as are my Journal Quilts this year.

First of all above is the one which is on show at the moment in the Puke Ariki gallery in New Zealand. The exhibition runs from the 28th March till the 2nd May, and can also be seen online in the Virtual Tart gallery, run by Dale Copeland who organizes the Collage Exchanges.

And here is the page with my collage which is actually for sale (only $70!). Picture above.

Have a look at the homepage too where you can navigate to both the sales pages as well as the exhibit pages where there are some beautiful collages to be seen. I've already bought one myself but I'm keeping that one under wraps for the moment as I haven't even paid for it yet!