Showing posts with label rubber stamps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rubber stamps. Show all posts

Monday, March 7, 2011

Backgrounds on Paper and Cloth

I decided to take a Mixed Media with Paper and Cloth online class with Jane LaFazio, one of our Sketchbook Challenge bloggers. She is a fabulous fiber artist, and artist extrordinaire, and offers online classes through Joggles, one of my favorite mixed media supply retailers. For our first lesson, we are making backgrounds on paper and cloth (these ones are on muslin), using gesso, maybe texturing it, and then acrylic paint. Here are just a few of mine:

I applied gesso, then created texture using a knitting needle, scribbling lines in it. Once that was very dry, I Played With Paint!! Transparent turquoises and blues, and opaque Baltic Green; then I stamped the little white dots.

This one is done the same way, using a different color palette. I LOVE this muslin thing!This one is similar, though I let the first Paint Playground dry before adding some of the transparent colors: quinacridone gold and nickel-azo yellow.
I have no idea where these will go. Jane demonstrated a stencil technique as well in the first lesson, but I may wait to use that later in the process. Thanks for visiting!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

New Collage Paintings

Here are a couple of new pieces, both using a leaf rubber stamp that I carved. For an inspiring and comprehensive look at making your own stamps, check out Judi Hurwitt's stamp tutorial. The first collage-painting, "Clothesline", is one I started a few weeks ago and posted some of its early stages.
You can see how much a painting can change over the course of its journey. I often find myself obliterating parts that I really like or have spend a lot of time on. But for me, this letting go, this ability to "destroy" precious parts in favor of the painting as a whole, is one of the essentials of making art. Suspending judgment, letting the painting speak, responding to what is there on the paper, not what "should be" there in my head, is like a meditation. A practice of detachment. It is a constant effort.

This next one, "Blue Circles", is inspired by the paintings of Victoria Huckins, whom I discovered recently. I'm trying to absorb some of her color sensibility to branch out from my usual colors.
I'm trying more reds and blues, and I love this light green-yellow thing. Both of these paintings are done on watercolor paper to which I have laminated muslin. I love painting on cloth, and I just started using muslin-on-paper as a substrate. "Blue Circles" also has a piece of lace trim adhered to the substrate with heavy acrylic gel.