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 I've moved over to a WordPress blog. You can find it here.

 

Heart Collage Zoom Workshop Aftermath

 We had a great group last Friday for the Valentine Card Workshop. I'll do it again next February. Here are just a few of the pieces made by participants.

All of these are small, greeting card size. It's a great format for exploring contrasts in color, value, and pattern. How do you make an image lively without making it 'too busy'? Where is the line between visual excitement and visual confusion? How simple can you make an image and still maintain a sense of excitement or mystery? 

Hope you all had a good Valentine's Day!

Re-Imagining: Using Your Own Artwork for Collage

 I recently had a bunch of my paintings, drawings, and sketchbook studies printed by a local printer, to generate new collage material. I always scan my smaller work at high resolution, and my larger works I have professionally photographed, so I have high quality digital images of everything. In Adobe PhotoShop I re-sized some of the images, and then ganged them up on 11"x17" files, ready for the printer. You could do this on your own printer if you have plenty of ink.

Here are a few of the files I sent to the printer:

A few images from my sketchbook

More from the sketchbook, original and re-sized

More from sketchbook with the red pear in several sizes

Here are some paintings and studies ganged up on 11"x17" sheets:

In addition to all this new collage material, I used some found material and began playing. Take a look at this video.

 

 

I found this to be a very freeing way to play with imagery and generate fresh visual ideas.

Scribble Paintings

 I've been scribbling a lot lately, layering marks in various materials. You can see previous posts about this work here and here.  Like many techniques, scribbling is easy. Making an interesting image with it takes some effort, careful judgement, lots of micro-decisions, and practice. Her is a video showing one way that a particular scribble painting developed. Processes vary quite a lot between individual works, but there is some consistency among those that I do in one "sitting". A sitting doesn't mean all at once, start to finish, but that I work on the group continually until they are done. I don't leave them for weeks while I work on something else. So there is a continuity of thought process.

Here are some of the pieces in this series. They are all 11"x14" on Bristol.

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Valentine Card Workshop on Zoom

Actually, it is a workshop on elements of abstract visual language, disguised as one on making valentine cards. Get details and sign up here. Friday, February 10, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Eastern time. All who sign up will get the recording, so if that time is not convenient, you can still get the workshop.