Late Breaking News....

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Two paintings recently sold [well.... ok......last summer] at the Art and Soul Gallery in Ogunquit, Maine: Velvet Night Angel, top and center, and They said she was too young to be in love, bottom.

The latter painting is particularly special to me because I used a photo of my mother, taken around 1944 when she was 18. I used acrylic paint for the background, patterned paper for the green and yellow areas, a hand stamped and baked charm [LOVE] made from the unfortunately named "shrink plastic". As the sheet plastic is baked in a toaster oven it is reduced in size by about 30% and gets thicker and stronger. I'll have a whole tutorial on shrink plastic in a future post. It's really fun to use and has unlimited design possibilities. The charm at the top is also made from the same material and stamped with an original hand carved stamp [another great project]. The words were done on the computer with a font designed in an old fashioned typewriter style. All the collage elements were adhered with acrylic matte medium to a stretched canvas. I use Liquitex or Golden mediums.

Both paintings are what I would call mixed media collage on canvas. The Velvet Night painting uses acrylic paints, dioxizine purple and pthalo blue, in various ratios to create the night sky. Fabric was used for the dress, the ground, and the rectangular piece on the left, which was painted with fabric paint and stamped with a hand carved stamp.

The flower is a copyright free black and white drawing [Dover Publications] that I painted with acrylics. Upper right is a postage type stamp in sticker form and the lower right shows a hand stamped polymer clay piece brushed with Jacquard metallic powders and baked in a toaster oven. The raised areas of gold are made with dimmentional paint such as Scribbles. Last were added a tiny lock and a key. The top triangle piece is made from foam core and covered with watercolor paper. It is painted in acrylic, with another rectangular shaped polymer clay piece. Individual rubber stamp letters are used to create the wording.
Don't know why there's a big gap here, but keep scrolling down for more. There IS more, I promise!!

A is for Art

Here is another example of one of my favorite techniques of collage art. Claudine Hellmuth is one of the most prominent artists using this technique today. It consists of gathering vintage photos and using part of that photo, usually the face of a relative or in the case of the above art piece, oneself. Yes that is a photo of me in one of the cute little hats my mother made for me. The face is mine as well as the hands. The rest of the piece is drawn, painted and collaged. I started with a heavy application of white gesso onto an 8"x10" stretched canvas to provide the texture, then added the blue for the sky with Liquitex acrylic paint, a dark turquoise green for the ground with a lighter, more neutral green brushed lightly on top to reveal the darker green underneath. The purpose of the different layers and the texture is to create more interest than just one solid smooth color could do.

The band across the top was created by layering different papers and distressing them with Distress Ink Pads. I used a commercial rubber stamp for the letter "A", and outlined it with dimenional Scribble Paint in gold. I hand lettered the word "Art". The word "Love" was hand stamped onto a sheet of shrink plastic and heated in the toaster oven until it thickened and shrank in length and width to about 30% its original size. Again, I outlined the shape with dimensional paint in gold.

Simple shapes were drawn and cut from decorative papers for the dress and feet. A little bit of line drawing was done with a waterproof fine tipped felt pen for the shoes and socks and the number on the dress was stamped onto paper and outlined with the gold dimensional paint. All collage elements were adhered using either Liquitex acrylic matte medium or gel matte medium depending on the heaviness of the material. As I went along I coated all collage elements with the matte medium as I adhered them and brushed on the medium over the entire canvas when I finished the piece. The number 12 refers to the date of my birth in case you didn't guess. And I don't mean 1912. I mean the day of the month. That's all I'll say.

I would be glad to answer any questions about the techniques used in creating this piece. Just leave me a note in the comments section for this post.

"LOVE" acrylic and collage 9" x 12"

I've been working on a series of paintings for the last week. This is one of my favorites. It was created with a foundation layer of gesso and torn paper to create the texture that you see. I concentrated on using a different color palette from my usual dark blue night skies. This time I used Golden acrylics as opposed to my usual Liquitex acrylics. The colors and their combinations are very different from any I've used before. To achieve a unified look for the painting I used only a few colors and mixed them together to create compatible colors. This way even though the colors are bold and bright, they are not gaudy and they don't clash with one another because they're made of the same "stuff".