Where have I been?

I learned today that the gallery sold three paintings. Shown above, they are "Too Young to Be in Love", "The Fiddler and Me" and "Courage", for which I don't have an image. I felt encouraged by this news, because today the economic headlines had me thinking, I'd better get a real job.

That thought, noble though it was, lasted until I caught myself looking once again on Amazon.com for more inspirational books on mixed media painting and collage (knitting and crochet, too). Like I haven't already bought out the entire craft sections of Barnes & Noble and Borders.

So getting back to the question I posed in the headline. I have been doing a lot of knitting this summer because my loft studio has been so hot I couldn't work there. During recent previews of the cooler fall weather, I have started my painting routine again (note cat with arm warmers... detail of a painting). Other ideas are well in the works.

The last photo above shows three facecloths knit in organic cotton, and a knit flower embellishment, created for a special friend. I have knit and designed many items and would like to sell them on Etsy. I'm already selling prints and note cards of paintings at that site. See links on right side of blog page.

Hope everyone had a creative summer. I've had blogger's block, but I'm back!

Believe In Love

These photos are details of a painting/collage done in acrylic, with a foundation of torn paper and accents of shrink plastic, fabric, rubber stamped letters, and dimmensional acrylic paints. They actually work as two separate pictures, but they add up to one. You'll have to wait to see the whole thing. How's that for a tease? Today I received my shipment of 100% cotton rag paper for making archival digital prints of my artwork. I will have prints, blank note cards, jewelry, and buttons for sale in my shop on Etsy. There will be a link from this blog to the shop. The buttons, shown below, are great for adding pizzaz to all the fun knitted items that so many are creating. Art quilters will appreciate them as well.

The buttons are coming! The buttons are coming!

Yes, they are finally here after years in the making. Polymer clay buttons you can really sink your teeth into.......NOT! Seriously, these are one of a kind original designs made by moi, having worked on my polymer clay techniques for many years. You actually use a pasta machine as part of the process for creating these little works of art. Colored clays must be mixed and conditioned by kneading, rolling and generally abusing the clay until it is soft and pliable. That's where the pasta machine comes in. You must laboriously roll sheets of the mixed stuff through the machine about 20 times. You do this for each color you are creating. Then you are ready to start putting the colors together in various shapes and combinations to create logs of clay that you can slice into geometric patterns that dazzle the eye. You can also stamp, paint, carve and sand the clay to allow endless design variations. I also make jewelry out of this clay which I will show in another post. I will in the next couple of weeks be posting my paintings, prints, jewelry, buttons and note cards on ETSY, an internet website for artists to sell their handmade wares.

Cindy's Buttons Little Works of Art

"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".