5.5×3.5″ acrylic, collage on matboard
I know, this isn’t a modern wind turbine like the ones I love to see along the roads in Iowa, but the triangular pieces of paper I had worked better as a nod to the old farm windmills. I collaged the papers over a small scraped acrylic painting.
3.5×5.5″ collage on matboard
I used the back of a matboard I had scraped paint on (unsuccessfully) for this collage. The collage material consists of cut-up paint chips from several of our interior wall painting projects over the years. I just cleaned out a drawer this past weekend and was going to recycle or throw away a lot of stuff like this, but then I thought why not use it for collage material?! And so I did. Because usually I keep this kind of thing and it stays in my studio for years. No more! (Well, it will probably continue to happen, but I’m going to try to work through some of it this fall….)
3.5×5″ strips of currency, acrylic paint
Strips of currency (from the US Mint) are collaged in a tangle onto this paper. I was going to then paint a color in the background and into the money, but once I started with the paint I didn’t think I would like so much of it. So I decided to splatter it on instead. The election debate news cycle played into the color choice, but I didn’t set out to create something tied to it; it just sort of morphed into that. I went through a LOT of other titles for this piece after it was done—some of the potential titles were just too “cute” to use—before settling on a slightly larger theme. I’ll share a few of the rejected titles with you if you ask.
5×3.5″ acrylic
Color play is a lot of fun. I toned down some of the colors a little bit after the first pass, trying to tie it all together more. Here it is, whether it ties together or not!
3.5×5″ acrylic
This is a sketch of a landscape I had already drawn, so I painted it for today. I didn’t have the real colors in mind anymore, so had to improvise that part.
approx. 6×8″ strips of currency
This is not really a “daily” (woven over a few days), and is not yet a piece unto itself (I’m still figuring how I will use it and in what kind of item), but is an “in-process” work that is interesting to me as it is (or rather bigger than life, after zooming in). There you have it.
5×3.5″ acrylic
Here is the second installment of the separate “top” and “bottom” images painted separately and separated by a day. Silly, I know. But it was kind of fun once I shut down the embarrassed critic inside.
5×3.5″ acrylic on paper
Let me explain. Sometimes on long road trips (and maybe other times, too), my mom would engage me in a fun (and funny) art activity. She would fold a piece of paper. One of us would draw the top of something (the head of an animal, a plant, a person—anything that would work) and then the “neck” only would be extended to the lower half of the paper. The first artist would pass the folded piece of paper with the blank lower half showing (and what they had just drawn, hidden), and the other one of us would draw the bottom of something using the neck marks as a guide—without looking at the top drawing. As you can imagine, this resulted in some pretty weird looking creatures in the end!
Here, I had already folded a couple of pieces of paper, so I did the bottom half of this one yesterday and the top half today (and for tomorrow’s, I did the top half yesterday and bottom half today). I did a little bit of rough sketching with pencil on some of it, but mostly just painted on with acrylic (which I had never used for this activity before).
I debated about even posting these as dailies, but the memory of this childhood joy outweighed my reticence. It works a lot better with someone else who doesn’t know what you’ve painted. I am happy to say that my memory is good enough that I remembered mostly what I painted on the first sides, but I had already hidden those sides this morning and did not reference what I had done until after the second side was completed.
A fun little diversion.
7×5.25″ acrylic on matboard
I was looking for inspiration, so I took a book from my art shelf, opened up to a random page, and without looking put my finger on the page to point to a random word. What word did I finger? Fear. Ha! The resident imp in my studio. So, this painting’s title is “fear,” although I have to admit, I wasn’t really thinking about fear when I chose the paint or scraped it on. Subconscious, maybe.
One of the most helpful books I’ve read about art-making is Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. I should probably re-read it now, in fact!
5×3.25″ ink, acrylic, collage
I’m not sure what to say about this. I first used the pencil drawing of the seed shapes as a template for a print block I made a few months ago. Today I colored in the “seeds,” then painted the greens in the middle, then painted the transparent background around everything. I nearly left it at that, but decided to add the magenta & deep cadmium pieces over the green, then collaged the green pieces from a magazine on the top and bottom. Is it done? Not sure. Am I finished? Yes, I am.