Month: February 2016

11×7.5″ acrylic on matboard

This painting is all scraped acrylic in at least two phases.

10×8″ acrylic, collage on paper

This has been percolating for a few months. I cut out the article in the November 22, 2015 Des Moines Register after writing “seriously?!” in the margin. Matt saved it for me mentioning that it might be useful in an art piece. I made an enlarged copy of the article—really just a brief news item from around Iowa—and saved it. This week I picked it back up. I first scraped the reds/magentas/crimson on the paper. Then I adhered the pieces of paper on top of that. The next layer is some blockprinting with various blocks I made in the last year using acrylic paint. I added some brushed on transparent acrylic where I wanted to highlight the printed content a little more. Hopefully you can read it if you click on the image to make it bigger.

digital photo

I’ve been working on this over the past few days. I knitted this yarn (spun and dyed by my Blue Gate Farmher friend Jill, and gifted to me by my cousin Melissa) into a circle. (Well, truth be told, I have knitted three circles…so far…trying to get the right size.) Then I felted it—this is only felted once so far; another session is coming. And it’s only an extreme close-up because it will hopefully be part of a larger art piece in the future and I’m not quite ready to share the details. Stay tuned!

6×6″ acrylic on paper

Some free brushwork turned into abstracted mysterious figures of sorts. As with dreams, the interpretations could be pretty interesting.

4×4″ acrylic on paper

This is just a little daily, starting with a scrape of leftover mostly magenta paint, then adding lavender and purple and cutting into the wet paint with a soft tool, and some brushwork of a couple of colors (cerulean blue and magenta) around the edges. One last scrape of magenta down the middle diagonally finished it off.

6×6″ acrylic, ink on paper

Scraped and brushed and edged acrylic paint, plus marker squiggles. This one began to get a little lost, but it has a feeling of place to me—of home. And it’s the daily for today.

4×4″ acrylic on paper

This began with the side-of-the-palette-knife lines of lavender paint. After those were dry, I scraped some transparent yellow-orange and zinc white acrylic, but waded into the wet paint with a soft tool to make more “scratch” marks in the top paint layer. I didn’t want to muddy it up too much (like I sometimes do), so I decided against adding additional colors for a more subtle look instead.

6×6″ acrylic on paper

This began with some leftover paint scrapes, then a lot of brushwork, some block-printing with acrylic, and finally some palette knife applications. It’s a little mysterious.

7×5.5″ acrylic, ink on matboard

The scraped transparent green gold acrylic transformed the color in this painting. There is one noticeable spot where the original colors (ultramarine blue & magenta) pop out. I added some parallel lines at the bottom, just because.

6.5×10.5″ acrylic on matboard

This began as a clean scrape, but a little too dull. I scraped another layer of transparent paint over it, but it was still too plain. I made some straight marks with the scraping tool in some areas, then did some similar work with the side of a palette knife at the top and throughout the piece. And here it is.