Remember those vintage pipe cleaner, felt and styrofoam head figures peeps used to make? I found one at an estate sale and had to have it. It had big ole’ shoes, gloves and a pointed hat in felt, some sort of nose and a little tunic looking shirt over it’s upper body. Pretty hinky but full of old craft magazine memories. One day I was outside early and noticed that a ray of super bright sunshine was beaming down on our white shed and got the idea to shoot some shadows. There was Mr. Hinky Elf, in all his splendor. I think he made quite a silhouette, all long and lanky. So I shot him for awhile and a few other things and printed them out. When I sat down to make this page I was interested in texture and layered on many cancelled postage stamps and some small labels, etc. I also put a hand drawn womans face and my Shadow Man on there and then painted over it all several times with a credit card. Lots of texture, plus an odd focus image. My kind of page. This one is finished, I won’t put writing on it because I like it the way it is.
Posts Tagged ‘new art work’
Long tall shadow art journal page
Posted: March 13, 2012 in art journalTags: altered book, art journaling, journaling, mixed media, new art work, painting, photography, shadows
All stamped up art journal page
Posted: March 10, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, new art work, rubber stamp, stamp
I believe I said earlier this week when presenting Albert the doll that when I say I have “a lot” of something it is likely to be an insane amount. Such is the case with this art journal page. More than a decade ago I procured a lot of stamps from Ebay and a box from a local used office supply shop. The stamps range in content from images for advertising to medicine to the Olympic games and a space shuttle mission. The text varies from “mixed nuts” to post office sayings to “import” and “export”. My goal was to see which of these antiquities still would print with a regular ink pad under normal conditions. Most of them did, leaving me with this busy page of black inked wonders. I topped the page off with one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver printed off the Internet. I like this page with its random DADA meaninglessness, graphics printed in simple black ink and old style mid-last-century appearance.
Angel with dove art journal page
Posted: March 9, 2012 in art journal, photographyTags: art journaling, cemetery images, journaling, new art work, painting, photography
I took this picture of an angel holding a dove at a cemetery in Brooksville, FL. The statue was unique in my collection. I’ve been shooting graveyard images for 15+ years, all over the southeast US. The image was Photoshopped and the height of the statue gives it a kind of wonky orientation on the page (the statue was about 3 1/2-4′ tall). I printed the photo on regular copy paper and placed it on an otherwise prepared page. It looks like I used either pan watercolors or pan gouache to color the image. This page is in my altered map journal but has no journaling on it besides the “The bird leaves no trail” saying. I doubt that anything more will be done to this page in the future, I like it the way it is right now.
Three chicks art journal page
Posted: March 5, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, journaling, new art work, photography
I’m dedicating this post to my friends Elli and Soren. To Elli because she has a case of spring fever right now of epic proportions. And Soren loves googly eyes on everything and these chix have pretty close to googly eyes going, without actually googly-ing. The journal part is above, written in white gel pen. I found these chicks at the drug store after Easter last year and have them sitting on my kitchen windowsill. They are bright and cheerful and we have extremely interesting conversations while I do the dishes. Nothing I can share here, you understand. Spring has Sprung!
Albert
Posted: March 3, 2012 in art dollTags: art doll, new art work, plain doll body, terry lee getz
Meet Albert. He has a funny story. Well, sort of funny. I bought a bunch (when I say a bunch, the numbers are usually astonishing) of these plain cloth dolls on clearance about a decade ago. I always wanted to make dolls, see. But the plain sort of ill shaped dolls mocked me. Don’t know how to sew (or rather, design patterns) so no clothes. Tried weaving over one and that took forever just to cover the body rectangle. I think I even tried painting one once. Everything that ever happened with these dolls, which wasn’t much, was only done once. So I decided to give some away and have a friend that said she’d take some. God bless her. Then the one I brought in to send her a picture of started mocking me. In order to shut it up, I applied gesso in black and white, then put a face on with those marvelous Sharpie poster paint markers, then when it was dried did that (except for the face) about three more times to cover, then sewed some shirt buttons on and called it Albert. I believe I got the last laugh…or did I??
Art life
Posted: March 2, 2012 in photographyTags: art journaling, everyday object still life, new art work, photography
I haven’t spoken too much on this blog about setting up simple shots with everyday items that you have literally laying around during the day as you make art. On this day I’d been using my alphabet rubber stamp set and decided to make a phrase and shoot it from eye level. I made sure the stuff in the background was art related (although you can’t tell now what it was, it was a rubber stamp pad and a paper plate palette) and set the other stamps behind the words. I like the depth in this shot and a tad of Posterize that I applied in Elements “arts” it up a notch. Get yourself some decent natural light in an area with some flat surface available (i try to use my kitchen counter) and set some objects up. Don’t have to be fancy about it. I saw a great shot of a fork yesterday on a fellow photographer’s blog. Try your flatware, dishes, art supplies (paint brushes are awesome), parts of a flower bouquet, flat marbles with writing underneath, your journaling supplies for the day. You’ll be surprised how poetic these shots look when changed to black and white, cropped and maybe filtered just a bit. Print ’em up and put them in your next collages. If you get really inspired by one of your set ups, draw it into your journal before breaking it down. A great way to practice your drawing, too.
Ruffles
Posted: March 1, 2012 in photographyTags: ARTpool Gallery, new art work, photography, shop window
I love love love this shot of a multi-tiered ruffled skirt that appeared on a mannaquin at ARTpool Gallery last month. The color of the skirt is a full blown red which did not interest me near as much as this image with the color removed. Often, black and white images are so much more intriguing than the original colored item. Sometimes the color of an object elicits such an initially strong emotional reaction that the beauty of the item is lost. Using a photo with these qualities makes a terrific study for drawing…just one ruffle would make a gorgeous rendering in your journal. Don’t overlook pictures with “nothing going for them” but texture because when these photos are turned to black and white in your photo editor they reveal their “true colors”. Have fun and don’t forget to practice your tonal drawings.
Day of the Dragonfly
Posted: February 28, 2012 in art journalTags: altered book, art journaling, journaling, mixed media, new art work, stamp, stitching
Last summer we had epic rain which resulted in the spawn of mosquito larvae on our flat roof which was holding puddles of water. About this time, dragonflies reached all time highs in populations and record breaking sizes and colors. I even saw a rare for this area bright red dragonfly; most of them here are an iridescent greenish-blue or brown. It was not unusual to see dragonflies last summer the size of birds, and in packs of 50+ swarming the backyard. If I had an ounce less of dragonfly love it would have been positively creepy and The Mist-y. I commemorated one dragonfly filled day with this journal page. I have a ginormous dragonfly stamp and did a lot of coloring with marker over top of already pretty scrapbooking paper. Patterns and lines were made using a white gel pen and I found a cute tree frog in a magazine to paste onto a wing looking like he was getting a free ride. Whee! I sewed around the edge of the page when it was finished with a blanket stitch. I love this page because it reminds me of a real day in the backyard enjoying nature and because of all the summer colors in it.
Fierce with reality
Posted: February 25, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, journaling, new art work, pen/ink drawing, terry lee getz
Sometimes a journal page is nearly an excuse to document a quote. Or it can seem that way, unless you do something, anything, to showcase the quote in a new setting. For some reason that I do not begin to remember, I decided to make this quote into a turban like headdress and do a partial portrait of a wise woman beneath it. The quote is by Florida Scott-Maxwell, who I am not familiar with nor had I heard this quote before but I loved it immediately and wanted to save it to refer back to. I ended up loving this page even tho it is a bit sparse. There is so much to think about in the quote I did not really want to distract from that thought by putting in a bunch of color or textures or patterns. This is pastel chalk directly onto a naked white journal page, no special paper, no gesso. Just a sharpie, white page and a tad of planning–not much, though. I wanted the page to remain fresh when I view it. As a side note, I also see in this page which was done months ago, an interest in more white space which is on my mind these days when I make art. Not that you’d really notice a change yet…still in the percolating stage.
Crow on a wire at twilight
Posted: February 24, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, new art work, painted canvas, painting
Although this piece is on canvas board I consider it an art journal piece. The canvas had an image on it that did not work out and I began to play around from scratch over top of it. The crow kind of materialized out of the darker paint I was using to cover the previous work. I believe there is metallic paint in several colors on the crow and the rest of the color is regular acrylic. A white pen was used to journal a shrine-like shape around the bird. I love crows although I find them hard to render unless I am stamping them in black ink in a really graphic way. All that dark can make definition hard to achieve to separate areas of the body and face. I “solved” the problem somewhat in this piece by doing some sweeping lines with the white pen, which gave the bird some personality and unified the body of the bird with the rest of the piece. Certainly not my favorite piece, nor best created, but I did resolve the problem of a canvas that was not working at all and turned this into a decent journal page. I will copy it and paste it into my altered map journal one of these days.
Crickyn 