Flowers a flutter

I finally finished the piece I've been working on for the past week or so.  It has a very summery kind of feel to it.  The color palate is very similar to my last painting  with the orioles in it.   I think they would go well together.

The part that took me the longest with this painting are the leaves.  It's probably hard to tell on the monitor, but each leaf segment is a separate piece of paper.  There are a couple segments per leaf in which it is watercolor right on the paper, but otherwise they are cut from either painted tea bags or coffee filters and then glued to the paper with gel medium.  It took me a full day to complete all of them. The flowers were created with painted tea bags and then I dipped the edges in a darker paint. The flower center is coffee filter and the stamens are with black ink.  The little butterflies made from tea bags and then painted with acrylic and black ink.

I'm starting to feel the call of spring.  The days are starting to get longer, I've noticed the birds are singing a little bit more and my chickens are much more active and they walk around with a happy little cluck.

Have a Happy Weekend!

Finch and Crow

This little guy was inspired by the sweet little purple finches that have been coming to our feeder this spring.  A beautiful bird with a wonderful song to sing.

I played around a bit with this piece.  I started with some nice splattering of coffee for the background and then drew in the bird.  I used a lot more watercolors in this piece than I'm  normally comfortable with.  I still haven't quite figured out watercolors yet, but I keep trying to work with them and find a technique or style that I like using.   The feathers were done with painted recycled coffee filters and tea bags.  The outlines were done with some homemade walnut ink.  Originally I was going to leave the background alone, but it just looked so plain and empty to me, and then I just kept adding and adding with watercolor, painted tissue paper and tea bags.  Hopefully I didn't add too much!

The crows around here have also been entertaining us.  This little guy left the nest on Friday and anytime ANYTHING got near it, it's parents would cause quite a raucous.  Cawing and cawing until whatever it was left.  They even chased several cats over the weekend, at one point there was about 8 crows going after one cat!  When our kids or our dog would go out to the swing set, the crows would sit just above in the trees and yell and yell  at them.  Very impressive parenting!  Today I found him out on our fence.  The parents were near by cawing a bit, but then left.  I'm wondering if they think he is old enough now to take care of himself?  I'm not sure.  This little guy stayed on the fence for about 45 minutes and then finally flew away to the top of our neighbors chicken coop.  I love watching the crows, so big and really quite beautiful,  such a smart bird that doesn't get the respect it deserves!

Playing around

I love reusing tea bags in my artwork.   Fortunately for me there seems to be no shortage of them at our house.  I love the look, transparency, the feel and their durability.  Sometimes the color of them can be a challenge.  In my head I wanted these flowers to be a brighter pink, but many times with the tea bags you get a darker color.  Of course it depends too on what kind of tea was in the bag.  My morning Chai makes for a darker tea bag, while my afternoon  green tea is usually very light colored.

When I want a truer color I choose the lightest tea bags as possible.  These flowers were painted with watercolors and then I used acrylic paint and white ink for the stripes.  Usually I paint them with a very watered down acrylic, like the brown circles in the painting.  When you use acrylics though you loose a lot of the transparency. 


 
                                                                            Print available here.


My goal for this painting was to just play around a little bit with the tea bags and  especially with patterns.  It started out feeling very rigid and tight, but I feel like I got over that and I'm feeling happy with the results.