Mandarin Orange Toss

All finished.  This one was a lot of fun to paint.  It's amazing how much more paint, tea bags, coffee filters and gel medium I went through painting larger.    If I painted this big all the time I would definitely be ordering from Dick Blick more than once or twice a year!  Both pictures are photos.  The colors are off.  The blues are more aqua and turquoise like the bottom picture.  The painting is too big for my scanner! 
I haven't come up with a name for it yet, but in the upper left corner is an old recipe I ripped out of a cookbook and the recipe is called Mandarin Orange Toss Salad, so I just might name this Mandarin Orange Toss.  I kind of like the randomness of it.

Little bird houses

This painting gave me a bit more trouble than planned.  I knew right away I wanted to do a painting with bird houses in a similar style as my "Our Town" painting.  It was going along well and then things weren't looking or feeling right.  Last night I started ripping the little roofs off, and then ripping off some of the houses, and trying out different colors and different scrapbook papers for the roofs, but nothing was working, so I went to bed, afraid that I might continue to destroy it.  I knew that tomorrow was a new day and things might look completely different.  I was right.

As soon as I looked at it this morning, I knew what was wrong.  My bird houses and their roof tops were mostly autumn colors, I needed spring colors.  The autumn colors just didn't seem to go well with the little blue birds whom seemed to be busy building their little nests.  As soon as I realized this, everything started to come together.  I ditched the scrapbook roofs for old paper doilies glued on top of tea bags which were then glued onto painted coffee filters, changed the color of a few of the houses,  and added a few little flowers to make it look even happier.

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!

Bison

Bison are such a unique and amazing animal.  One of my  highlights when we went to Yellowstone was waking up, looking out our window of the Old Faithful Lodge and seeing the bison.  The morning was cold and foggy, but their big dark figures contrasted beautifully against the colors of the geysers and hot springs.  It was one of those moments that will be etched in my mind forever.

Last summer on one of my running routes, there were two bison that were always out to pasture.  As I would start running past them, the one would come running up the field towards me, it always frightened me a bit as it came bounding through the long grass, only an electric fence between me and it, but just as it would reach the fence it would change direction and then it would  run the length of it with me.  A little unnerving, but kind of cool.

This piece came together pretty quickly.  I recently saw a picture of bison walking through Yellowstone and the hot springs and was inspired by the bright red, orange, and yellowy rust colors of the hot springs.  I painted a bunch of tea bags in these wonderful colors and tore them in strips and glued them down over coffee stained paper.  The dark brown strips in the painting are from a very concentrated coffee.  I love how rich the color is when I do that.  The clouds and sky are watercolor and gesso together which gives it a wonderful feathery kind of appearance.   The bison are cut from painted coffee filters.  I didn't do a lot of embellishing to this piece because I feel like it works just as it is and has the feeling that I'm looking for.

And a New Year begins

Hello and Happy New Year!

 

I woke up on New Years Day and decided that I would spend most of the day painting and drawing,  totally guilt free, not worrying about all the Christmas messiness that surrounded me.  I thought this would be the perfect way to spend the first day of the year, doing what I love and also knowing that this was what I wanted for the rest of the year too.

And what a productive little day I had.  I need to do this more often.  I tend to paint a little bit here and there, whenever I can sneak it in, never quite getting into the flow.  So maybe my New Year's Resolution needs to be to commit to one day a week of nothing but painting and drawing.  A day where I can work without worrying about vacuuming or dirty bathrooms or laundry.  I think it might be a fun resolution to try and work on.

I've been thinking about taking Misty Mawn's  "Face to Face" with Mixed Media Art:  A study of portraits and beyond and I think that is how this painting came about.  This piece started with my usual coffee stained background and then I glued tea bags over the top of it  and it created a wonderful brown background with subtle tones and variations.   Her face was created with light colored tea bags, charcoal and acrylics.  Her hair from painted coffee filters.  Her dress is part coffee filters, tissue paper, gesso and charcoal.  

Fischer my son looked at her with a wrinkled up nose and said "she looks like she is from another country"  and I think he is right.  My niece left for Spain the day after Christmas to study for a semester, perhaps there was a Spanish influence? 

I'm imagining her partner with a big black mustache.

More Autumn

Some more fall goodness to share with you.  When I first started this piece, I had no intention of putting crows in it.   I knew I wanted pumpkins, leaves and acorns in it and later after the piece was finished I remembered that I had wanted to include the old fashioned corn stacks, such as the Amish do when they "shock" their corn.  But since I forgot all about the corn, the piece ended up with crows instead and I think it probably turned out for the better.

"Autumn"  available here

I'm having so much fun with my coffee and watercolor washes for the background.    The leaves were cut from recycled tea bags and everything else is made from recycled coffee filters.  We use the brown unbleached coffee filters for our coffee.   When you paint on them,  the colors aren't as bright   as if you were to use white ones, the colors tend to be darker which works very well for the fall palette.   With the leaves you can really see the difference between the shades of tea bags I used.  The darker ones like the oak leaves are from chai and the lighter ones are from herbal teas like lemon ginger.  Our family has been sick a lot lately with sore throats and runny noses so we've been drinking tons of tea, both bulk and in bags.  It seems my supply of tea bags is never ending which is really quite perfect for me! (not the sick family part of course!)

a little fairy goodness

 
here's a sweet little fairy that i finished up today.  i'm really happy with the results.  i've noticed that a lot of my paintings have turquoise in them, so i tried to use a different color palette.  the little butterflies in her hair were a complete accident.  i used painted coffee filters for her hair and after it dried,  some of the darker pieces formed a little butterfly on the left side in the most perfect spot, so i then repeated it for the right side.  don't you just love it when accidents like that happen?

have a wonderful weekend!  i know ours is going to be a snowy one!