Needa Cuppa

The idea for this painting has been in my head for a couple of weeks now and I finally dragged it out and got it on paper. My ideas are usually not finished in my head, so there's an element of surprise as I work one out. I'd like a catchier title, but this will do for now. And as I live with it, I may find I want to do more but I don't know what yet.

Sylvie's Pups

My friend Sylvie's basset hound had three puppies recently and shared some of the photos she's taken. I couldn't resist painting this one. So cute.

Red Shard

The beginning of this image woke me in the night a few days ago and I finally got it on paper yesterday. It's mostly black gesso on watercolor paper with white gesso sloppily over the top, then collaged with lighter paper also painted with black gesso and plain white paper. The red is tissue paper and the lines are pastel.

We ended our mixed media workshop yesterday and all (almost) went out
to dinner together. It was all great, great fun, although I'm
exhausted today. Here are the last 2 paintings. The black one was one
of those wonderful accidents that sometimes happen. I painted a sheet
of illustration board (18" x 29") with black gesso, then put a piece
of waxed paper that I'd folded in a couple of places over part of the
wet gesso. When it was dry, I took the waxed paper off and a
wonderful, woodcut-like pattern appeared in the gesso and the reverse
on the waxed paper. That's the darker patterned part. I glued some of
the printed waxed paper on top with a single layer of tissue paper under it. In the borders where the pattern wasn't, I glued some papers on for texture and did another layer of the black gesso. Finally, with a light gray pastel, I made some lines and little squares.

On the last day of the workshop, we were to take in some people sketches we had. If you've ever taken a figure drawing class, you know that you end up with heaps of quick sketches. That sort of
thing. Then we used all or parts of those sketches as collage material on a background we'd painted and integrated them by going over parts with paint, etc. Mine wasn't working very well until I drew a face practically in the middle and painted around it.

Workshop, Day 2

For the red and black collage, I was working an overall design which got too busy and too scattered. In desperation, I put some paint in the middle and stuck a piece of waxed paper over it, then coated the rest of the mess with black gesso. The teacher loved it, talked about the layering and the depth, so I stopped there.






The all red one seemed to develop into tree-like shapes, so I built on that and added some collage, some pastel and some letters.

Glascow Skyscraper

Today was the first day of a three-day, mixed media workshop taught by Nancy Barch, the artist with whom we've studied for the last 6-8 years. The group is small, 7 people, and all are women I've painted with before, some regularly. Nancy does wonderful abstracted and non-representational work (take a look at http://www.nancybarch.com/) and her classes are always fun and productive. Anyway, this painting is what I did today. It has mostly watercolor. Then I used a bit of collage, some pastel, some white gesso and some acrylic paint. The whole process is very intuitive. Glascow is the only Scottish city I've seen, and since it has an interesting mix of old buildings and modern skyscrapers, the title of the work came easily.