Collage Kickstart: Working with a Limited Color Palette This was a great 5-day, FREE workshop by Catherine Rains. Today, I’m playing with a warm color palette, which is not one I usually gravitate toward. Today’s focus was circles and included a resist technique of using glue and tar gel (cool, stringy medium) to create dimension. In playing with the circles (such a freeing shape to paint) and them wiping off my glue and tar gel sheets, my paper towels looked like tie-dye. So they are now in the pile drying, too. (My husband is cringing because I saved the used paper towels. Opening holiday gifts, I also got the side eye for saving tissue paper, wrapping paper, ribbons, and even the craft paper the mailed boxes were wrapped in.) Every surface of my studio is covered in the warmth of these colors. I’ll work with a cool palette later. Love this workshop ! My chosen color palette is Liquitex cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow deep, burnt sienna, burnt umber, raw umber, mars black and tita...

  Collage Kickstart Live Day 4: Circle Swirls & Finger Painting With a variety of lids and a palette of acrylic paint, making these circle swirls was addicting. They really looked interesting when the lid was dipped in a few different colored paints and kinda smushed around in a repeating circle.  Adding a gold/white mix of paint looked really stunning on tissue paper. (Gold paint is so cool!)   Finger painting is what we all know from our youth, but in this technique after swirling around a mixture of paints with fingers on plastic, the paper is sprayed with water and another paper is placed on top, creating interesting texture . 

Collage Kickstart Live Day 2: Straws and Bubbles I’ve been having a grand time with the classes I’m taking in the Collage Kickstart Live w/ Catherine Raines. Today’s lesson involved making bubble papers. Getting the perfect ratio of acrylic paint, water, and dish soap was very tricky, and it seems as if success is a random chance. I spent ALL day experimenting with blowing bubbles and just playing. I think I gained some youth back! My husband came home from playing 18 holes of golf and could not believe I was still playing with bubbles and straws. I only had a few bubble papers that I really like; playing with the ratio, the type of paint, and the technique was fun but ultimately frustrating . Luck-of-the-draw sort of thing, I think . I had SO much paint left over in my cups (mostly instant coffee, white acrylic, and India ink), and the straw was calling my name. So I did some straw art .  After getting light-headed from straw-blowing, I brought out the big guns. . . the Tim Holtz...

Day 1: Asemic Writing (Intention) A perfect lesson to help focus my intentions by writing them down.  Next step is using asemic writing (  explained here ). I wrote on copy paper, kraft paper, deli paper, and tissue paper using a neutral palette as well as both warm and cool colors. With all of this paper (500 deli sheets and a new roll of painters’s paper) it’s easy to get carried away with making fodder. The more I wrote a really loose, distinctive style emerged. I loved the intention aspect of this exercise; I could have done this all day. In fact, I did!

Sa shiko Sashiko is a traditional form of Japanese embroidery, usually in white thread on blue fabric. The repetition and preciseness of the stitched pattern is calming and reflective. 

 

 

col dne ss Blue is the coldest color in color theory. This piece screams cold to me. Frosty, rough ice above a frigid but vibrant world filled with wonder. 

  ne w mo on  The new moon, the point in the month where the earth is directly between the sun and moon, and the start of the lunar cycle. A opportunity to re-focus our minds, connect ourselves to the natural world, refresh, and yawp. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. ~ Walt Whitman

  grate fulness

  blu e th read This piece was created with a thread dipped in acrylic ink, smashed between a page spread,  and swirled around. It was all about letting go of the result and going with the flow. Paint, mark-making, and text from my stash of sentence strips cut out of books finished it off.  Swirling around inked thread took me back to my childhood art days. This one was fun and freeing.