The Urge to Dissect

I got a handsome postcard from Terrie in the mail today (thank you!) and have had some fun trying to fathom the layers. At first I thought there was green patterned paper under the green and blue overpainting. Now I’m inclined to think that all of the background is handpainted paper.

Then I got noodling over the little bubbles of lighter green across the top and in the lower right. I don’t know any way to make little bubbles just like that, so I hope Terrie is going to tell me.

The dark plant forms are very opaque and smooth. Done in what medium?? And with so much control…. The two stems on the right are outlined in metallic bronze. Aha! That, I know how to do. The outlining doesn’t show clearly in the scan but picks up the light in a lovely subtle way when you shift the card back and forth.

Whoops, almost forgot to mention the spatter. It looks just like snow.

Finally, I picked up that this card is part of a set made from one larger piece of art. I should do that more often.

This was fun. Probably you’ll see me imitate this some time in the near future.

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Winter Be Gone

For the longest time, I didn’t think I could make one art-journal page of these two facing pages, because the page backgrounds are very different: scrapbook paper in jaundiced shades of gold, green and maroon on the left and Caribbean greens and blues painted over an old book page on the right.

I think in the end I did that, though, by aggressively hauling the bright blue to the left and using some very strong rust brown on both sides. An ancient blue highlighter pen helped a lot with that. The page is very busy but has little threads of coherence. And I really like the mauve-pink butterfly-like object on the left, which came from a reply card in an issue of American Craft; I think it is a brooch made of wire.

While I was working on this page, a musician on local radio was singing, “Under the snow, seeds start to grow … under the snow, seeds start to say ‘hello.'” We have had two snows in March and might get one more, yet the daffodils don’t seem to care.

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