I love Saturday mornings when I can do as I please. Since tomorrow is Mother's Day here in the US-of-A, I had a grocery order delivered with some things I want to take to my Mom's tomorrow to snack on for anyone that randomly shows up. We are not having a formal lunch or dinner, just a day of family folks floating in and out whenever they please. Miracle of miracles, everything I wanted was accounted for in the order, so I will not have to make extra stops for missing, out of stock items. YAY ! I will prepare the parts that need preparing this evening or in the morning. Not much of that to do thankfully.
I also have a pile of stuff to drop at Good Will today. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, I am continuing to clean out all the nooks and crannies in the house. Although I've done this over and over through the years, a lot of "stuff" has kept making the cut, but this time I am DEEP cutting and seeing how much I can get out of here by donating. In the last month or 6 weeks, I have been slowly gathering "things" in the evenings as I come across them and packing them in tote bags, then dropping them off at Good Will before going in the store and seeing if they have anything else I might use in my art. I really enjoy both parts. It makes Saturdays fun to me.
A couple nights ago, I had new junk mail, so like I showed in a couple of posts ago, I have started painting it up instead of shredding and trashing. It worked out good last time, so I am continuing. I don't get as much junk mail as I used too, but still to much. It kind of annoys and saddens me that companies are SO wasteful sending out all this paper. I mean, I LOVE paper in general for my art, but ... well.... you know.... anyway....
This time I played with a few stencils over several papers and instead of just stenciling once in one color, on some I tried something I saw where you stencil a color and then leave the stencil and put more, different colors on. I thought this one turned out the best and I know this will be something I will use more going forward.
The background on this paper was just some yellow and pinks that mixed and made some oranges, with no particular design. After it was dry, I used a flower stencil with dark paint on the right, thought it was too dark and stark and then remembered seeing someone putting the stencil back in the same place and dotting another color over, so that is what I did with the aqua color and although it doesn't pop out, I also used some magenta, which still helped mute the dark paint down some. I filled in on the other side doing the same thing, but without that very dark base to start with.
Quite a lovely outcome and it will be fun to use parts of it in some future collage.
This was also one I had prepainted the background before and I stenciled on it with black and/or dark gray. I liked it till I saw how much better the other one looked, so I may go back and add some color shadowing on the black part tonight to see if I can kick it up a notch.
I used the flower stencil on the bottom part of this photo, cool colors on the orange background. I thought that was done, but no, after making the better piece later, I decided to go back and stencil over this one too. I also like how it came out.
What a MESS!... but some very nice colors for collaging.
While I was cleaning out my Old Auntie's toy basket, I came across an old party favor that was shaped like a hand. Instead of throwing it out, I tore it apart and kept the hand shaped piece to try in my paint marking and I used that last night too as you can see. It looks very much like child art and it made me smile, so I will be keeping the hand pieces in my paint shapes bucket. It's a keeper.
This is what it looked like before I tore it apart. The shiny hand shaped parts, when shaken, will clack against a hard center stem attached to the handle and it makes a hideously loud noise. It came on a cheap bead necklace and lets you do one-hand-clapping. LOL... weird and fun.... and now elevated to an art tool
I've accumulated lots of paints, various brands and thicknesses over time. I am attempting to use up some of the older ones as I make the collage papers. These aren't that old, but when I made the paper behind the bottles on the left, I liked the combination so good, that I wanted to remember exactly what I used. Since I have mixed brands and multiple shades of similar colors, it would be hard to remember, so I decided that maybe when I find something I like, I will take a photo like this to show what I used. My phone is always at my art desk with me and it only takes seconds.... AND I will make a file to keep them in to refer back to later if needed. Genius.... right ?? 😂
Here's the last little piece of painted junk mail for now. It looks like I spilled cottage cheese on it or something I think, but the colors are nice and surprisingly, sooner or later there is some collage piece that parts of crazy papers like this fit really well on. Time will tell if any of this piece ends up being that part.
Ok, time to get outdoor clothes on and get the car loaded for the Good Will run.
I leave you with strawberries.... yes, with a sinful amount of sugar on them. I bought them at the local garden market. I have bought strawberries there for years and they have always been awesome, so I was lulled into thinking they would be now too, only to find when I got home that they are indeed beautiful, but sour! Drats! So.... I sugared some for later. It's still pretty.
I hope you have all had a good week and are enjoying a most wonderful weekend.
