For this piece, I also began with a gesso resist under a wash of acrylic, using a rubber stamp of a pear.  You can still barely see the imprint of the pear just under the crow’s shoulder.  After pasting on scraps of greenish textured paper and repeating washes of red-iron-oxide colored paint, I decided it was time to stop dicking around with the background and make some kind of a focal point.

I wanted to repeat the pear motif, while adding a little elegance to the piece, so I used golden joss paper.  Joss paper is the fake money that Chinese people burn for the dead at New Year’s.  It’s thin, cheap, and bleeds like crazy, so it’s good for certain kinds of collage. I folded it in half and trimmed it into the pear shape, then pasted it onto the paper with acrylic medium. The acrylic kind of made it shiny around it in a halo, but it was supposed to be matte, so I don’t know why.

My pieces have been hankering for a little more realism.  Acrylic would have worked better, but the clean up is such a nuisance that I decided to resort to colored pencils despite the way they exaggerate the texture.   With a little shading, the pear looked much more like a piece of fruit and a lot less like a pear-shaped piece of joss paper.

Now for the bird.  I’d cut some raven linoblocks, but again, getting out the acrylic seemed like a huge nuisance, so instead I just drew a crow’s head using the black colored pencil.

I started out with the gesso resist. I used a greenish wash in the background, with a Victorian bookplate design stamp providing the resist. Since I almost always stick to blue+orange as my color theme, I decided to vary it and go with a sage green+red iron oxide color theme.  I did a wash of reddish paint over the green.  I had some paper that matched the color scheme, so I pasted bits of it all over, then let it dry.  Then I did a wash of titan buff over that, trying to make the paper look like it wasn’t just bits of paper glued down randomly.

By now it looked pretty bad.  Â

I’d done a technique earlier to make paint look like it was peeling, and decided that if I ruined this it wasn’t like I was throwing away a masterpiece. First you smear petroleum jelly haphazardly over the piece. Then you paint a solid wash of color over the whole thing and let it all dry.  (The letting-it-dry stages are why these pieces can take me a week or more to finish, and why I usually do two to four simultaneously.) When the paint is dried, you rub off the petroleum jelly, and the paint flakes off like it’s old.  It also makes the surface kind of greasy, which is partly why I did the gesso in the next step.

I had an idea of a woman with a box where her heart was supposed to be, and a bird flying in the box. The original name of this post was going to be “The Box-Shaped Heart,” a sort of pun on the title of the Nirvana song.  In my head it was really beautiful. You’ll have to take my word for it.Â

I didn’t want to try to paint something directly over the background, because my crappy paints can’t handle it, so I first painted it with gesso. The right side got a little messed up, but I told myself it didn’t matter, that I wasn’t going for imperfect.

When that gesso dried, I tried to sand it.  It didn’t get as smooth as I’d hoped, so instead of using colored pencils, I just mixed up some acrylic and asked myself “how hard can it be?”

I do wonder if I’ll ever get over my aversion to acrylic.  The colors just don’t seem to mix like I wanted. The highlights don’t look natural.  With watercolor, if you want the same shade a little lighter, you just mix water. And if it’s not dark enough, you just add a little more paint. With acrylic, when you add white, it gets cartoony. This is what I dislike most about acrylics most of the time when I see paintings in galleries: the colors just aren’t true.

Enough complaining. I got the left side to look right, but the right side’s outline was pre-determined by the placement of the gesso, and there was no way I could make an arm look that fat and have it natural, so I made it a wing instead, inspired by Shweta Narayan’s poem “Half Flight.”  By then I realized that if the figure had half a wing, it wasn’t going to be a girl, it had to be a boy, like the young prince in the fairy tale. So I left the face as it was, half shadowed and indistinct.

I wanted a realistic bird in the box.  I can draw realistic birds, especially if I have a thousand Google images to inspire me. So I drew a sketch of a flying tern, and then a smaller pencil drawing in exactly the right size.  I cut it out and placed it over the picture.  It didn’t work at all.  I taped the drawing into my sketchbook and started over.Â

I had a piece of a magazine that thankfully at least matched the color scheme.  I tore off a piece that looked big enough and turned it over, sketching until I had the outline of a bird. Then I cut it out, taking extra care to get some detail around the lee edge of the wing.  After I glued it onto the piece, it didn’t stand out enough, so I touched it up with black and titan buff acrylic washes.  Time to stick a fork in it and call it done.

All learning experiences, right?

I started out with a gesso resist technique, using a wash of light brown and a stamped gesso design.  Honestly I can’t remember how it looked, except that I made the mistake of thinking I’d draw a picture on the background and use it as a springboard for another design.

There’s a school of thought that the only kind of 2D one should strive for is photo-realism.  As much as I admire realistic art, I didn’t want to devote my art to trying to duplicate in many years and many hours of practice what a camera can do in 1/15th of a second, so I shifted my focus to 3D, but I still have the internal inistence on perfection.  Always I have in my head what the real thing looks like, and the drawing is measured up to that image.   I feel exposed when I draw and paint: I was taught to draw as realistically as possible, and I can’t help but try, and then I fail. 

Part of the goal of this project, and my new focus on mixed media in general, is to learn to be more comfortable with chaos, with representation that’s not totally faithful. Non-realistic drawing and painting, like belly fat, looks endearing when it’s someone else’s, but I can’t (yet) tolerate it on myself.  Considering how I cringed when I saw my sharpie-cartoon sketch of a songbird, I have a long way to go.  48 birds might not be enough.

I took a piece of orange-and-gold joss paper and adhered it over the support, which partially obscured the drawing I was so ashamed of.  It didn’t obscure it completely, but I had a tube of liquitex acrylic, which is much, much better than the little jars of Apple Barrel and Ceramcoat you get at Michael’s. 

I didn’t think I’d be able to paint a realistic looking wing, but I didn’t have to.  I’d drawn one on a piece of cardstock earlier, and cut it out, so I had a stencil.  It worked so well that I decided to paint a little bird flying in the sky.  As with most my acrylic attempts, it turned out like crap.  You couldn’t even tell it was a bird.

I’d been given these little memory-game cards in a Christmas card from our Czech exchange student.  My self-imposed prohibition against using others’ art draws the line at cards (Tarot, playing, Mexican lottery, etc.)  So I chose this one and pasted it over the bird-shaped blemish.  I tapped a little gold mica powder into the acrylic gel medium so that it had the same sheen as the gold wash over the joss paper and the gold paint in the wing.

Then I had an idea.  Would pen and ink work over acrylic? I didn’t think so, but it was matte medium, and I’d sanded it smooth, so I decided to try anyway.  Now I know.  Sometimes you can use pen and ink over acrylic.  The words came out of the somewhat biblical imagery of the card, and from the double-meaning of the word “fled”.

I had read about some gesso resist techniques and wanted to try them.  The author, whose article appeared in a magazine called “Apprentice Building Blocks” from Somerset, neglected to mention whether one had ot paint the background with paint before doing the gesso resist, or whether you were to just paint the gesso on plain paper.  So I tried both. 

Since I had the gesso out anyway, I layered gesso over this support and used a stamp to impress a sort of Italianate boss.  After it dried, I did a wash of gold paint, and then another wash of red iron oxide paint.  It looked fantastic, and I was sure this was going to be an excellent piece. However, I managed to ruin it.

My color themes gravitate towards blue+orange. I’m not sure why.  Of all the opposite colors, blue/orange is my favorite pair.  So natrually, I decided to add some blue to this.  I had some tissuepaper with a toile design on it, so I tore a sheet off and pasted it on.  This instantly turned my favorite promising start into something that didn’t work.

Next, I did a wash of blue over it.  This made it even worse, obscuring what little remained of the design in the gesso.  While the paint was still wet, I pressed my sparrow linoblock into it.  You could barely see the sparrow, but it was a start.

What it needed, I decided, were some words.  Yellow words, stamped with one of my myriad stamp sets.  So I got out some acrylic paint and mixed up a good shade, then spread it out flat so I could stamp in it.  This technique is mentioned in nearly every magazine about collage and mixed media I’ve ever seen–and it never works!  Not here, at least, with our low humidity. All it does is make the stamps dirty.  I’ve been able to make it work if I mix it with acrylic gel retarder, but that’s kind of a nuisance step.

Here’s what I like about acrylic:  It sticks to just about everything, which means you can use it to paint over mixed-media surfaces.

Here’s what I dislike about acrylic: everything else.

I know some people are able to make fabulous paintings with acrylic, but since my painting focus was always on watercolor, I find that when I paint with acrylic I feel like I’m painting with q-tips and toothpaste.  I just don’t have the control I’m used to, and without control, I can’t make something that looks realistic. Often, I can’t even make anything that looks good.  More on this later.

Since the stamps were a dismal failure, I started to scratch the letters through the top layer of paint instead.  I have a blade I bought for scraffito, but it won’t wedge into my pen-nib holder far enough and the blade wobbles.  I tried a different scraffito tool, but it was too sharp and just cut the paper all the way through.  Finally I just dipped a brush in the gold/yellow paint and wrote “Darling”.  I had a whole poem in mind, but the letting looked so crappy that I gave it up. 

I used the rest of the yellow to highlight the sparrow and to bring out some of the boss design, then stuck a fork in it and called it done. I’m not terribly proud of this, but it was a learning experience.  It’s all a learning experience.

For this piece, as with the previous one, I was hoping for a faint scratchy surface texture, like a print from a scratched negative or an etching.  My attempts to do this with beeswax were messy and unsatisfactory, so I decided to use the slight-resist properties of gesso to do the same thing.

I had an image in my head, something floral and radially symmetrical.  I used a compass and sketched this flower. I wanted something like a Japanese cherry blossom boss.  Naturally, the images in my head look nowhere near as cool as the ones on paper.  After I had the outline, I filled it in with red marker.

I’d just like to say for the record that markers have never really impressed me. They always seem like little-kid toys.  Even crayons have more of a place in my art than markers.  My sister swears by them for inking rubber stamps, and I suppose they do that well, but they are very underwhelming in other contexts.  One color will stain another marker, for example, so if you’re filling in a black outline with a red marker, your red marker will get black on it and stain black therever after.  They’re also completely water-soluble, which can be a pain or a boon.

I decided to call it a boon when the gesso smeared the flower.  It still looked okay.  I painted gesso and clear acrylic medium over the rest of the watercolor paper and let it dry.  When it was dry, I went over it with sandpaper, rubbing it in circles.  After brushing the dust off, I painted it with India ink, then quickly washed it under the faucet. 

That worked beautifully.  Unlike with the wax, with gesso and acrylic medium, you have a huge amount of control over how well or little the ink stays.  The ink didn’t wash out of the lines, since they were incised down to the paper.

I wanted a bird of some sort, and my  first thought was to do an oil paint/gum arabic print from a photocopy.  I decided to save that for another piece, as that sort of printing is more blobby and indistinct and I wanted an image that brought out the fine lines.  Instead I just drew a little sparrow with an 005 ink pen.

Every time I see beeswax collages in the art magazines, it looks really fabulous. Every time I try to replicate it, the results are messy and frustrating. I think it doesn’t help that I’m lacking the correct tools.  I use a heat gun and a ceramic dish (I learned not to use metal!) instead of a variable temp crock pot.

The effect I wanted to repliate was that of an etching, with very fine lines, and I wanted it whimsically unrealistic.  I wanted something like amonster in the background, so I drew one as poorly as I could using an 005 fine line marker.  You can still see the oval of the monster’s face.

I melted white beeswax and started layering it on.  This is messy, messy, messy.  As soon as it touches the paper, it solidifies, and yet when I use the heat gun directly on the paper, it soaks in making the watercolor paper look somewhat translucent.  I smeared it and smoothed it as best I could using a tiny palette knife that I’d bought for chinapainting.

Once that was done, I scratched the surface all over with a scraffito tool that’s very sharp.  This, surely, would give me the fine lines I wanted.  After that, I painted the whole thing with India ink, then wiped it off.  Um, not quite what I was looking for.  My assumption was that the ink would seep through where I’d scratched the wax away, soaking into the paper while resisting off the wax.  Instead, the ink stains the beeswax just fine.

A second problem emerged when I tried to attach the birds.  I’d cut them out of a chocolate wrapper I saved, and needed to attach them, but I presumed that nothing would stick well to wax except wax itself, so I got out my heat gun and another couple blobs of beeswax.  Naturally, the wax solidified as soon as I took it out of the ceramic vessel, so that the birds wouldn’t stick.  Eventually I got frustrated and just put the heat gun directly on the piece.  This made the ink blister off the melted wax, creating white blobs.  Finally I got the birds to stick, but one of them didn’t stand out well against the gray background, so I outlined it with ink, smearing it around the edges for a halo.

The only thing that went right with this is the photography.  On the premise that you can’t possibly have too much light when photographing art, I decided to just take it outside and shoot it under the noon sun.    I had to adjust the gamma downward in the editing, but except for that, I think I’ve hit upon a very successful, easy method of photographing 2D art. After all, if there’s one thing we have plenty of in Arizona, it’s sun. 

Once again I started with watercolor paper, and wrote on it with a calligraphy dip pen. I wrote “There were facts about ravens she didn’t want the others to know.”  Once again it became quickly apparent that plain writing on a white background is BORING.  When I’d finished with the paint washes and tissue paper layers, the writing was completly obscured. 

I’d added bits of other papers too, in keeping with the color theme.  One is the washi with stars, one is he striped handmade paper, and one is the vintage domino ad.  I saw something  in a magazine where there were stripes of pretty paper arching over a box. I painted an arched rectangle with gesso, then looked for papers. The paper I had didn’t look right.

So, instead, I outlined the box with blue oil pastel.  Suddenly the inside looked dull, so I drew inside it with the red oil pastel.  Oil pastels look a lot like crayon, but you can smear it a little.  Smearing it helped. A little. I tried to draw outlines with sharpies and ended up ruining two sharpies.  Sharpies do not like to draw on an oily surface.

I used a scraffito tool to scratch branches in the center of the rectangle, and a small figure in the transom arch.  Then I painted on the gesso with India ink and wiped it off.  That did not quite have the effect I had hoped for.  I was going to gesso a bird outline so I could paint it in with acrylic later, but once I’d painted the white bird I decided that was okay.

The writing at the top of the arch, in my opinion, was a disaster.  First of all, I misquoted myself.  Secondly, despite being afraid of ruining another sharpie, no other pen writes well on gesso. Thirdly, my lettering was terrible.

But the purpose of this project is not to create a series of masterpieces, it’s to practice and get better at mixed media.

Good news, camera tripods can hold spotlights too, which is good, because you apparently want a spot that is some distance away from the piece so as to avoid glare. I’m still not 100% happy with these photos.  Bad news, the spotlight clamp has a tendency to scratch the top of the tripod.  I have a plan for a better design, but it involves some things which may or may not exist at the hardware store.

I have been wanting to embark on a collage project. That is to say, I want to start practicing in earnest to become a better mixed media artist.  I had a theme in mind: 99 Ravens.  I like pictures with ravens, after all, so why not do a series of mixed media with that as the subject?  But 99 might be too many.  The parameters of the project itself might be a learning experience.

But first things first.  I had one pair of pages left in my art journal that my sister and I started a couple of years ago.  I ended up only using part of the pair of collage pieces that I made for that, and this is one of them.  I have a notebook of black paper, and I had an idea that if I made the pieces of a small, consistent rectangular size, I might be able to mount them directly in the notebook and they would therefore be easier to photograph. 

The photography is a major part of any art project, and I get tired of hefting the kitchen table into the studio and unrolling the backdrop paper every time I want to photograph something. Not to mention the fact that two dimensional pieces are quite difficult to photograph. For me, anyway.

For the support, I used a piece of 9″ x 6″ 140lb cold press watercolor paper.  I started by writing something on the background with waterproof ink. The problem with this was that I didn’t really like what I had written.  It sounded pretty silly.  So I pasted over it with orange tissue paper using matte medium. 

I also pasted over it the print of the songbird on joss paper, which I’d made for an earlier project.  One thing I’ve discovered about water soluble block printing inks is that they are ALWAYS water soluble.  No matter how careful you are with the acrylic gel, you will smear some of the design. This is not always bad, as red was the third color of my palette.

I am usually loathe to use other people’s designs, but I’ll use scrapbooking paper as it is really designed for this purpose.  After I put on the piece of the domino ad, there wasn’t much cohesion, color wise, so I added the blue starry rice paper and a wash of orange paint.  Then I added a wash of blue paint.  It looked pretty much done at that point, so the only further touch-up was to scratch away some of the paint to highlight the form of the bird.

The rectangle as it is now is 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches.  My idea was to do them as art cards, except much larger.  The advantage of cropping them all to the same size is that I can change the focus, and I don’t have to worry so much about having perfect edges.  We’ll see how it goes.

Lesson I learned from this piece: I need to learn the knack of taking good photos of 2D art.