Fish Paintings

Here is the latest page in my art journal.  I took pictures of it along the way so I could explain the steps.

Step One:  I painted watercolors of fish directly into the book, then photographed them so I could print the photos smaller onto cardstock.

Step Two:  I photocopied sheets of old stamps, coins, and Egyptian money, then made a collage.

Step Three:  I covered the entire thing with green tissue paper. It didn’t look very good, so after I did that I tore it off, leaving only three stripes.  After that, I painted it with a wash of half green acrylic paint and half translucent acrylic medium.

Step Four:  I had a photo to work from, and I started by sketching it on another piece of paper before concluding that it would look better drawn directly onto the page.  I tried to color in the flesh with a colored pencil, but it’s difficult to draw on top of acrylic.  I painted the shirt in with acrylic, then used a combination of soft graphite and sharpie marker to draw the outlines.  I adhered the fish with acrylic medium, and drew around them with marker and graphite to make them stand out.  You can still see some of the fish underneath.

For the past year or so, collage has fascinated me.  It’s a completely different direction from my usual art.  Altered books especially interest me, because it’s 3D art and because it’s recycled. 

It does take some courage to actually destroy a book, but I consoled myself in that there were other copies for sale at the Goodwill.

The first picture is the cover, to which I added cutouts from scrapbooking paper, found objects, and gilded embellishments that I made out of fimo. It also has a textured wash of acrylic over it.

The second is of windows cut in a block of pages. I’m going to put something really cool in there, as soon as I can think of something.

The third is a digitally altered photograph, and a heat transfer of the same photo. The blue glow is from interference paints.  I sewed the beads on to add 3d texture and to make it slightly more modest.

The card in the fourth image is from a deck of cards, either French or German, I can’t remember.  The red crow on the right is a gum arabic transfer of the photocopy, which I took of a sketch I made. The sketches on the right side are done in ink and layered over with tissue paper.

The orange page with the poem is a piece I did in response to frustration about a rejection letter.

The last page doesn’t show the folded pages very well, but you can see the layered cutaway images of the trees.  I don’t like using premade scrapbooking supplies, but I was away from my studio.

There are other pages altered in this book, but I’m not as fond of them.

My sister sent back my art journal, and now I have to think of the next page.  I have a tenative idea, but haven’t started yet.  Here’s the page that I did a year ago today.

This is my latest page in the art journal I’m sharing with my sister.  I used copies of the notes I took at Clarion for the background, and the brown paper are tea-stained scraps of two short stories I wrote. 

The title of the piece is Rewriting: An Armful of Tomatoes.  My analogy is that carrying an armful of tomatoes is like trying to write a good second draft; how do you get more without losing what you’ve got?

The fox is drawn in colored pencil. Why a fox?  I like foxes, and they’re easy to draw. 

My sister and I have been working on a pair of Art Journals for over a year now.  I made some 140lb watercolor signatures, and we each created our own covers.  Then we’ve taken turns mailing the books back and forth to each other, so every other page is by the other person.  Here’s the most recent one I did.

For the background, I painted a forest scene in watercolor.

The profile is a linocut I made.  Actually, I first printed the linocut on the fabric itself, but it didn’t look right so I added the black-on-red print to cover it. 

The fabric is a swatch that a friend of mine used to cover a chair. 

The crown is cut out from some wrapping paper from my favorite store.  You can’t tell in the photo very well, but the crown has metallic gold highlights.

The buttons, which spell out ‘wicked queen’ were scrapbooking supplies that were on sale.  They’re lamentably short of ‘e’s, so if I use them again it will probably spell “sky turd” or something. 

This journal entry took me a lot longer than some of the other ones I did, not just because I painted an entire picture before covering it.  I fiddled with the composition for most of a week.