The Eclectic Artist

I've been messing about with different art mediums and seeing what sort of art comes from it.  I have been reminded again of how eclectic I am.  The piece pictured below is one I worked on today.  It is absolutely unlike anything I have done before.  Though I have dabbled here and there in the art world I often come back to working in pen and ink that has a distinctive style to it no matter how much I mess with it.  But I can only do so much pen and ink.  It is very hard on my hands.  So I occasionally make myself take a break and try something different.  

This time around I started messing with altered art, paper art, and collage.  Collage has the potential for me to do larger pieces while still utilizing smaller pieces of my pen and ink work.  Though there is none in this piece, I hope to try integrating the two in the future.

Another tendency for my art (and creative writing) is for it to take on a life of it's own.  If I fight it, trying to make something look a certain preconceived (by me) way the flow stops and I can't continue.  When I give in to the stubborn spirit of the art piece and go with the flow things usually work out - but I never know what I'm going to end up with when I start out.  

For this piece, I had a stretched canvas that I had at some point in the past given a streaky gray acrylic wash

to.  I had gotten interrupted shortly after painting it and never got back to it.  So it was sitting there, waiting.  Last night, just before drifting off to sleep I had the idea of using buttons and scrap paper to do flowers on canvas.  That was all I had in my head when I started out today. And this is what I ended up with.

I used colored backgrounds of magazine pages to create the flower stalks, bird shapes, and clouds.

The leaves I created from cutting out text from the same magazine, searching for words that turned out to have a positive theme.

The clouds were three different colors from magazine pages that I layered and used some colored pencil on the white layer to tone it down a bit.  I found whole individual words to apply to the clouds as well.

I also took some stamp pad ink in a frosty blue on my finger and brushed it across the surface of the canvas and around the edges of the cloud.

The teal blue highlights were prompted by one bright button that insisted on being included, no matter how hard I tried to stay with the grey scale theme.  And I ended up carrying that over into the birds, which I cut out, free style, from a teal colored page in the magazine.

This is the first time I have ever posted any of my art.  It has taken me a while to get brave enough to do so.  Now that I have though, I plan on getting some decent pictures of other things I have done and get them up here as well, that way, when I call myself  'The Eclectic Artist', you'll understand why.