Long Time No See

It's been almost a year since I posted here, but now I'm back. In that time, my art has undergone a radical transformation. In the past, I made jewelry almost exclusively. Much of it was made with wire, as one can see from looking at my old posts. Shortly after my last post was made, I put my jewelry aside for the most part to work on my health. By that time I had been making jewelry for over six years in various ways. In the fall, I started picking up drawing again, mostly pen and ink. I found that unsatisfying because I wanted to be able to create subtle gradations between and among colors, which is very difficult to do with pen unless you use pointilism. As the Queen of ADHD, I wasn't about to spend weeks on a single piece! Then my daughter sat me down and made me try her watercolor paints, and it was instant love.

I had known about WetCanvas for some time, and had started hanging out there in the Pen and Ink forum, so I just trotted on over to Watercolors and began to research to know the materials I would need. I sold a lot of my precious metal wire back to a manufacturer to give me seed money to start out with the best of materials for my watercolors, which I did, choosing M. Graham paints and Arches paper, along with a variety of different brushes. I played mostly happily with watercolors for several months. The only problem was that I found the slow, deliberate approach that works best with representational watercolors (at least during the learning curve) was very frustrating for me. Since I was viewing my art largely as therapy/stress relief, that didn't work very well. Therefore, I started doing more abstract work. Somewhere in this process I got the idea that I wanted to do collage. I could picture combining watercolor stuff with some of the lovely beads and other materials I had hoarded duirng my jewelry-making days. Sparkle AND subtle gradations of color! Yeah!

So, after awhile, I decided I also wanted to take my watercolors and apply them to household objects. The world of decoupage beckoned, and I started working on that. I wanted my work to be much more dimensional than classic decoupage, which is generally very flat and looks "painted-on". My decoupage books made reference to altered art and collage, so it was only natural that I began to investigate those options as well.

So here I am. It's the beginning of summer break, prime art-making time. I just bought over a hundred dollars' worth of beautiful papers and other materials for collage. I have located all of my cabochons, which just beg to be included. I have been painting abstract watercolors expressly for use in collage. I have found some beautiful duplicate photos and have drawn some interesting things (and gotten my daughter to do the same). Now I am ready to begin. In fact, I have started.....I took a photo of my daughter, mother, and both grandmothers, taken at my wedding, and have started working with it. I will post a photo when it is done. And so I say to myself, Bon Voyage! May it be an artful, color-ful, texture-ful, joy-ful summer of fascinating exploration of the possibilities of mixed media.