Daylight over the Jemez

This is the completion of the excericse I started a couple of weeks ago. I finished about 4 days ago and then let it sit where I could look at it. Today I polished it up a little adding more mist in the mountains and lightening up the foreground and sky. In my mind I was trying to see the brilliant colors of Santa Fe sunrises. The colors are are breathtaking. There is a place that Marc and I use to cross country ski in the Jemez. It is a caldera very near Los Alamos. We would get up before dawn in Santa Fe and head up to Los Alamos and this ski spot. Catching the sunrise on the drive there always brought tears to my eyes. The skiing was fabulous too!

The work is a mixed media and collage piece using acrylics, water colors, and a variety of papers such as tissue and paper towel. I used some pastels to help define some of the mountain scape.

On to the next exercise....

K

Snowy Day in McHenry 3-21-08

Gosh, my 15 year old was wearing flip flops yesterday and today we have 9 inches of snow on the ground and it is still snowing! It has been a cuddle day. All of us are home so we spent the late morning visiting with some new friends who came over to meet our greyhounds, and then we cuddled together on the sofas and watched movies. I managed to sneak off and continue work on my mountain scape exercise. It has been at least 2 weeks since I have had paint on my hand!

This is sort of the next phase in this exercise where a colored wash is added. Ms. Beam recommends using acrylics, heavy bodied, in the mountains followed ;by watercolor washes. I decided to use acrylics applied very thinned down. Next I will add some opaque colors, begin to define the mountains and then sketch in some distant peaks. What fun this is!

K

Found Art 3-11-08: Fire

My 15 ear old just started reading Romeo and Juliet at school. With a theme of fire, there was no doubt where my inspiration would come from.... A quick and easy piece using watercolors, inks and just plain old paper., this work returned me to my rubber stamping roots. Enjoy "Passion on Fire."

Now back to the piece I started last week. If only there were more hours to the day.

K

The Creative Process and a Found Art piece in progress

Found art for this week is day. So I have this work in progress that I think will become my "day" found art piece but I have to see how the work reveals itself. Following the Mountainscape excercise in "Celebrating you Creative Self", I have begun this work by laying down a large strip of gesso and then laying pieces of rice paper, tissue paper, and paper towel down. The bottom portion of the work is textured with gel medium and pumice gel. The next steps will be to add some color washes. And I should get to that next week.

This is a little different avenue for me but I needed this diversion. I have one work in progress that is stalled. I wish I could draw hands better... I may need to resort to magazines for my hands this time around. And just two months to go till my show. I am sure that time will fly.

K