Hi there !

Thank you for coming to see my post. I hope you are doing well and life is treating you good.

Yesterday I thought I was going to spend most of the day at my art table. The thought of it made me happy! However, through nobody's fault but my own, I kept doing one more thing and one more thing around the house, washing dishes and clothes and parts of the bathroom and resolving cluttery areas here and there, till it turned out to be early evening before I let myself sit down to it. I spent some time straightening the area and reorganizing the paper bits, which for some reason I enjoy doing too. Then I played around in the papers a while, trying to figure out what I wanted to start next.

There were endless possibilities, so many in fact I could barely make up my mind. I had an idea for an angel feather I have, but it was smaller than I remembered, so I decided to rethink my ideas on that and do something else this time. I also toyed with starting an art journal, not a serious journal the way I was thinking on it, just a place to make small art pieces to continue to practice and explore. I needed to do a little more thinking on that too, about how to protect all the other pages when you are painting on one page...yadda yadda... so instead I decided to practice something random on this small 5X7 primed canvas board.

My idea was to gather my smallest paper bit boxes and create something colorful out of the bits. Small canvas, small bits !

And so it began. Swishy Swishy...lovely...right?

Then on with more random paints. Colors nor design mattered at this point. I did think I wanted to create something with a horizon, but to this point, that was all that I knew.

After doing some random doodles with black and white Caran d'Ache water resistant wax pastels (fancy crayons 😄), I began to add some paper bits. The only one that wasn't from my paper bit boxes was the flowery one in the lower left corner. That was a torn piece of tissue paper I bought previously. I was curious how it would behave when it hit the wet glue, but it actually did very well. I was really careful about where I laid it on, figuring I would not be able to move it once it hit. Fortunately I had it lined up pretty good.

The wavey white swishes in the sky were also on a piece of blue rice paper that I had painted before and the yellow & pink dotted paper on the bottom right corner was also from painty papers I previously made. Since most of the paper bits I used were on rice or other thin paper, you could still see some of the crayon marks through them.

"They" say that there are no rules in mixed media/collage but there simply IS a rule, you have to put two kinds of things on one art piece for it to qualify as "mixed". ahahahahaha.... ok.... I agree that is not much of a rule. Just being silly, however many artists that create mixed media like to put some sort of black feature somewhere in the piece. I thought it was kind of pretty before I did it, but in the end I caved and added some big black circles. THERE.... are you happy now?

😂

Then I added a different paper with a different white smudge to the left of them and played with a few more black marks through the black fencey looking line.

I also stenciled in some yellow beehive shapes across some of the flower part. Then added smaller black circles at the bottom to help the balance.

I had thought the tops of the purple circles I had originally painted on the canvas looked a bit like mountains in the background, so I enhanced them abstractly with a little more purple. I also thought some of the random shapes behind what seemed like a fence looked like a barn that might have a silo. Of course a barn and a silo means it's a farm ...right ? With all the flowers in the foreground, it must then be a flower farm... right ? ....and all that at the base of some mountains.

I also thought the yellow from the original paint that showed between what were now perceived as mountains, meant either the sun was coming up... or it was going down. That was natural to think, wasn't it? So I took my yellow paint pen, enhanced the yellow a little and then took my orange pin and made a small sun dot. I made it small enough so that if this doesn't look to you like what it looks like to me, it doesn't take away from the overall look of the piece.

But by me saying all of that, I made you see the barn and farm and fence and sunrise.... on the flower farm... didn't I?

This is actually the finished piece.

However, through out the creation time of this piece, several times I stopped and laid this white ring offset to the right at the bottom. I kept wondering if it should go on. My eyes kind of liked something about it. I didn't glue it and each time I ended up taking it back off as I couldn't make up my mind about whether it should go there or not. I'm still undecided, so, so far I haven't made it permanent.

Through the years of painting, I have never been big on giving my creations names. It somehow didn't seem that important to me, but once in a while a piece would name itself and I thought this one did.

I don't know why, but photos of the art table when it is full of fun bits and pieces makes me happy. I mean it makes me happy in the real to see it there, before I go back and sort it all away again, so it's no wonder that I like the photos too.

One more little practice session completed. Now... on to the next.

And remember, Jacey says, "Try and behave yourself...ok?"

ha ha

Luv ya !

Jacey