So, Happy Mid-Winter Polies, but I'm glad it's you and not me this year...

While wandering the web the other day I found some information on using Baking Soda to produce a mottled color effect with multiple paint layers so that you can see the layers below. Intrigued, I decided to give it a try.


This is the link where I found the information: http://www.heartsart.com/info/innewsdetail.asp?nid=5&ID=114


Essentially, you lay down some paint and while it's still wet you sprinkle baking soda over portions of it where you don't want the paint to stick. Then when it's dry you rub off the baking powder and voila!


On my first attempt I painted a canvas with one layer of yellow and then sprinkled the baking powder on. I was hoping to get some of the white canvas to show through but as you can see from this picture, the baking soda didn't have much of an effect (I had to put a stamp on the canvas to give my camera something to focus on):




It occurred to me that perhaps I was being too timid with the amount of baking soda, so I tried it again. I sealed the yellow paint layer with some gel medium and then put a layer of green paint over it. While the green was still wet I put baking soda all over it. I used a LOT more this time as you can see from the picture below:




Once it dried and I rubbed off the baking soda I was left with this:

I don't love the result, but I plan to do more layers and keep working with it this weekend. I'll post more pictures in a few days.

I've been wandering around the web the last few days looking for some information on a couple of mixed media methods/techniques that I'd like to try and have found some really cool mixed media related websites.

1. http://www.annbaldwin.com/index.html

This artist has some amazing work and has some really good how-to's on her website.

2. http://mmcamarketplace.typepad.com/mmca_marketplace/

This website is actually a marketplace, but it's not the first thing you'll come to when you go there. They have some great resources, including tutorials, a listing of art challenges and some great artist interviews. I thoroughly enjoyed perusing this site.

3. http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/

Art e-zine is a UK website. It's not the most intuitive to maneuver around or the easiest to read, BUT it has GREAT how-to's, tutorials and loads of other information. Great site if you can suffer a bit through the difficult to read text.

4. http://www.mixed-media-artist.com/

This is an artist's website. She posts how-to's on various methods and techniques that she uses in her work. I really like the twisted fabric painting information. I'm not sure I'll ever do it myself, but it's highly entertaining to me to read about what methods others are using.

If you're looking for new methods or information on techniques you'd like to try, check these out.

A few weeks ago while wandering around Boulder I picked up this old book titled 'The Circus Menagerie'. I don't generally like to tear books up, but this one was already falling apart and I planned from the moment I saw it to turn it into an art piece.



Oops- I managed to chop up the title page before it occurred to me to get a photo of it. 1929. This is important because it explains why the animals are treated the way they are. This is long before PETA.



Circuses creep me out. They always have. The bones of my piece appear to be bright and sunny, but this is just the first layer.



Here's a test layout for the second layer. There are a lot more pictures in this book and it's hard to narrow them down. I really wanted to incorporate elephants too but they look like big gray blobs. There's one picture of fighting elephants but I can't tell if they're being harassed in order to fight, or if they're fighting on their own. I do love the picture of the monkey smoking the pipe.




I'm hoping to finish this piece in the next week or so. More pics to follow...

Over the last couple of days I've come across a few stamps that I thought were a little creepy. I don't usually find creepy stamps, most of them are colorful and upbeat, but that's debatable with these little guys.

This first one appears to have some sort of battle scene going on. See the chopped off head in the middle of the stamp rolling down the hill? I'm not sure what this is all about, other than blood and guts.



Need I say anything about this next one?



This pink guy looks like he want to make dinner out of the little blue guy. Something about his just creeps me out.



I find most clowns to be creepy, and this one is no exception.



I completed a new painting this weekend. I think I'm going through a blue phase with my work. When purchasing paints I can only seem to pick up the blue hues. Most of the fish pieces I've created recently are all shades of blue and over the last week I completed a new piece 'Stormy Day in the City' that is 13 different shades of blue. I also have several other canvases in the works that are all blue at the moment.

The things in the world that I love that are blue are the ocean, lagoons, stormy rainy skies, alpine forget-me-nots, blueberries, sea glass, Japanese glass balls, my husbands eyes, my first Schwinn bike and my latest 110 year old acquired book 'Chinese and Arabian Literature'.

Here is my latest study in blues: