Art Every Day

I spent yesterday in the company of 3 other women artists working on a project call ‘The Exquisite Corpse’. Let me say in advance that I’m inspired and humbled by all of our combined talents–can’t wait to do this again!

The basis of the project is you start something (could be a painting, a poem, a short story–anything creative) and then you hand it off to someone else who adds to it. There’s almost no rules (like if you paint something, the next person can paint over it, around it, through it…), but when a ‘theme’ is started, the next artist tends to be inspired by it and carries it on, modifying and taking it to new places.

Here is my ’start’ for the project–I’ve been studying the tarot card ‘Death’ (it’s all about transformation and metamorphosis, not necessarily physical death), so I started with a typical symbol of that card–a skeleton. This is 14 x 18 inches, the skeleton is troweled on modeling paste, dried, sanded, and with several acrylic washes over the top.

And here is the final product, the ideas of each artist added in and around the starting image. Pretty impressive, no?

To see all the other projects along with pictures of us all, please visit Marianne’s oh-so-active blog–here’s the entry for The Exquisite Corpse.

Part of the goal for these projects (as I found out once I got to Marianne’s!) is to put them in the We Art Women silent auction. I don’t think that Pam is going to part with hers, and honestly, don’t know if I can part with mine either! We’ll see…I figure I’ll frame it up and decide in a week or so.

I can’t tell you how many times (oh…4, 5?) I’ve paid good money to take watercolor classes and I have failed miserably. I’m going to spare you those images, not post them here so you can agree with me.

So, I found the most incredible work on a site where the artist embellishes monotypes with watercolor and colored pencils. That’s what’s inpired my recent posts, right? So, quickly I realized that I just don’t understand watercolors. I can do a tolerable job with colored pencils (at least, I think it’s tolerable!) but I figured I’d better learn how to do watercolors.

I found  a couple of really good books that point out that you really have to have GOOD materials, and the dirt-cheap watercolor tubes I bought for my classes just didn’t cut it. You know the ones (without naming names)…$2 for 24 tubes of ‘fine artist’s watercolors’? If they’re so fine, how come there’s no pigment information on the tubes? So, I shopped around and figured out that Winsor Newton are the ones to have. Ummm…$26 for a tiny tube of Alizarin Crimson. Maybe I don’t need THAT fine a quality watercolors while I’m learning, so I bought a Cotman set (still Winsor Newton, but their ’student’ grade) of half-pans. What a difference! I’ve been happily following the instructions in the watercolor method books I bought and I think I’m starting to figure this out!

Anyway, here is a painting I did for the Virtual Paintout this month (which is Corsisa).

Made a couple of small changes and calling it done. I hope my mystery-man thinks it’s a close enough likeness!
8×10 Acrylic on panel.

Well, I’m not sure I’m done with this or not–thought I’d sit on it a few days and see what I think…

Here is the original photo. This was a little difficult to work from since it was somewhat washed-out lighting-wize.