Gift Art!

Recently I received a wonderful mixed-media collage from my step-daughter Mimi.  Well, 'step-daughter' is the conventional description, to me she is my 'heart daughter'.  I loved the old photo of me, circa 1976, and my totem crow feather and spiral and all the embellishments.  I recalled the sewing machine and thought it came from the studio I had at that time when I was working with a lot of fabric and soft sculpture.  

Mimi told me there was much more to the story.  In fact, the sewing machine is hers, which she has used since all those years ago, and that I gave it to her at that time. The sewing basket is an image of her own basket and the case with Mimi in block fabric letters, was one I made for her scissors! In thinking on it, I remember better but still feel the sewing machine is the one I had.  I more specifically remember it as one her father used for making kites and I can see us happily passing it along to her.  In any event, I loved having a warm memory come back to me as art.  

Studio goodies!

Spent some time unpacking my ebay goodies, fun things from Artchixstudios and miscellany.  Love the lipstick pen. Super love my new goth girl Ophelia Pain doll.  Artchix shipping labels are fun in and of themselves and are alway addressed to The Lovely Elisabeth. Fun. Now all nicely sorted and waiting for the 'right' moment.

And here are my mascot girls.  They live on my computer desk.  Hmm, 3 stages of e???

Baby Girl, Ginny Girl, Ophelia Girl

Booked In Paris

This piece came together from a couple of fun finds.  The 'book' box was found at Michael's and offered a perfect medium for collage and assemblage.  On sale too - so naturally I've picked up a couple.  The wood-cut figure and the odd clock-faces came from a favorite online source of mine, Artchixstudio.com, hailing from Victoria, Canada and the inspiration and work of the oh-so-lovely Helga.

Add some of my favorite themes - travel, shoes, hands and an odd bit here and there and it comes together nicely. The 3-dimensional suitcases were created by collaging over wood pieces and the map embellishments were also collaged on wood.. It was said to me that this was a 'sweet' version of my usual work, but hey, I do enjoy a piece of white chocolate on a regular basis, so why not!

Booked for Paris mixed-media assemblage

Inside Detail

Back View

            

Book box

Art Chix Wooden Flappers 

                       

Shenandoah Valley Art Center in Waynesboro, Virginia

Thanks to the exhortations and support from my buddy Deb Booth, I've become a member of the SVAC.  Right now in the main gallery there is an excellent show of quite large and dramatic wood cut prints.  The hall galleries has contributions by gallery members on the subject of 'green' - which brought entries of green colors, green as natural, as in art done on or with wood and green as eco-friendly, with recycled materials.  

I contributed two green pieces - Dunton an altered-doll elf and Dorothea a color-green-themed altered doll and find I am excited about being part of a collective environment once again.  Piper Groves is the dynamic gallery director and I really look forward to getting to know her better and work with her.  I also discovered that there is a pottery studio and kiln open to members and am happy to be able to consider working in hand-built ceramics once again.

Dunton-Woodland Elf, Altered Doll, Mixed-Media 12"high

Dorothea Altered-Doll, Mixed-Media 10" high

In the area? Check out the gallery.   Enjoy lunch around the corner  at The Green Leaf Grill on Main St.

Red Dress Lady

I have themes and colors and things that just catch my eye over and over again.  Red!  Red dresses, red things, red retro things.  I do like retro - 1930's-70's for me and vintage - pre 1930 - and I love super amped colors. Yellow! and Grunge.  Lately I've been printing my digital collages on glossy photo paper because I just like that high gloss look and feel.  I like to use high gloss glazes on my assemblages too.

I found 'red dress woman on a bench' looking for who-knows-what and knew I wanted to do a piece with her.  She was part of a larger photograph which I had amped the colors on.  I then extracted the woman of the bench. I couldn't do without the 'Magic Extractor' aspect of PhotoShop Elements. They must have a patent on it, because any other extraction tool I've tried, just doesn't work as easily or well as the Photoshop one.   

Browsing through my image collection, images started to gather and I noticed they were all juicy red.  I got side-tracked with about a 1/2 hour of looking at gear pngs.  I love that gear element, now so popular with steampunk.  Now I've got a growing collection.  An easy way to become a gear-head yourself is to go to my favorite go-to site, Cliker.  Search for gears and there you go.  You can also edit the images on the site and make your gears in your favorite colors.  The Cliker pngs all have transparent backgrounds which make them super-perfecto for collage.  

Red Dress Woman 

Inspiration, Collage from Conversation, Glue Discovery

Recently I came across a wonderful quote from Andy Warhol and decided to make it into a little pop of inspiration collage.  While googling for I'm not sure what, I also found the wonderful figure I've included in the Warhol collage.   She felt like a perfect avatar for 'art girl' energy.  

Since I wanted to use her, I thought I'd try to find the original artwork, so I could credit the artist.  To my surprise, she is not a one-of-a-kind  piece, but actually a commercial doll from the Bleeding Edge doll series,  aka BeGoths from Varner Concepts. Her name is Opehlia Pain [pun very much intended, I assume]. I even found a WWF wrestler, whose persona is modeled after the doll.   I love where the internet can take you!

Another link-to-link journey, came from watching the wonderful and weird Discovery channel tv show, Oddities.  It is based in an NYC shop called Obscura, which, naturally, sells all sorts of oddities.  One episode showed a woman who made art from skeletons, and she demonstrated gluing a cat skeleton using Zap-A-Gap, a quick-action 'crazy glue' that fills any space between the items glued. Typically, crazy-glue has to be flat surface to flat surface. I'm always on the lookout for good glues and am now a happy purchaser of Zap-A-Gap.  If it works for cat skeletons, it's just fine for found objects!  

Often my collages evolve from conversations.  Sometimes I just like a turn-of-phrase.  Other times I want to capture in imagery something I'd like to remember.  Just Say Ok captures both elements.

Just say Ok digital collage