Something a Little Different - Collaged Postcards

Today, I decided to work on some postcards.  I have tons of magazines, so I spent the morning, cutting pics of models, flowers, interesting shapes, etc.

This was my first try.  I want to do it again.

I didn't have any watercolor paper (which I think would have worked better) so I just cut up some cardstock in 4"X 6" pieces.  Then I starting collaging the cutouts to the cardstock, using gel medium.  I added some gel pen and charcoal pencil at the end for decoration.  I also edged each card with ink, but I did it after I took these pictures so you won't see it.

Here they are.

Peace,

Cyndi

Collage Couture

I've seen the work of several artists who do collages of women in pretty clothes made out of paper, fabric, flowers, little gems, etc.  So when I was in the bookstore the other day and saw Collage Couture: Techniques for Creating Fashionable Art, I had to get it.

It starts at the beginning teaching you how to sketch a fashion figure (you know, those tall, skinny figures that fashion designers draw for their creations).  Then she moves into drawing clothing, painting backgrounds, choosing colors and styles for clothes, then putting it all together into a piece of art.

The hardest thing for me was choosing the papers.  Then the only scissors that I could find were huge, which made it very difficult to cut out the body and dress.  Next time, I will make sure that I have some very small, very sharp, pointy scissors.

Here's my first attempt.  This was the first project in the book.  I made a couple changes.  She made her background by rubber stamping flowers and the word Vogue.  I didn't have a flower stamp that looked right, so I stenciled some leaves with a few small flowers.  I added a couple silver skeleton leaves.  I used bubble wrap to make the little white cirles and fine black marker to outline the stamped areas and add a couple more flowers.

Here's the most recent art journal page and some zentangling that I did while I was keeping my parents company in the hospital.  Actually, the girls face couldn't be consider zentangle - it's just doodling.

3/12/2013 Art Journal Page

Zentangle

Three Tears

Playing around with stencils

My original idea was to paint a canvas with lots of different colors, then cut out paper dolls and attach them to the canvas, then paint white over it.

So I flipped thru several fashion magazines and carefully cut out the models.  Then I glued the magazine models to cardstock and cut out the dolls again.  I was pretty happy with the way that the canvas turned out.  I used spray paint and acrylic paints.  Then I made a mistake.  I started stamping various designs over the paint with archival ink - bad choice.  It seems to repel paint.  So when I spray painted the canvas white, you can see little black flowers peeking thru here and there.  As you can see, the paint got under the stencil so I didn't get the sharp lines that I had envisioned.  Even though I'm putting a photo of it up now, I'm going to do a lot more work on it.  This will just be my bottom layer.

However, I did discover that any time you cut out a paper doll, you also have a reverse stencil, so I played around with some of my citra solv papers and convolution papers that I have made and this is what I came up with.

I think these are kind of cute. Maybe I will make some small ones that I could put on greeting cards.  Sure - I'll get right on that.  See you later.