I'm calling the one with the big rock "Sitting..." since the boulder has most likely been sitting in that spot for a LONG time... there are two rock cairns sitting on top of the boulder... and the shape reminds me of a fat Buddha sitting. This one is really a mixed media piece. First I altered the photo by placing a taller rock cairn than what was actually there (using a photo of rocks I'd brought home from Montana) as I wanted it to reach up into the sky area, and then I ran some painterly filters on the photo to abstract it. After applying the two sections of prints to my 11" x 14" cradled panel, I layered topo map fragments over the rocks, painted daubs of straw color in the upper grasses to help distinguish the rock edge from what was behind it, and added grassy papers, pine needles and raw flax to the foreground to make the vegetation more dimensional. (If you click on the image, you can better see the details I'm talking about.)
The second piece shows a two-track road up a hill in Montana that I'm calling "Rising" -- it is 20" x 16". I made three filtered variations of the image and tiled out the large images. Then I tore sections from each to glue down with acrylic matte medium to merge into this new image. I added fibrous art papers to the clouds and grasses to further alter the image.
