Self Portrait

Art Calendar is having a "self portrait" contest and the winner will be featured on their March issue cover. They said it could be 2-D or 3-D and abstract was fine. That was an interesting assignment to give myself... what would I use to represent me as an abstract self portrait. I thought about using an owl since I'd had a dream recently about an owl. However, I decided it should be a raven since I've been using ravens in my art of late and I admire their intelligence, trickster nature and sense of play. I decided to add the rice paper spirals to the image to also reflect a recent theme in my art. I put my green eye in place of the raven's black eye. :-)

I'm calling it "As a Raven, I'd Breathe Spirals to the Clouds."

Blurring the lines

My husband and I have a graphic design business together, in addition to both being artists (he's a sculptor: Dr. Stone's sculpture blog ). We just completed a 100-page catalog for our client who sells training equipment for dogs. I decided to make a collage for the front and back covers of their 2010 catalog and use torn papers inside for page headers and backgrounds – blurring the lines between my design business and fine art. In the printed catalog, the J&J Dog Supplies logo will be at the upper left above the jumping dog for the front cover; the horizontal collage will take up half of the back cover with 800# and other information reversed out of the left side of the image. They were very pleased with the look, so I'll be taking these out to hang in their offices.

Pieces of Memory

There's something about looking up hillsides and seeing clouds rising over their edges that I find really magical. I took this photo on a hike in Montana. In Photoshop, I ran three different filters to make it less photographic and more like a painting. Then I made a pale version of the photo and a full-intensity version; I printed out sections of the pale version to tear and overlap on this 30" x 10" cradle board. Then I overlaid torn pieces of the full-intensity view. I added art papers to the ground and sky to further the painted feeling of the work.

Revisiting

I decided to work with new landscape photos of Montana (thank you, Karen!) combined with old photos of Livingston, Montana. I hadn't worked with old photographs for awhile, so it was fun to figure out what to do with them and the mountain scene in this 14 x 11 canvas. I printed out one photo of the landscape unaltered and one with an ink edges filter applied to the image. I wanted to add some grassy paper to the bottom left, but only had green - nothing autumnal. And then, the lightbulb went on – I could paint the paper! So, I painted acrylic gold and brown onto the green grassy paper and then added them to the composition when the paint was dry. :-)

Three Ravens

I made the previously posted raven with the red string for my friend Linda for her birthday. I really enjoyed working with that image, so I decided to make three more collages using the same bird photo. I placed the raven in various settings and ran different filters on the image in Photoshop to give the feathers subtle texture changes. The collages are all on 11 x 14 canvas and are titled "Raven's connection" (with the ribbon), "Raven's gift" (with the flower) and "Raven's invitation" (with the stick - an invitation to come play). I'm going to hang these three – plus two landscapes and three spiral pieces – at Q's Cafe in downtown Galesburg. The owners have expanded the cafe and have asked five artists to hang work in the new dining area. The work will be for sale and we can change it out for new work when we want.

Different degrees of not real

I made a small 6" x 6" collage this summer using part of this scene. I decided it was such an unusual scene (a high mountain lake in Yellowstone) that I wanted to make a large collage with it. This 20" x 10" x 1.5" canvas has a painted sky with paper clouds, spliced together pieces of the scene with a "dry brush" filter run on the original in Photoshop, and art papers and tissue papers added to the trees and grass areas.

Red String of Fate

In our last art group gathering, we all brought items to combine and make an assemblage together. Linda brought red string and talked about Asian stories of red string connecting people destined to be together. I decided to add a red string to this raven photo to combine the string folklore with a bird who has a lot of folklore associated with it.

My husband took this photo of a raven on a road in Yellowstone. I ran the poster edges filter on the picture in Photoshop and then "painted" a light blue across the top at 15% opacity. I then added light brown to the area around the raven. After I'd attached the print to the cradle board with matte medium, I decided the brown was too light and added a light wash of brown acrylic paint. I layered up art papers and tissue papers for the shadow and ground textures.