Author: Mixy

artist, thing maker & idea magpie. I am making it all up, one bit at a time.

shapes in reds (part two)

red painted papers, rolling & ravelling.

are you ready to roll?

If you saw yesterpost, you’ll know that the painted papers I made last week were intended for further adventures, I love making 3D elements in collage, so today I’m exploring this again, but in a different direction:

Instead of blocky raised shapes I’m making these rolled shapes.

I’m fascinated by spirals, and love to explore them in every way I can in my art. The spiral is a metaphor for just about everything in life, and it’s also a super simple motif that’s super easy to create.

The rolled up paper forms are a sort of spiral through their own layers (think of looking at it end on), and by rolling the paper on the diagonal it has the appearance of changing direction in the middle.

Add to this another layer by binding in thread (which also helps hold together the sometimes unruly paper) with the alternating directions of the white torn edges, the direction of the print, altogether make a multidimensional criss-crossing which is endlessly fun to minds like mine!

I think that variation is everything.

Varying the direction, the weight and thickness of the thread, the narrow band of color with a smidge of back and white contrast, echoed by the shadows in the in between spaces and highlights of the paint’s sheen.

If I did this again I think I’d explore the variations further – with thicker yarn – and with black and white as well as red threads.

Here’s the step by step of how I made today’s piece:

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Violet-Blue , Violet & Red-Violet)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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shapes in reds (part one)

red painted papers, recycling, reinventing.

What does RED mean to you?

Often associated with passion and energy, RED is attention grabbing: from the red stop lights and warning signs to advertising where it’s the color used to draw our attention to the big SALE signs.

Today I’m using three shades of red acrylic paint and some scrap paper from some of last month’s red-violet pieces that wound up in the recycling box.

Layers of acrylic paint spread thin have a transparency that allows patterns and print show through from underneath, the color is similar enough not to interfere.

These painted papers will be the basis of three different pieces in this month of red.

This time I’m making something a bit more dimensional than the usual layered shapes: Rectangles cut from mount board, wrapped with the painted pape build up a multi layered landscape of shapes.

Working in this small scale with one color, channels all the focus into the process, it’s a jumping off point for another project further down the line. I want to revisit this theme in a bigger format… but that’s for another time!

Meanwhile, if you’d like to follow the journey of how this piece came about:

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Violet-Blue , Violet & Red-Violet)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

color mixing in layers

red over violet, violet over red. repeat as required 😉

This month’s color is Violet-Red, the berry hues of maroon, magenta & cyclamen pink.

Today, the thing I really wanted to do was see how much variety there is in this narrow band of the color wheel. The pinky-purples to the coolest reds. Without stretching far in tonal value, how does one color show up against another?

Well, to begin each medium has a quality aside from the color. The paints I’m using today are craft acrylic that have a satin-almost-matt finish.

I’ve got a few markers, some water based and some permanent – some of these new and juicy with ink and some quite dry which make more feathery lines.

Crayons and colored pencils have a certain sheen that picks up in the light, sometimes with a little color shift from the waxiness.

Piling on layers of color, mixing the mediums between the layers, adds layers of character, a sort of aliveness, as the different marks overlap and interact together.

Nothing here is complex. Nothing requires years of practice, skill, or concentration. It’s just a belief that by keeping on going, something good will appear.

Every time I do this I hear the same conversation in my head:

“it’s just a mess”
— it’s not done yet.

“it’s going nowhere”
— keep going.

“I don’t know what I’m doing”
— none of us do, keep moving.

“It’s getting worse”
–keep moving.

“I hate this”
–you know that will change

Yes.
Yes, I do.

Today was no exception.

Truth be told, right up until I was looking at the final photos you’re seeing here, I was a little bit disappointed with the outcome.

So in case you hear a conversation like this start up in your head, know you aren’t alone. You can let that conversation run along in the background while you content yourself with the act of moving colors around, in whatever particular order takes your fancy.

Here’s how today’s creating came together.

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Violet-Blue & Violet)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Processing…
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You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

some more of the iceberg

In these strange days I’m leaning extra hard into my creative practices.

Most of what I share here in this blog is from my one color a month project, TWELVTY, but there’s a lot of other stuff bumbling away in the background.

I think of that other stuff being the other 9/10 of the creative iceberg.

illustration: one page at a time

In this month’s studio musings email I shared a new project I’m just embarking on.

It’s something really enormous, both literally, and I hope, figuratively too.

All of this is feeding into what comes next.

‘The sun wants to shine.’

I add these little thought snippets to my drawings.

Oftentimes words from whatever I’m listening to as I draw. Sometimes they have a meaning to me at the time, but sometimes the meaning arrives weeks or even years later.

Or the meaning gets lost and reappears later, morphed, updated to the current moment.

It’s a leap of faith – putting this out there into the internet, and saving these thoughts in my drawings. Faith that it will have some meaning to someone -a future version of me, or a present day version of someone reading this.

It’s like a lot of loose puzzle pieces to me right now.

I’m intrigued and entranced by the process of puzzling, through drawing and words.

To slow down the spiral enough to catch focus on what the elements of it are:

The repeating patterns, the sequence of feelings, the stories that play out over and over again.

I don’t have answers, but I do have observations, and new questions all the time.

If you’d like to join in me in this curious adventure, sign up to my newsletter and I’ll show you where I’m at right now. Let’s puzzle some of this out together, shall we?

Irresistible Textures

Playing with color resist over texture: mixed media experiments with tissue paper, gloss medium, oil pastels & ink. Oh my!

I couldn’t sit down and draw these kind of organic squiggles, that look like the bark of a tree, like a dry riverbed, like the craggy contours of a rock. These intricate organic details take serendipity to shape in all the unexpected, uncontrolled ways that makes mixed media appear magic to me.

Like a lot of folk I’ve been getting parcels in the mail of stuff I’d ordinarily get from the shops until the upside down of 2020 changed everything. With every parcel I get a bunch of free art making materials, corrugated card & packing paper, bubble wrap & tissue paper. It all gets recycled in some fashion, most often becoming fodder for my studio hoards.

Tissue paper is especially fun, and today I wanted to use the texture of scrumpled tissue as a kind of resist, to explore new ways to enhance these universal patterns.

I used gloss gel medium to stick the paper down. Making sure to get a some places flatter and some places super wrinkly to test this idea out to its fullest. Little torn bits layer up and fill in the gaps and very flat parts.

The gloss gel, once dried, I figured would work as a resist against watercolor ink. But for an extra layer of resist I also used a couple of pinky-magenta oil pastels to skim across the ridges of the dried tissue before dripping on the ink.

I love these intensely pigmented inks by Dr PH Martin (in Magenta + Red-Violet) but I think you’d get the same effect with any drawing ink or watercolor paint (I must experiment more to find out – watch this space!)

I wet the surface with water before the ink and encourage it to find its way through the rivulets of texture with a loose floppy brush. I might have been a bit heavy handed in all the excitement here, but I dabbed up the too much and the patterns revealed themselves again.

I think this would look amazing with a bit of metallic something in the mix to give it some twinkle, so I might give that a try next!

This is the process, and how they all turned out!

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Violet-Blue & Violet)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

idea seeds

This month’s color is red-violet: all that’s magenta, maroon & wine coloured.


“There is a seed inside of every tree and a tree inside of every seed.” 

 Matshona Dhliwayo

Much of the art I’ve shared with you in these single color posts have a common seed of an idea: a doodle.

Often times it’s in messy watercolor or ink splashes, I get excited by the dynamism of moving water and pigments, the witnessing of art making itself. This never gets old to me!

Today I was interested in painting 3 pieces from a common seed to explore the directions they could take.

(I could come back and add more – this is just how the process begins)

To keep the pieces similar to begin I dragged and splashed color across all three together.

(I used Quin Violet & Rose of Ultraviolet from Daniel Smith+ an unnamed red-violet from the Kuretake Gansai Tambi Japanese Watercolour set)

Extra Idea Seeds…

Here’s something I often do when I’m working small like this (these pieces are maybe 4 x 5 inches or so) – I use a blank page in a sketchbook or art journal as a drop sheet.

I can happily paint over the edges and let color spill around, when the paint is too watery and/or I’m too impatient to wait for it to fully dry, I can use the page underneath to blot the water, as well as to clean off my brush.

All this makes some beginning patterns for the first layer on that page into the bargain: More seeds for more ideas!

watercolor doodles

Once these had dried I moved on to the next step for today’s creating – a medium I didn’t use for a really long time – but was inspired to revisit: coloured pencils.

I recently picked up a couple of Derwent Procolour & Faber Castell Polychromos Pencils. Oh my days what a world apart these are from the ancient coloured pencils I’ve had kicking around since forever ago!

The pencil doodles were all about following the lines in the paint shapes, wiggling around the contours and the negative space in between, filling with spirals, squiggles and little circles.

Taking each piece in turn, my intention was to give each its own character, like siblings in a family, related but still unique.

This is the painting process, and how they all turned out!

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, Violet-Blue & Violet)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

book pages & thread doodles

After yesterpost’s experiments with stitching paper, my thoughts moved on to other ways of making doodles with thread. I’ve found no better way to create perfectly organic scribbles than with loops of thread!

I’m using book pages for two reasons: first off I love the contrast of the printed text and the abstract splotches and whirls of color. Secondly, I’ve got a big stack of old books I’m recycling into art I was curious to compare how the different types of paper reacted to this process.

Some of the books are very old, the paper has become brittle and porous, their pages soak up water like a sponge. One old text book is printed on a slightly shiny paper (think magazine page sheen). This was by far my favourite from the way it reacted to watercolor paint, the pigment granulated wildly and created this fabulous crackled finish. It’s inspired me to play with magazine pages another time.

Like a map detailing the tributaries of a waterway, watercolor paint on printed paper.

The process was a simple one, my usual splashy wash of watercolor across all the pages, extra water, then using sewing cotton. I let the unravelled thread make a pattern in the wet paint. Then some extra paint and water for good measure – to make sure it’s all soaked through – and wait for it to dry.

Just for good measure, I gave the process a second round, this time with purple ink.

The patterns from the thread were the perfect cues for doodling.

This is the thread painting process

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue & Violet-Blue)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

100 days & beyond…

as one project ends another begins. see the full flip through of my 100 day project + where to see what I’m making now!

The 2020 #100dayproject
junk journal

Last week saw the last day of the 100 day project which has kept me busy since early April.

Every day for 3½ months I added more to this little junk journal: more doodles, collage, patterns and thoughts. Even these little paper animals who live tucked right in the middle at page 50!

Beginning just a week or two into the covid lockdown, this project and the daily ritual of posting on IG really helped me by providing an anchor to the reality of the day, one single constant amid the overwhelm, and kept me from drifting off in the confusion.

For a long while I was quite set on the idea of carrying on beyond the 100 days, especially as I’d overshot in the making of the junk journal and still have lots of *prepped pages.

But as the 100th day loomed I was already getting giddy on ideas for what’s coming next. It’s a much bigger project, and something that will keep me busy for much more than 100 days this time!

*so there will be a junk journal part two at some point in the future!

For now, here’s the full flip through of the 100 page book.

Junk Journaling: April – July 2020

 

In other news, my monthly-ish newsletter has resumed!

After a short hiatus, my spring/summer studio musings went out last week {Sign up below & I’ll send it to you!}

The next one goes out in August: where you’ll be first to see the latest about my gigantic new project + how I’m getting on with some new mixed media techniques I’m about to dive into. 😀

 

Stitching Paper Zigzags

I love to sew and I love experimenting with mixed media, so I guess it was kinda inevitable that one day I’d try stitching on paper.

“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”

–– Rumi

stitching on paper

I love to sew and I love experimenting with mixed media, so I guess it was kinda inevitable that one day I’d try stitching on paper.

I forget when it was I first tried – but it was like two parts of my world colliding – and I have been low-level obsessed with it ever since.

Here are a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way:

  • Piercing the stitch holes in the paper before you begin is far easier than straight up sewing the paper. Depending on its thickness, it will either put up a forceful struggle against the needle, or else it will tear against the pull of the thread.
  • Piercing with a regular sewing needle is usually fine, but thick paper (like watercolor) or card stock might require something like a darning needle, a compass or even a bradawl.
  • Have a stab-proof surface to pierce onto. Polystyrene is great (yay for not throwing out the packaging from something fragile that came in the mail!) I’ve also got a cork tile and a cutting mat I use. This keeps the paper flat when fromit tries to fold under pressure of the needle, and protects the hand that’s holding the paper from getting holes in it.
  • Unlike sewing on fabric, the loose ends of the thread can be glued down at the back to secure them from unravelling.
  • I like experimenting with different threads, yarns, single ply and multiple. Just the same as my drawing, I like to make lines vary in weight, this can be done by over stitching some places.
  • If I don’t have the color I want to use, I always have white thread, which can be painted with ink or watercolor after the stitching is done.

painted stitches

For this week’s experiments I doodled about with a stitched zigzag pattern (white thread on white paper – because that was easier than rummaging for the colors I wanted. Plus it’s fun to paint.)

I coloured the stitches with watercolor in dioxazine purple and imperial purple.

painted stitched zigzags

Here’s how my purple zigzagging happened

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue & Violet-Blue)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

Violet Spirals

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”

–Barry H Gillespie 

exploring the spiral path

As we continue around the color wheel, this week I’m sharing my first experiments with the color violet.

I’ve taken this year long trip around the color wheel a few times now. So stepping into each color feels like a return to a familiar place.

A few years ago I set the starting point of this color adventure as yellow, meaning that violet marks the mid point in the journey, and in turn has come to be the color of summer to me.

I love how these connections develop over time, it’s something we can appreciate more and more with each year clocked up in this lifetime.

Each time I repeat this 12 color project I learn something new in the nuances, and a bit more about myself along the way. So I was inspired [there’s that word again] to revisit a pattern that suits this notion – the spiral.

a spiral collage

I began with some painted papers, much like i have thoughout this journey.

Painted with watercolor and gouache in my usual haphazard way, today I’ve got regular drawing paper (pages from a sketchbook) and some heavy weight tracing paper, for contrast. I like tracing paper for the way the color shows through both sides, and the way it crinkles up on contact with paint and glue.

I tried three shapes for my spirals: a square, a long rectangle, and a circle. The long rectangle was the most fiddly to handle, the circle probably the easiest, being the smallest of the shapes it didn’t flop around so much.

the long rectangle spiral made with painted tracing paper.

You could do this with scissors, but I love torn edges so much I freehanded all of these.

I’ve been playing with this torn spiral technique in my art journals for a long time so can go quickly, but if you’re trying this for a first time it might be easier to sketch your path out on the back of the paper before you begin.

The trick is to keep the spiral wide enough to follow the line in to the middle, then back out to the edge. That way you get two complete pieces. Hopefully that explanation will make more sense in the video!

By the time I finished I had a little heap of spirals. They naturally like to knot together (in the same way as cables do) so in this last collage I let them do this.

I especially like the combination of surface pattern in this one, it reminds me of batik dyed fabric. It’s got me wondering about trying a more intricate pattern for a larger piece. What do you think?

Here’s how my spiralling went

“Twelvty” 12 Colors in 12 Months

Every month this year I am making a series of mixed media pieces in just one color. At the end of the year I’ll combine them into one big multicolored work. 

I’m sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog. (So far this year I’ve explored Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Blue-Green, Blue & Violet-Blue)

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free!

Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook. 

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Check with your cat too. You know it’s what they expect.

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