purple – Page 2 – Mixy's Art Blog

Three Colour Challenge

Nuvofelt’s challenge was just what I needed this evening.

After a day of getting on with some long put off jobs about the nest, my reward for myself was an hour or so of de-rusting my painting skills.

The three colours I chose (without a lot of thought) were Magenta, Gold Ochre & Purple. Which for someone who has been in a rut of bluey greens for a loooong time, was probably a well balanced choice.

One at a time, on with the colour!

The artificial light doesn’t do the colour justice. It might be a work in progress or maybe a done thing, I’ll review it in the cold light of morning. Either way it was fun to do, I recommend it as a way to break colour habits!

On the second day of Twelvty-Twelve…

Today’s Twelve all come from the first 2 months’ colors of the year

ink dribbles

Remember the watermarked dyed paper ?

This week I’ve been playing with ink (quite a lot!) So it followed that where water does one thing, ink should do similar but with more colorful results!

I used Pebeo Colorex ink (Chartreuse. My fav color de jour!) they have a real glowing transparency and mouth-wateringly rich color! On pre-scrumpled paper they run deliciously through the landscape of the paper’s surface.

The quilt-making (more on that later) is my current obsession, and the urge to stitch is cropping up everywhere!

Jam Jar Art

Have you ever noticed the underside of a *jam jar?

Me neither… until by happy accident. I checked all the old jars I have collected up, and they all seem to be the same. (I’ll wait here, you go off to the kitchen if you need to check yours now)

They all have a ring of raised dots – like glass Braille – I guess an anti-slipping thing.

Turns out if you wash out a jar and instead of drying it, leave it to dry naturally on the nearest flat surface, like maybe an inky page of an open sketchbook, a beautiful ring of dots appear where the water has run down the sides and puddled round these dots!

Oh yeh – and if you get carried away trying to recreate the effect you can obliterate the dot circles just as easily with too much water!

The patterning reminded me of sewing machined lines (unthreaded needle, just perforating the paper) …that seemed like the best thing to go with the page in progress

So that’s what became of page 36!

* strictly speaking mine are all coffee, mayo & pasta sauce jars. I don’t like jam. Funny how they’re always called jam jars…

now…. where was I ?

All that giddy excitement from last weekend (or some such excuse) meant I’ve not kept you updated on the page a day project – but I’ve not been so remiss as to let it slide!

Ready for a 10 day/page binge? Ok, here they come!

Day 29 (chronologically this day fell between Contrast (with buttons) and Quality Time)

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Although there are parts of this page I like – the colors and some parts of the composition, it has an overall feel of hurried chaos. Something too bitty and scrappy, but isn’t that the way of some days?!

Onward and upward to day 30!

Seeing through new eyes

Over the last couple of years, my perspective has shifted. Like after an epiphany, I began to see differently. Expectations and assumptions either altered or vanished.

I’ve always enjoyed the process, creating, painting, etc-ing…. but inevitably it would go wrong and be set aside (that paper/fabric/material etc was expensive/so nice before I ruined it… for these reasons I can’t through it away. Haunted by a residual value… It must remain as a warning not to repeat this mistake. It must fester. It can sit there stewing in guilt, shame, regret). Weeks, months, years would pass. These ghosts of ideas would move house with me. Boxed up past failures.

Art school taught me to question these feelings, the judgemnents I made. Finally I found out why I’d kept so many of these past attempts: they weren’t wrong, they just weren’t finished!. They took a detour from the path I’d imagined for them, but that didn’t mean their journey was over.

Through these ‘new eyes’, I see possibility in so many places. This week I’ve been playing with water – as bits of dyed paper lie about my work space, often splashed and used to dry wet brushes, I came to notice how the dried watermarks disrupted the pigments of the dye/ink. This had to be investigated further…..!

editDSC_2767 — Water brushes are the perfect tool for this!

The moral to this story? Keep playing! Keep on swimming! 😀

the sum of its parts

Ephemeral Gecko

If you’ve been following these posts you’ve maybe wondered about the name. So I’ll let you into a little secret…

Ephemeral Gecko resulted from pairs of fave words randomly combined til I hit on a combination that yeilded no Googlings.

In a serendipitous way, the 2 words seemed suited to their purpose: Sharing the fleetingly ephemeral art on the journey to a finished piece – my initial plan for this blog. And my fascination with the Gecko, the +800 variations of this lizard come in a wonderful assortment of colors and sizes, many of which are nocturnal, much like my art.

Fresh from a recent paper-dying harvest, I’ve got many little stashes of paper scraps like this…

Have we gone off on another tangent here? Not exactly, bear with me here.

Inspired by “musings of a muse, dave’s diary”, last week I felt compelled to manifest an Ephemeral Gecko in physical form.

(I don’t know where these ideas come from, but have learnt not to question, it only delays the inevitable.)

He’s already found a home in the page a day book…. but I suspect he could be the first of many.

2-stage ink dripping

Having let the first ink drippings dried, stage 2:

And a swish of water, then a bit more for good measure

This thing

The things with the dyed paper, the cut outs and torn edges, the outlining and the doodlings. The purple and orange thing that’s a little shiny in places. This thing here…