Cath Sheard Art

Tag: collage

  • NZ Art Guild challenge

    This fortnight’s NZ Art Guild challenge was “Experiment with shape and colour to communicate meaning. Choose a sound and convey it in an artwork using a maximum of 3 colours (you may also use black and white in addition to your 3 selected colours)”. I use the Guild challenges as a chance to free up and have a play. These are the details I posted on the Guild forum with my piece:

    Title: The (art) noise in my mind
    Medium: mixed media – paint, ink, rubber stamps, coloured pen
    Size: 210x135mm (in one of my art journals)
    Colours: Red, blue, pale aqua

    The writing  says “I need to spend time on my art each day or gradually the noise from all the ideas becomes louder and louder till I can’t hear myself think anymore.”

    The (art) noise in my mind

  • NZ Art Guild Challenge – ‘where the wild things are’

    The NZ Art Guild runs regular challenges and, although we had a break over Christmas, it’s to get back into it. This is what it says about the first challenge for 2010 on the Guild website:

    Welcome back to our fortnightly challenges, I’ve got some great challenges planned this year to get you thinking (and hopefully creating!!!). Here’s the first one for the year….
    Challenge: Create an artwork inspired by a given book/movie
    Using the book or movie “Where the Wild Things Are” as inspiration to create an artwork.  There are no other restrictions, all forms of media may be used.

    All forms of media? Okay then, sounds like a good chance to exercise some creative muscle. I hauled out some old scrapbooking supplies and got to work. The final piece is 20x30cm, mixed media – paper, paint, pens, fabric, ribbon, glue, brads. Nothing like a little bit of nonsense to lift my spirits!

    'where the wild things' are mixed media collage

  • Still testing the water for works paintings

    This is another of the larger experiments as I feel my way towards a process I am happy with for the Freezing Works series of paintings. The process is much the same as with my previous post. I am still feeling good about this general direction, if not the actual result so far, which needs a lot more work yet.

  • Working on the works paintings

    Just so you know that I really have been working – even though I have not posted much of late. I am still not sure how I want to tackle the actual paintings so have been doing some more experiments, working bigger this time (about A3 size).

    I started with a layer of old sewing pattern collaged onto heavy watercolour paper with gel medium. This gave me some text and lines, much like the graffiti that is all over the works buildings. Next I put on really loose washes of Golden Fluid Acrylics, with no real scheme in mind. Over that I added more lines, this time using ink and a fine needle, courtesy of our vet clinic! Once all that had dried I started adding more colours, making some of the colour a bit more opaque, thinking about where the light and shadows are. These are still really only just beginning, but I think I may have found a direction I like…

  • Crusade #33 – back to school

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    Michelle’s challenge over at the GPP Street Team this month is to learn something new, either in or out of the studio – you can read all about it here. I decided this month I would learn to let go of the results a bit more, and just enjoy the process. In the spirit of going back to school I have been reading about the creative process, about play, and about some new cutting-edge techniques – trying to make my objective an active on. Some of the books I have dipped into have included Nita Leland’s “The new creative artist“, Nancy Reyner’s “Acrylic revolution” and Lisa Cyr’s “Art revolution“.  

    Moving on from reading, I have been playing with looser backgrounds as beginnings to works, collage, enhancing digitally then printing and working further on paper. In the image shown here I photographed a chook in amongst some weeds, made a loose background with texture, collaged the photo on, added some old watercolour painting strips on top, scanned and enhanced digitally. Is it a masterpiece? Not at all. Did I let go off the results and just learn through play? Yes.

    Thanks Michelle – my “back to school” lesson was one I needed to start (re)learning. chook crop