Current Art

school days vintage photo transfer on cradled wood panel

In the last year I had checked out a book by Sarah Ahearn Bellemare from my library at least twice. I ended up buying a copy for myself.  Meanwhile...a friend had a copy of Somerset Workshop that had an article on Sarah's technique. (she did some art with her own spin on it) which then inspired me to do some too.  I still want to try one that has more the look Sarah gets but in the meantime, i'm having fun.

FISH-
I used a vintage photo of my mom as a little girl. My grandfather loved to fish-pretty sure he took her to land this one.  Blew up my photo and made a transfer.  The background was inspired by something i saw on pinterest by Joan Fullerton who does beautiful work. I went for the drippy look more than texture since I was adding my transfer and not transferring onto my substrate.
This one is done on plywood.






The girl with pink is done on a little canvas board.  She still needed something-a friend suggested she needed to be layered on another piece-so that is what she will get. (this photo is taken on the backside of the FISH (the plywood was an unfisnished project-but the side i never finished looked good with the canvas so i'll make something along those lines color wise.

 Did this piece on a wooden house I got at michael's this summer.
It's about 6" tall.  Transfer image is one i found on pinterest~went with a halloween theme.  (below is picture of the sides/top of the house) painted stripes then gave it a charcoal wash to age it.  Still may do more to the sides (vintage text circles)  or not. 
 So that is what i've been up to when i can fit time in for art~

Anatomy of an Art Piece

Thought i would chronicle a piece of fabric art this week.  I was given a wonderful stash of rusty metal pieces
some years ago-chicken wire, old bed springs, barbed wire, misc large pieces of metal-you get the picture.  I knew i wanted to use some of the chicken wire on a fabric piece-so I got the base of the piece ready and attached the wire to it.  There it sat.  

 Last week i went through some fabrics to start in on this piece.  I knew i wanted a western theme to go with the chicken wire.  Reds of course.  This is what i gathered to use on the piece. 

I then picked my "base" fabrics that the rest of my "collage" and images would be built on.
I then layed out the images to decide on their placement.

 Here you see i've removed the middle image-decided it was too much.  I'm trying out my belt piece but not really liking it.

 I decide to go with a large rusted nail-what has it got to do with cowgirls?  Don't know but i liked the look along with everything else.  Originally i was going to make this piece with the short side top and bottom.   After playing around, decided to turn it in this configuration.







After allot of playing around, this is how the piece turned out.
 Images layered with burned papers, a suede piece to finish off the top and bottom along with the fringe-because a cowgirl needs a bit of fringe.

 

 Closer looks at some areas of the piece.
And there you have many hours chronicled in these photo's. 
I think i'm happy with how it turned out~