Backgrounds, planning, and meditations

This bouquet of brilliant backgrounds is most photogenic of the myriad things that have gobbled up the week or so it’s been since I last blogged (still getting the hang of doing so regularly, I must admit!). I’m running a background swap at my ATC group’s retreat at the end of the month, and I’m trying to make sure I have quite a few of my own to swap. I’m not sure how many I’ll be able to part with, I love how most of these came out! That’s the joy of working on a somewhat bigger scale; making an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of watercolor paper will produce 10 beautiful ATC backgrounds, as well as a few tiny scraps. I’m sure I’ll be able to part with at least a few from each sheet.

Aside from playing with paints, I’ve been very busy planning our retreat; I’m in charge of coordinating the Activity Guide. There’s been a ton of work involved getting descriptions and supply lists written and rewritten, but I am blessedly nearing completion. I’m eager to have it taken care of so that I can put more of my mental cycles to some bigger issues that have been plaguing me.

I’ve been very preoccupied lately with figuring out what my future holds, with – as the blog says – finding my path. I’m living with a lot of pain right now, from so many sources I’m having difficulty sorting it all out. I’m letting go of a business that once held so much promise but in the end just caused me a lot of pain. I’m learning to live with seasonal depression all over again, as a very rainy summer has left me scrambling for new tools. I’m pondering what it means to be on the autistic spectrum, what it means to be an artist, and how a person like that can fit into a society that doesn’t really seem to know how to accept either of those things. I’m struggling to find my identity, to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and how to make peace with it all.

Steampunk mail day!

I had company over yesterday, so I ended up not getting an art made. But I did have quite a mail day! I’ve made a few purchases on eBay and Amazon lately, and a bunch of things came at once. As you can see from the picture, it was something of a steampunk mail day. I got a marvelous antique book full of patent illustrations, as well as two REALLY cool paper punches – a gear and a pair of watch hands. These are so amazing, I had to try them out right away on some copper embossed paper and some black silver-speckled paper. The results are amazing, I can’t wait to use them!

I got the steampunky punches as part of a large lot from eBay – I’m trying to beef up my collection in time for an activity I’m hosting at the NEATC Retreat. We’re calling it the Punchin’ Luncheon and the idea is that we all bring our punches and some paper and share the wealth. There will be cupcakes and punch, and we’ll all come home with a nice stash of awesome paper shapes.

I got a couple of books yesterday as well, but I’ll talk about those another time, when I’ve had a chance to look them over a bit. Right now I gotta run, I have a driving lesson in twenty minutes – I’m in my mid-twenties and I’m finally learning to drive!

Make It Mondays – Orange

I figured I’d take a break from cleaning up the studio to jump back into making art with both feet. A challenge seemed a good place to start, so I took up the Orange challenge over at Lisa Vollrath’s Make It Mondays. I’ve never participated in Make It mondays before (or any other blog challenge for that matter) and I had a lot of fun with it. This was an interesting challenge; color challenges seem to have an interesting effect on me. They are deceptively simple, but I always find that interesting themes and meanings can surface.

I find color challenges tend to follow a pattern for me. I took some pictures of the process to illustrate how I make color-themed collages. First, I sort through all my bins of collage papers and pull out elements of the color in question. My collage elements are all sorted into obsessive little 8.5″x11″ clear plastic bins. I started with the “Orange” bin of course, but I ended up finding loads more scattered throughout bins such as “Postal,” “People” and “Misc Collagey Elements”.

Once I’ve gathered up plenty of elements, I sort them out into potential backgrounds, smaller images, and ATC blanks. As you can see from the photo, I also pulled a few orange pigments out at this point – craft acrylics, a Sharpie, and a pigment inkpad. I find it’s very useful to have some pigments on hand, especially for color challenges. You never know what the right thing is going to be to tie it all together. Which I guess is the reason I pull so many elements out… when the only requirement in that you use a certain color, it can be hard to predict what sorts of elements will work.

After all this fiddly preliminary stuff is when the magic happens. I start arranging things, playing around, keeping an eye out to see what themes present themselves. For the color orange, I found that the themes that surfaced were an exotic Far East theme, a city heat-wave theme, and a summer morning theme. As you can see, it was the summer morning theme that I ended up going with. (The inkpad came in handy to highlight the edges of the cards and blend the elements together.) I’m hoping to work on the other two cards tomorrow, but it started to feel like something of a heat-wave in the studio so I decided to call it a night after the first card.