Sunday, May 6, 2012

2012/365 - Day 127

it's getting to be about that time again...

Wow -- the second Wednesday of the month is nearly here and I have barely started on my artist trading cards!

This month the theme is "In the style of..." and my inspiration is collage artist Claudine Hellmuth.  I am getting ideas and instructions from her book "Collage Discovery Workshop:  Beyond the Unexpected". 

Ruth and I were planning on getting together for dinner tonight and then coming back to my house to work on our cards together.



I have a number of steps to choose from to prepare the background and add color and textures so I got started this morning with covering the base cards with gesso.  I was thinking that if I used a brayer to apply the gesso it would dry quicker and more evenly than if I tried to paint it on with a brush.  


Yep...it's like watching gesso dry.

I feel that I need to mention that I am not doing my cards exactly step by step...there is no way I could make a collage just like Claudine Hellmuth.  The most I can hope for is a nod to her style.

Another part of the collage calls for a photocopy of a photograph.  I chose this girl from my high school year book.










It is a good thing I got started this morning...LOL.  Dinner/conversation with Ruth was so pleasant and relaxing that neither of us felt like working on cards when we got back to my house afterwards.  We are going to get together tomorrow instead.  Ruth will work more on her ideas at home tonight and assemble her cards at my house tomorrow while I am working on mine.

I came into the studio to fool around and started feeling like I really needed to work on the collage elements some more tonight or I wouldn't get far enough tomorrow to finish them.  I have a dental appointment at noon and I will be glad I did this part tonight.  It is already nearly 11 p.m. so I am showing this much of the next step and I will continue after I blog this.



 Next you find some text, tear the top edge for a softer look and add the photocopy to the text.


Then you paint on a neutral color over the text to tone it down a little...this is the part I will do later tonight.

2 comments:

miss_peggy_artist said...

these look so great already and thanks for the step-by-step sort of . . . are you using specific text or just random

Took said...

Thanks, Peggy!

I am using two old books...I suppose it is mostly random text since I didn't really read more than a couple of the torn parts.

Three of the pages are from a book that was reprinted in 1922. I like the feel of the paper, but it is becoming brittle -- not sure it will hold up...so I switched to pages from a dictionary I used when I was in school. I always considered that dictionary at "the" authority. It is in really bad shape now but I still can't seem to throw it out.

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