365 Day 236

creatures emerging and revealing themselves

I have had this canvas for some time now. It was originally given to me as a birthday present -- a sort of giant birthday card. It had swirly metallic lettering and teensy seed beads and glitter and was wonderful at the time, but then it was stuck in a closet for a long time.

I don't remember exactly when I pulled it out and scraped off as much of the glue and beads as I could. In doing this, many small tears and holes happened so I covered the entire surface with this wonderful stripey handmade paper that I love and never found a use for. When I matte medium'd the canvas and laid the paper down and then covered the paper again on top with more matte medium, it really soaked in and changed the look of the paper a lot...but covered the little holes and tears. The other thing that happened is that you can sort of see some of the images and beads through the stripes...in places...but you absolutely cannot see the original lettering or cake or anything...I mean, you can see some swirly bits, but you can't read it.



The canvas with the paper on it...and turned sideways instead of the original direction.


I had no intention of working on this tonight, but it caught my eye when I was about to leave my desk...







...a bird was emerging tonight from under the paper...I couldn't ignore it...I have tried to draw birds before and it never really works for me. So I took this as something that needed to happen.









I darkened the lines a bit, now you can see the bird better.










Then this creature emerged along side of the bird.











I tried to ignore the heart-shape that was calling me...then I saw the eyes and the whale tail...then the body started to show itself. Believe me, this is not like anything I would draw on my own.

This whole thing is reminding me of the linocut sketch book from the relief printmaking class -- how I kept finding creatures in my scribbled pages. This is taking things quite a bit farther for me, though...this is most likely going to require painting...LOL.

Here is the newest creature with more of a body.

I think the painting of these creatures will be similar to the Experimental Art Night painting exercises and not be as stressful as the painting of plaster cloth guys.





And here is how all three of them look on the canvas.

I am going to leave this and come back to it every now and then, the way I do with the canvas that started out as the three ghosts...that one keeps evolving, too.

Ooops -- re-reading this and looking at the photos, it looks like a fox or wolf head is emerging near the heart-shape face creature's tail...maybe I'm not done for tonight yet.