Follow Up: Try, Try Again

I love reading your comments and reactions

to my posts.  And I take them to heart.

Little did I know that my blog on  "Far and Away," titled

KA-BOOM (the sound of a failed experiment) would

elicit so much input.  So I shall follow up.

You may recall the experiment:

     

which I believed had failed.  Let me clarify: it failed to accomplish what I had hoped to achieve in paint.  It may not have failed to please your eye or failed to teach me something.  It was an effort, like homework, to practice a technique.

However the post resulted in some very interesting reactions!  One reader cautioned me against going too close to the "dark side," (the world of modern art.) Another said it was not a huge failure, just a "little one."  I also received a lecture on not telling my readers what they should or should not like and a fellow artist sent a cropped photo of the piece (which greatly improved it).  More feedback than I ever imagined and while I appreciated each, one motivated me.

Ellen Lindner, a renowned fabric artist, applauded my efforts and suggested a method she uses for  design.  "Tear up colored paper," she advised, "play around with that.  Tearing paper keeps you from being precise but forces you to color-think."

Voila!

my square canvas, my inspiration photo and piles of color from magazines

next I began playing with a layout

eventually I have to commit, using Mod Podge for glue

It was fun choosing my colors from the paper pile and trying to tear out simple shapes.

from this detail you can see the variety of the patterns used, I tried to squint down

hard so that I mostly saw the overall value, not that I had onions

and asparagus in the swatch

one more detail so you can see the variety of magazine pages gathered to use

Far Away, 10 x 10 on canvas

torn paper collage

available, of course!

Ta da!  Done.  I knew when I started tearing pinhead-sized pieces I was getting too detailed (or just "licking" as we say when done with paint).  Time to cease and desist.

Now I'm going out on a limb here and state that I like this!  (feel free to disagree...) 

Tearing up paper made me think hard about the big shapes I wanted (not the detail) and using found colors, not mixing them, forced me to think about color values.  And I really like the little patterns that snuck in. 

What do you think?

(And BTW, I apologize that the link on the site to contact me is broken: work in progress.  If you receive this via an email feed just hit the reply button and I will get it.  I really do value what you say.)

Glued together,

Cindy