Strange Journey II and Back to Nature Collages

Top to Bottom:

1.  2nd in a series of Strange Journey Mixed Media Collage:  This one "Making Choices"  16"w x 12"h x 1" cradled board with illustrator Cadillac, die cut paper, fabric 3D photoshop bird and hand painted and die cut Cherry Tree.

2.  Back to Nature I:  Drawing/Photograph digital collage flowers with die cut insects on paper on board 10" x 8".

3.  Back to Nature II:  Digital collage of 3 Autrey Sisters with die cut flowers and bugs on paper on board 10" x 8"

Some Easter Bunny Art for my upcoming Marin Open Studios this May

I've been using some Photoshop Posterization Techniques on old photos of my backyard rabbit sculpture then adding him (his name is Sherman) into digital and paper collages.
From the top:
6"x 6" cradled board:  B&W Sherman Dreaming in Color
10" x 8" cradled board:  Bronze Sherman behind the Garden Fence.  Some of you might recognize one of the background collage elements - which was the photo below, taken in San Anselmo of a landscape reflected in the dirty window of a Drake High School student's car.  The fence cut out is from a separate double exposure photo.  Digitized Sherman, in the top two pieces, was printed on some nice Epson Metallic Photo Paper Luster, cut out and glued.

The 3rd pink and purple image of Sherman in the Garden is a digital collage of a different posterized Sherman photo, superimposed on a pen & ink and watercolor painting of a park in downtown San Anselmo, with a photo of some cherry tomatoes added in for flavor.  It is available as a 13 x 19 or 8 1/2 x 11 print on fine art paper.
Check the Marin Open Studios website for more info:  https://marinopenstudios.org/artist/631/

Illustration of a Summer Cold

Getting sick in the summertime has never seemed fair.  But it  recently happened to me.  I decided to try to tackle how it felt by doing another mixed media collage.  The (for now) final version is at the top of the page, an earlier version below it.  So what's the backstory on the elements used in this new creation?  The photo of me in the collage goes back to a Christmas in 1971 when my sister  Susan came to visit me while I was living in Madrid, Spain.  As I was often sick during the two years I lived there, I'm pretty sure I was sick that Christmas.  I was also pretty poor.  I always liked the moody photo Susan shot of me in front of the wall calendar.  To illustrate my sore throat, I used another little piece of my new red Japanese washi paper.  I didn't have any picture of viruses to throw at the image so sampled a few I discovered Tal Danino had created and posted on his twitter account (link here)  I could have used my own bacterial design which I created for a Spoonflower (link here - although they aren't showing all of my designs anymore) fabric design contest - a Paenibacillus done in 2015 because it looked cool, but I didn't because that wasn't what was infecting me.  Finally, I spent too much time trying to create a brain image using various photos (from the ocean in Pt. Reyes to the Botanical Gardens in Berkeley.)  I'm not too happy with the resulting brain but think it is time to move on from this project.

Japanese Popsicles Artwork Backstory

One of the few benefits of being older is there is some personal history now I can pull from when creating new artwork.  My latest craze doing mixed media collage is benefiting from various other expressions on similar subjects done in the past.  Case in point:  In 2004 I did a watercolor of some orange ice cream and multi flavored popsicles (because I used to love to eat them).  In 2009 I turned that painting into a digital composite with some scanned buttons (art using scanned buttons kept me entertained for about a year.)  Now, I used some new Japanese washi origami papers to create the ice cream/popsicles and placed them onto a recent landscape photograph of trees printed on Hiromi kozo-shi paper.

New Pen&ink Watercolors plus Mixed Media Collage on Paper

Top to Bottom:
1.  Pen&ink & watercolor 7x10 - my hand holding a photo of the Taj Mahal with a view out the window in Queen Anne, Seattle of Puget Sound
2.  Two portraits of grandsons Cole and Wilson Taylor (which look nothing like them but they were kind enough to pose)
3.  Bottle of Amber's favorite hot sauce, also sharing the view of Puget Sound out the window
4.  Something new!  Mixed Media collage with cut up photographs and various papers glued onto high quality 100% cotton rag paper then inked.  Vase of Flamingo Flowers is 11.5" wide x 15" high
5.  The first of this new formula collage:  Woman with a Bird on Her Head is 11" w x 15" h
6.  Bottom two paintings by nearly 8 year old twin grandsons:  Cole's is a still life of two beer can openers found on a treasure hung; bottom is by Wilson of his legs and feet resting on the balcony.

Gum Arabic Transfer Collage

I recently took a fun workshop with Heather Wilcoxon and learned some new techniques to further my interest in printmaking and collage.  Continuing on my themes of bugs and birds are three new items:

Top two: Collage on cradled wood panels 12" x 16"
1.  Bugs in a Bottle
2.  Crow's Nest
Bottom:  Collage on Rives BFK paper 11 1/2" x 15"
3.  Crow's Shadow

Messing With The Past

1965, Santa Barbara Research open house.  Smokers and curious old men. Where did that pig come from? My father was more likely looking at something that lead to his patent #3,356,500

Loon Button Garden

Version B with layered feather pattern.  Just playing with Photoshop.

Lollipop Hill

Mixed media 8x10 revised with the addition of colored wax!

Mixed Media Collage Vignettes

These new mixed media collages are composed of scans of real objects, watercolor and oil. paintings, digital paintings, etc. printed on Epson Velvet Fine Art paper glued on marble gesso-covered boards, some treated with various acrylic gels for texture, then painted with egg tempera, pigment and oil paints.
1.  "Menage a Trois" 5x7 (paper prints from a section of "9 Parrots in Orange Tree" 2007 oil painting)
2.  "Cadillac Cat and Rat" 8x10 (paper print of Cadillac digital painting combined with J.L. Autrey's cat watercolor and rat china painted tile)
3.  "Lollipop Hill" 8x10 (paper print of flowers is from a section of "Garden," 2011 oil painting)
4.  "Sea Food" 8x10 (paper print of surfers in Solana Beach is from "Sundown," 2012 oil painting), one apple was painted by Matt Taylor, another by Amber Autrey Wilson Taylor.
5.  "Underground Love" 8x10 (paper print is of scanned geraniums, ribbons and other real objects)

Frustration

The earlier version of "Two Eggs" (posted 2/3/2012) needed more work, so I black lined it  and added more colored inks over a gel medium in the background.  Now the beauty of the original silverpoint was totally lost.  Frustrated, I glued a red paper house over the entire drawing, added silver stars and an image of young Elsa with a bed balloon, then drew/threw in some additional trees and flowers using Copic markers.  The final collage is called "Balloon Seeking Marble."  Experimentation with new mediums can be fun, and not so fun when the experiment doesn't work out as planned!