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.

Revisiting an Old quilt

Trying to put my quilts together in one place on my Pinterest page LINK HERE, I found a few that were saved from an old defunct website (redcrowartworks) I closed out years ago.  So, I'm reposting one of my first little quilts titled "Bee World," created in 2014, so the link will be more viable.  The quilt was mainly comprised of a collection of my art printed on fabric, some original fabric designs and a centerpiece of beautiful french silk I bought off of eBay, in a mix of silk fabric remnants, and which had some beautiful little embroidered bees on it.  My sewing skills are not the best, as one can see from the irregularity of the piece.  One of the artworks, a digital rendering of an oil painting of sunflowers, has recently reincarnated itself into a paper collage.

What If ...

there were Greater Flamingos in California?  Wouldn't that be nice.

Sunflowers in Vase

Continuing on with my variations on a theme spree is my newest version of Sunflowers in a Vase. Top:  Photo and paper collage on Arches watercolor paper, including a pattern of local sunflower photos printed on Kozo paper which make up the vase.   18 1/2" x 15".
Bottom:  My 28 x 22 oil on stretched canvas painting done in 2012.

Lotus Pond Mixed Media Photo Collage

Like the previous post, this mixed media collage of cut up photographs, a variety of papers, and pen & ink, glued onto Arches watercolor paper (11x15), includes images from a photo of orange and yellow flowers, shot at the Botanical Gardens in Mendocino in 2015 (below).  Also included here are some cut-outs from a print of a digital composite, comprised of an underwater photo shot in the Galapagos together with a field of Calla Lilies in Mendocino - both shot this year.  The inspiration for the piece is a photo of a Lotus Pond in the beautiful "Extreme Horticulture" book by John Pfahl with an introduction by Rebecca Solnit.

Evolution of an Bird Inspired Idea

I seem to flit from media to media, as evidenced by the evolution of the above bird art.
From the bottom to the top:
1.  A 100% digital painting done in 2005, with an old painter software program.
2.  An oil painting done in 2006, recreating (kind of) the digital painting but adding a Vincent van Gogh sky.
3.  Another oil painting, this time in 2006, with a different bird and a pink cloud in the sky.  Sold to a friend.
4.  Fabric applique of a crow drawing in 2016, on a T shirt.
5.  The same applique crow, under a pink cloud and starry night sky, now done by cutting up photos and adding various bits of ripped Mulberry papers, all glued onto 100% arches cotton watercolor paper - just finished yesterday.