An ATC Triptych

Made this mixed media collage piece to illustrate a page on "Ultra ATC's". This is a term I first came across in Berni Berlin's ATC workshop book, gives an artist a little more room for creativity, don't you think. I have never been one for adding lots of frippery, tending to keep my stuff simplistic and to have each item adding to the story. Sometimes I think that I ought to change but it's just "doing what comes naturally" there is a larger version on my Flickr photostream.

What do you think?

The main images are from a collage sheet, called daunting darlings from Kim Newberg and the backgrounds are basically black and white images of the eiffel tower. My history was never much good! The other text was simply found serendipitously ( is that a real word?) in my stash or from magazines. The coloured borders at the top of each atc are downloaded from the Flickr free images group, my apologies to the artist whose name I have not got at my fingertips.

I guess many of you died in the wool ATC'ers will already have this book, but if you haven't why not? It has become something of a standard text for many artists. I am continually dipping back into it for inspiration and new ideas.

I guess that one of the issues for me is that I get into a rut with techniques. I make something, it works, and then I make something else along the same lines. A book like this helps to remind me that there are many ways of skinning a cat. (Whoops, is this a politically correct thing to say these days.)






Along thse lines, I have recenly "unearthed" some early paintings of mine whilst searching my loft/storage area for some frames for a project I am starting. The first is a small oil painting of an apple - talk about simplistic! The second is a very early pastel. Judging by the blue of the sky, this was before I had aquired a complete set of colours. These days I would definitely have toned down the blue.

In fact to be honest, these days I would probably have laid down an underpainting with an orange sky before layering with the sky colours that I wanted to be seen. Then when leaving small patches of the underpainting showing thru the top coat, the complementary colour adds a real zing. In the same way, I would have put a red undercoat over the grassed areas.

I started using this technique when painting abstracts but found that it worked equally well with other types and gendres od paintings. But this is something I should be discussing on another blog.