A slightly larger multimedia collage

Ok, christmas has come and gone and I am still not active at crafting. All my stuff is packed away in boxes and not available for short sessions. I have done a little painting, have been playing my guitar and of course with my computer. I have had a lovely new laptop as a present from my ever suffering spouse, so it must prove that she still loves me. Or maybe she thinks that at least with a laptop I can play on the computer and be in the same room.

One art piece that I have not yet posted on the blog ( it was posted on Flickr some time ago) is a piece I did for a challenge for the design team on PDA, and I wanted to do something a little different for me. In fact you would not know it from the photo but it is considerably larger than the ATC's I usually do.

Here it is:-

Title: Faded Rose

The image of the young lady was one of a number of images on a collage sheet by Kim Newberg and this was the basis of the challenge. 

 

The background was a piece of matt board covered in torn craft papers. The flower was a gift from Jean Roman and the watch face also from Kim. The metal "frame" is actually a flattened kilner jar lid, an idea from Kim. In fact without Kim's unknowing input, I could not have made this piece. The other element is the butterfly; bought cheaply at a local store it has a spring loaded clip. I purchased three for potential use in future projects, this is the first.

I keep saying this but I do hope to get sorted out at home very soon, and getting back to some crafting. I am getting withdrawal symptoms and snapping at the people ( or person) that I should not be snapping at. The alternative is vallium! Not a good idea methinks.

Steam punk and other fancy ATC's

I have been making one or two heavily decorated ATC's lately. The majority of my collage work is created using paper images. But more and more frequently recently I have been adding 3-D embellishments of all sorts. A lot of this is because I keep getting small gifts, etc with traded cards and other art works. THis is actually fun and makes the epithet mixed media come to life for me.

This first pair of ATC cards were created for a challenge/swap on PDA, the theme of the challenge was colour(s), I was not sure what results this would bring but in the end a great collection of different interpretations was achieved by the entrants, you can see the results on ATC's of  PDA .

The first was called "Autumn" for hopefully obvious reasons and the second "Timeless" for maybe not so obvious reasons; actually the clockface spoke to me.

Autumn was always intended to be how it finished up, a use of a very familiar set of colours which most artists would recognise as belonging to a particular time of year. I simply built up the layers and utilised one or two bits and pieces I had in my stash, mostly gifts from trades with other artists.

Timeless was a different kettle of fish. I originally intended to make a statement by outlining a B&W image on a b&W background with a coloured slide mount.The slide mount was blue plastic covered in pink craft paper. However I was not quite satisfied and added the clock face ( brass, painted with a watery acrylic) and followed this with the large linen flower (Thanks Jean). The key was added for balance. It now seems that the flower is the most important part of the whole but this is because the central image is a little washed out in this photo.

A third ATC I want to look at here is a stab at steam punk. A gendre I often shy away from even tho' i do like the images I see from it.

I found a collage sheet with lots of engineering drawing images on and used this for the background. I edged this with a gree ink pad. The image of the girl is one that I like and decided to use right at the start. This left me to find a number of items which would look good on the piece. A watch face again (thanks Kim), a small key, a metal charm, and a bracket from a VHS machine sort of went together after a little playing around with the configuration. And a card arrow and sequin completed the "mechanism". The word NOW ( which I used for the title) was one of a number of acrylic buttons which I had and seemed to reflect the look in the young girls face, sort of expectancy or determination. Anyway, I enjoyed making this so much I went and ordered a bag of bits off Ebay so that I could experiment a little more with this gendre. Almost gwettingto the assemblage techniques I am determined to get to grips with.