Santa's on his way ...

It's no secret that I'm smitten with Santa. He's appearing on all manner of paper goods from stamped gift tags - using my favorite image - and collaged tags to collages and prints.

I'm just finishing new Santa collages for this weekend's Showcase of Arts at the Woman's Art Club of Cincinnati (10-4 Saturday Dec. 7, noon-4 Sunday Dec. 8 rain, sleet, ice or snow … so they say).

Here's a peek at them … the first three are on 6"x 6" hardwood panels, and are ready to hang with a hanger on the back. They're sealed, and the sides are varnished. The second three are on covered book board - 4" x 7.75" - and hang from vintage seam binding threaded through the grommets at the top of each.

Hope to see you this weekend, but, please, be careful out there ...

Shooting the moon

© Marvelous Night for a Moon Dance.

So, back in the spring, I created this collage for an art auction of small works to benefit a cancer nonprofit. It didn't sell - yeah, it happens - and was returned to me. The more I looked at it, the less I liked it. I was so smitten by the Victorian scrap of the woman in the moon that I was determined to use it no matter what. Reality check: it was too big, and overshadowed the rest of the collage.

Well, you know what happened next. Time to revise. I tried to salvage the scrap, but damaged it in the process. Sigh. In any case, more planets seemed like the best option ...  

1st try: Not bad, but the planet
overlapping the blue one is too dark. 

2nd try: The planet's replacement
- luckily I had another one - is too light.

3rd - and final - try: colored pencil softens
the planet and helps it blend in. The
blue planet gets a light glaze
to make the color less intense.
This image was scanned, and the
colors are more true to the original. 

Animal attraction

Village Dandies

Footloose
(sold)

Last week, I mentioned a new line of "petite" collages I'm creating. They really ARE petite, that is:  2.5"x4.5" and 3.25"x4.6" - and matted in 5"x7" acid-free mats to fit ready-made frames. 

Well, this week, I hit my stride with a series of animal collages - a first for me, except for birds, that is - for a fundraiser to aid a new Cincinnati non-profit: Pets In Need. It provides vet care for animals owned by low-income people, which could be anyone from a person who's been laid off from their job to someone with a serious illness whose income has been depleted by medical bills.

Pets are a passion of a good friend of mine, Carol Sanger, who chairs the board. So, when she asked me if I wanted to participate in their Summer Solstice Celebration, I jumped at the chance. Since the group is not charging any "set-up" fee or taking a commission on sales, I decided to donate part of my proceeds to them.

Well, enough of the back story, here are more of the petites ...

Cat o' Nine Tales
(sold)

Waited on, hand and foot

Melancholic
(sold)

Groovin'
(sold)

You Talkin' to Me?
(sold)

Snail Mail

The Proposal

Tag mania! Holiday style.

Just finishing a couple dozen holiday collage tags. This morning, I'll seal, trim and punch them, then, add hand-colored reinforcements and vintage seam binding for the ties. The images - all the original paper, as always - run the gamut, from the Victorian era through the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

I used vintage greeting cards, antique postcards, recycled grocery bags (Trader Joe's shoppers will recognize the woman on the bottom left from the store's holiday bag), vintage Christmas seals, antique and vintage sheet music, vintage sewing pattern illustrations, snowflakes punched from old greeting cards, antique endpaper, recycled wrapping paper (yes, I save all the bits and pieces leftover from wrapping).

They are glued onto recycled manila folders and coasters (the large round ones are the end of a lot of letterpress coasters I bought years ago to use as tags but didn't).

Northside's NVision - newly expanded - will get a batch on Thursday, the rest will be in the studio for my Friday and Saturday Holiday Open Studio.

Butterflies: 2

Here's the second collage in the butterfly series. I popped it onto the scanner rather than shooting a photo, because when I have it in the shadowbox, it's difficult to shoot. So, keep in mind that about an inch of the edges is covered by the shadow box.

As mentioned before, these started out as simple, decorative collages but as they grew, I decided to add elements about collecting. A Victorian obsession if ever there was one. That's where the text on the left comes in, and because it references caterpillars, I located some to place beside it. Both are from the "Butterfly Book" by W.J. Holland (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902) that I've been pilfering for all it's worth - as are a few of the butterflies.

Of note is the flower background. I found two vintage Dover books of iron-ons and bought them with the intention of seeing whether the images could be ironed on to paper as a different kind of image transfer. I tried it and it works, but what also interested me was that the images had begun transferring onto each other over the years. You can see faint outlines of the image that was after this one in the background. So, I opted to use the entire page as is.  10.5" x 7.75" on archival mat board with ink, watercolor and specimen pins. Mounted in a cloth-covered, 8.5" x 11" shadowbox and ready to hang.

Butterflies: 1

So, this is what happened with the square-shaped butterfly collage mentioned in the last post. Now titled "Butterflies: 1." Yeah, not too creative. Most likely, I'll rename it, as often happens and is one reason I stopped writing titles on the mats!

In any case, not much changed on the piece. I moved the red butterfly, which was cut from a recycled greeting card, to the bottom. The orientation of the main butterfly was altered, and antennae and a body were added. A small gold butterfly was tucked under the quote and, hmm, there seem to be more changes than I thought.

I wanted to soften the quote but didn't want to use paint. I turned to my tissue paper bins - yes, I save all the tissue paper from gifts I receive - where I found a pale blue piece. Once it was down - but not glued on yet - I realized it would draw attention away from the butterflies. Then, I found a white-on-white, flower-patterned piece. The pattern is lost against the white background of the quote but it provides some cover over the text, which is what I was looking for. 7.5" x 7.5" on archival mat board with ink, watercolor and acrylic paint. Matted to fit a standard 12" x 12" frame.