Decisions

Continuing on from Friday, I've been painting away and spreading my art supplies throughout the entire house.  I pasted some leaves down on the canvas, using heavy gel medium.  The leaves were dry and curled a bit, so I ironed them flat first.  They did wrinkle some, but not so bad.

In every artistic adventure there are hundreds of decisions to be made.  Even when we're just playing around, however mindless or random we may think our actions are, in reality each brush stroke or pencil line is an artistic decision based on the principles of art: unity, variety, balance, contrast, proportion, rhythm.  Sometimes we change our mind.  A piece of art often evolves as it comes into being, changing the original course the artist thought she was going on.  I knew my piece would have a squirrel and acorns.  The first decision I made was what paper to use for the acorns.  I decided pages from an old German novel were appropriate.  Then came Mister Squirrel.  I had this piece of green found paper.  I painted a sort of abstracted faux bois design, then blocked out the squirrel with gesso.

I colored the acorns and pasted them down.  I know I'm mixing tree species here, but following a very time honored tradition in doing so.  If you read my artist statement (blech!) from last week, you'll remember that I'm influenced by the old natural history illustrators.  They quite often created illustrations with completely unrelated species, mixing animals with plants from oppisite sides of the earth

Looking at this canvas and the squirrel sheet, I decided I liked the faux bois too much to chop it down as much as would be necessary for the way this canvas was going.

So I decided this squirrel was meant for a different canvas.

And I went in a different direction.  When this dries, I'll sketch in the squirrel and fill him in with some acrylic paint.

If you're looking for more creative inspiration, I found a great blog called Creative Every Day. She has all kinds of brilliant ideas and insights into the creative process to get you inspired.