A Girl Looking Up Collage With Background

Sometimes, while I'm making illustrations for my children's books, I do one or two designs that I think will make a wonderful stand-alone collage painting, suitable for framing and hanging on the wall.  This little girl is one of those.  I thought she turned out charming.  To finish this one for framing, I had to cut her out of the paper she was on and glue her against a new background.

The challenge is creating a suitable background for the composition I already have.  She is wearing a green dress in middle values.  My original idea was to put her against a blue background imitating the sky but the blues I chose were also of middle values and once I placed her against it, I could see it didn't work at all.  She got lost in all the middle values and I wanted her to stand out.

So I threw away the blue background and started again using values of white, cream, and soft light grey.  As you can see, these lighter values worked much better and she stands out against them.  She is again the focal point of the picture.  I love the triangle that her face and leg form in the composition.  It adds dynamic action where no action is going on.

As I usually do in my collages, I added words and images that "hide" in the composition until you look closer.  There is a duck, a white freesia, a ballerina, some postage stamps, a couple of drawings of a little girl in black and white.  These all work to enhance the composition of the collage.

Let me know what you think.

Homeless Boy in a Sea of Prosperity Collage

Homelessness is a real problem in this country.  I think art should influence society and make statements and change things.  This piece is my attempt at making people more aware of homelessness and the fact that children are homeless too.  

My collages have become more than paintings to me.  They are a challenge to create but also allow for more than just a pretty picture.  The collage technique allows me to add words and pictures into the composition that tell more of the story.  This makes me feel like I am a storyteller as well as a painter. 

First I add the background tones then put related words and pictures on top. They have to match the overall tone and color of the background pieces.  Then when you step back, they fade into the overall composition.

Second, I add the foreground details like the subject and the secondary composition.  In this case, I did the little boy and his shirt, leaving the background legs for last.

My pictures in collage are for sale in my Etsy shop at https://dancingpaintbrushco.com

Speed Painting a White Peony in Watercolor

It's an interesting thing about white flowers.  They tend to reflect other colors, all the colors around them.  Their shadows are blue, indigo, and violet.  They have reflections of the yellow center in each petal as well as greens and pinks from all around.  They are a veritable rainbow of color.

One day I took my paints to the local county fair to paint on location.  I went into the Pavillion with all the garden displays and chose a beautiful white gardenia to paint.  Was I ever sorry.  It took forever to paint because it wasn't just white.  It had lots of other colors very subtly splashed in.  It was disappointing to me to spend so much time on one white flower.  Now I know.  Now I prepare for the many colors I will need.

It's a good exercise to paint something white.  Try it and see all the variations of color.

Painting Watercolor Botanicals, House Finch and Apricots

This will be the last of the botanical watercolors for a while.  I feel a yearn to work on some collages and some children's books.

The botanicals have a great history and it was fun for me to research how far back they go.  Drawings of plants and flowers have adorned nature journals and medicinal journals for centuries.  Da Vinci did some, and so did Durer but they go back even farther than the Renaissance.  It wasn't until printing in color became accurate that herbalists began to grow in numbers and the benefits of herbal remedies began to soar.  Now, most botanical herbal books have photos but I still prefer the artist's rendition in watercolor.  

A botanical usually contains the plant in flower, leaves, and fruit, as well as any birds that may frequent the plant.  They usually have the root also but I didn't see it necessary for apricots to have the roots.