Found Objects and Art Doll
Today at Uni, we made art using materials we had found during the course of our journey in to class. I carefully gathered my bag of found objects and waited to see what would emerge.
I was totally unprepared for this amazing doll!
In response to our artwork we were invited to write a short poem. This is mine – let me know if you like it.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you all!
December flew past, taken up with finishing my dissertation followed by a really relaxing family Christmas – it seems like ages since I last posted. But I have been busy creating!
It’s become a habit over the last few years to use this workbook from Susannah Conway to review the passing year and look forward to the New Year, including choosing a word to represent the coming year. This year I chose ‘Emergence’ as my word and placed it in the mandala from the workbook.
After I uploaded it, I just couldn’t resist pushing the invert button to see what happened. I’m not sure if I like it. What do you think?
A couple of days ago, I was inspired to create this large painting by these words from Leonard Cohen‘s song ‘Anthem’:
“…There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Today, I couldn’t resist the call of a ball of yarn in my supply box. It was calling to be made into a doll. This is the result!
I devised this method of creating a doll from yarn last month when I was playing with a few scraps laying on my desk one evening. With the exception of the head, which was stuffed with a small ball of tissue to give it shape, the entire doll is made from wool wound round on itself. This is the original that I made last month.
They’re so simple to make, and have endless possibilities from a therapeutic point of view which I’m working on developing at the moment.
Creativity Rocks!
Creativity rocks! I’ve been so busy writing my dissertation that I haven’t had time to do anything else. But I took a couple of days off last week and did a bit of catching up!
A couple of weeks ago we had our dissertation tutorials and as part of the tutorial, our group were asked to create an image to represent our finished dissertation. I knew I had to create a doll, but as we didn’t have much time for the art work I knew she had to be simple. So I made a wrapped pipe cleaner doll and called her “All wrapped up with a feather in her cap!” Do you like her?
This image started out as a photograph of the kitchen sink with splashes of water all over it. Then I blended a painting into it – et voilá!
This one is a blend of two paintings created during a recent painting workshop.
I’ve been fascinated by mandalas for a long time as any of you who have followed my blog or flickr stream will know. So when I saw Julie Gibbons was running a five day free course, I just had to sign up and play along. I must say, the course is one of the most comprehensive mandala courses I have ever seen and I am learning so much. Thank you Julie. This is my first mandala created on day two using a pencil drawn grid, neocolour crayons and watercolour pencils.
And I just couldn’t resist playing digital with the mandala after I scanned it!
Digital Magic!
Todays first image started out as an acrylic painted background in my handmade journal, which I transformed with a bit of digital magic!
When I first created this, I called it ‘Christmas Background’ because I thought the colours looked very festive…
…then I played digital – adding a digital image of Molly doll and a digital caption to explain why she’s there!
Image two started out as a simple oil pastel drawing.
It too fell prey to the digital magic that was in the air and it ended up looking like this!
Patchwork Doll!
Continuing with my doll making addiction, the other day I got an urge to make a patchwork doll! I adapted the pattern from Elinor Peace Bailey’s book Mother Plays With Dolls … and Finds an Important Key to Unlocking Creativity
…and this is the result! She’s very colourful and rather playful! What do you think?
Being me, I couldn’t just leave her like that, I had to try adding her to a digital blend!
Do you like her in her new setting?
Addicted to Doll Making!
Did I mention that I am becoming addicted to doll making? This one’s taking a bit longer than the others have, and she’s still not quite finished, but I thought you might like to see her anyway.
The pattern came from Elinor Peace Bailey’s book Mother Plays With Dolls … and Finds an Important Key to Unlocking Creativity
In between playing with dolls, I’ve also been playing with paint.
I started off with some recycled cardboard and a double page spread from a newspaper, added some blobs of moulding paste then swirled them about. I added acrylic paint, acrylic ink and spray paint to the mix, then left it all to dry. But that wasn’t the end! After scanning it I had to play digital blending…
…I thought this one was quite nice, but then I thought I’d try inverting the colours…
…and came up with this which I rather like. What do you think?
Breathing space!
I’ve finally finished handing in my written work for this academic year and have a little bit of breathing space before the next marathon of academic writing begins!! I haven’t done any painting yet, but I have been playing digital and making dolls!
It never ceases to amaze me how many variations it’s possible to create from one image simply by copying and blending.
The problem comes with knowing when to stop – tricky one that!! Both these images were created from one original piece of artwork which I played with digitally to achieve more depth and interest.
Ever since we had a doll making workshop on the course, I’ve been obsessed with doll making and have been reading about the history and researching well known doll makers. I bought this Art Doll Instructional Zine from Lani Gerity a while ago, and finally managed to have a go at making one of the dolls.
She’s called “Study’s Over” and if you want to know how I made her you’re going to have to splash out $9 to buy the zine from Lani, but I can tell you I used pipe cleaners, fabric, yarn, air drying clay and acrylic paint. She was very simple and great fun to make!
I’m working on some more dolls and am hoping to get the paint out very soon, so keep watching!