Joyful!

So yesterday I had a seriously productive day! This doesn't happen often. Believe me. I was lucky enough to be able to spend pretty much the whole day in my studio, and I finished 6 collages!! I have one more that partially done, so that will be a total of 7. Not too shabby.

Before you think I'm some kind of artistic/creative genius (snicker), I must admit that the canvases in question were pretty small. 3 5x7's and 4 8x10's. So it wasn't that hard to finish them. I kind of got on a roll and just kept pumping them out.

It helped that I had a ton of cool images from Itkupilli who does an amazing job manipulating images and then lets people use them! How can I not love that? You'll be seeing her name a lot as I've used her images in almost everything I've done lately. Except for today's picture actually. The image of the dancing lady is from Lisa Kettell who has a very fun blog over here. If you don't already know her, check her out, you could get lost in her magical world.

This painting came about in a funny way. I had the image forever, and never got around to using it. Well one day I finally fooled around with it in photoshop to change some colors and decided I would use it in my next collage.

Well! Those darn colors! Believe it or not, I didn't have the right shades. I tried so many different things to create those colors, mixing paint, pretty papers, beads, etc. Nothing worked. I was so disgusted, that I gessoed over almost the entire collage.

What I created totally grossed me out. I let it sit for a few days, and in the meantime made sure to purchase the correct color paints.

What a difference that muted yellow makes! Man, when I started again, the collage just flew together. I just kept adding piece after piece. All of a sudden so many things went with it, where before I couldn't find anything to complement it.

Long story short, it is now one of my favorite pieces. It reminds me of Christmas! I guess it's the colors. I just really like this one a lot. It sure came a long way from the disgusting mess I made earlier!