My latest philosophy regarding my art work and art life is to use what I have.
I often struggle as an artist when it comes to figuring out what I want to create. At night when I climb into bed and finally get time to relax a deluge of visions flow through my mind as I drift off to sleep. Unfortunately I always seem to forget my ideas by the next morning. Then when I'm awake and getting through each day I get so busy dealing with life issues that I have trouble letting go and letting my artistic ideas flow.
So with that mental block lingering in my mind pretty much all the time I decided to take a year long series of online art classes to help me overcome my struggle as well as learn some new art techniques.
Meanwhile, I started my business way back in 2001. I have files upon files upon files of photos of all the things I've created since then. For the past several years the voice in my head has been saying "Jane, use what you have!", but for some reason I couldn't figure out how to do that. Thankfully through these art classes I am learning how to do this. And I'm loving it!
I've often wanted to learn how to do collage work but just didn't know how to get all of my ideas to come together. These classes incorporate lots of collage lessons and the art instructors share the idea of 'using what you have on hand'. I've found it very freeing and am really enjoying the collage method of creating.
One of the instructors shared the idea to use playing cards as your canvas. We have lots of decks of cards laying around and we never use them so I went to town...here's one of my favorite ones so far...
The center of the flower is a small green spiral that I cut out of a print of one of my original paintings "Colorful Spirals"...
My "Colorful Spirals" painting has so many colors throughout and I love to use spirals in my work, so it provides me lots of opportunity to go with my new phiosopy of 'using what I have'.
Another thing I found interesting is that a playing card measures the exact same size as an ACEO or art card. So I plan to add the ones I've made as well as prints of them to my website.
Okay...I better get to work. I have some order to fill this week and if I keep sitting at my computer those orders are not going to paint themselves! More fun on the way...until then,
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