Perfect Pairs: Birds Looking West

Actual bird near Manzanita, Oregon

Mosaic birds on Vashon Island

A big flock of Unruly Birds on the horizon!

Woohoo!  My very first painting exhibit is coming up.

In May I agreed to complete 30 paintings in 30 days. The result was a huge flock of wildly colorful and frankly silly UNRULY BIRDS.  Opening night is Friday, July 9 (6-9pm) at Avanti Art & Design (7317 Greenwood Ave.) as part of the July Greenwood/Phinney Artwalk. There will be beverages and snacks and lots of other artists' work, so please stop by.

A seriously unruly tower of unruly birds:

This ceramic statue was the inspiration for the squawking unruly birds.  Basically art imitating art imitating life...

A typical conversation amongst avian royalty:

A whole smorgasbord of unruliness:

Bad / better / best bird legs

I have made some really, really BAD bird legs in my day.  This poor thing looks like a person with really skinny legs in black tights wearing a giant bird suit.

I ripped out the mutant legs and put in these straight lines that looked better, but I couldn't tell you WHY these legs looked better.

It kept nagging at me (because I kept drawing really bad bird legs) until I finally realized bird legs are often approximately at a 90 degree angle to the back of the bird.  Aha!  Eureka!  Lightbulb moment!  Better bird legs!

Watercolors...

...that I painted while on vacation this weekend.

I tried copying this little guy from a Cavallini notebook I had with me:

If you squint and crane your neck (ha!  get it?  crane!  ha!) 45 degrees, it looks more similar.  I decided to leave out the large black mark near the top of the wing because I figured it would look like a big mistake on my copy.

This view might help the eagle-eyed (ha!  get it?  eagle-eyed!  ha!) make the comparison:

Too much Twister!

Wow...I guess this is what happens with birds play Twister...maybe this is where scrambled eggs come from???

I would NEVER eavesdrop...

.

I bought this beautiful handpainted metal shrine in New Mexico during our Sacred Dirt roadtrip a few years ago. I have no idea what this little guy is saying, but he's clearly QUITE passionate about it...

And speaking of silliness...

Here's another entry in the silly ceramic parade that runs through my house:

Postcard to Carla

For those of you who follow the delightful Carla Sonheim's blog, you may recall that she asked people to send her postcards for her new studio in Seattle. In return, she would send that person a postcard. Well, a body would have to be MENTAL to pass up an offer like that! Who wouldn't want to get a postcard from Carla? So here is what I made this weekend to send her... -------------

Because it was going through the mail, I didn't want to rely on glue to hold the fringe-y trim on, so I found some colored staples in my stash and used those instead.


And I love to use those little paper drink umbrellas in my collages. Just open one up completely (it works better to do this BEFORE enjoying too many of the drinks that accompany said little umbrella), snip the little white spokes that hold the paper to the stick and work the stick through the hole at the top. I just affix with white glue like Elmer's and they end up wonderfully translucent.

And look at the laundering instructions on the wrapper from really old embroidery floss...it recommends using Ivory soap.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Oooh, I got this fabulous postcard from Ginger & Addie today wishing me a Happy Valentine's Day. I think someone knows I've got a serious jones for bluebirds...

Up to the moon! All through the sky!

Here's a collage I made this weekend. It is supposedly for my holiday cards, although there's nothing holiday-ish about it. It is, however, optimistic and peaceful and nurturing...and I think that's a grand way to start off a new year. The crown was made from a nifty punch I bought at Michael's with a gift certificate my sister sent me...that makes it doubly fun! I was inspired by the book SCRAPS (that I posted about earlier) to incorporate lots of postage stamps.

As if there weren't ENOUGH birds!

And yet another fabric depiction of a bird. This time I used the shape from my last project and just casually stitched around it a few times. Then I went back and forth kind of crazy-like to create the tail feathers. Easy peasy and pretty fun looking...if you don't mind a few wrinkles. I love the funky stitch I used to attached the colored dots...it reminds me of bird footprints in the sand.

A different sort of 'paint by number'

Here is an embroidery piece from a kit I bought several years ago (ahem) that I finally finished. It was the perfect project for those times when I wanted my hands to be busy but I wasn't feeling all that creative, or I just didn't want to make a big mess in my art room (or more likely I already HAD a big mess and didn't want to clean it up so I could work on something else).

I haven't decided what I'm going to do with it. Well, ironing it would be the first step, I suppose. I suspect I'll piece together some cool fabric for a background and think of a fun way to display it...maybe hanging from a small branch.

And this is from a table runner I found at the Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle. There are literally huge piles of fabric-y things (clothes, linens, pillows) to sort through, but at pennies per serving (they charge by the pound of merchandise), it's worth it. I always take everything home and immediately toss it into the washing machine. Then I have fun cutting it up (if it's clothing) and adding it to my (ever growing) stash of fabric fun-ness.

Embroidery Imbroglio No More!

A few weeks ago I posted the beginnings of an embroidery project which sadly featured bird legs that were awkward at best, and downright mutant at worst. Despite Carla's kind comments, I opted to surgically remove the initial stitching and try the legs again.

I'm must happier with this version, and as you can see, I added Dr. Seuss-like flowers and embellishments for the bird.

I'm loving the chain stitch. I used it for the bird's tail feathers and kind of for its head and the dangling vines. Making big, open loops is a great way to cover a lot of real estate without spending a lot of time...great for someone who likes more immediate gratification like moi. Apparently the random stitches on the bird's wing are examples of a technique called "seeding"...who knew?

Here's are a couple of closeups of the chain stitching:

Now the question is what to do with my embroidery. Covering a pillow is the obvious choice, but given how my cats love to shed and drool on such things, I'm reluctant to give them another "toy" to play with...

Cheery, cherry bird

I'm posting this just because it makes me happy to look at it. I got the image from Vintage Moth. I do notice I'm more observant about bird legs since my embroidery imbroglio.

I looked up "imbroglio" and found that one definition is a "confused mass". So this wasn't really an imbroglio...but I just really like the way those two words sound together.

Crazy Bird Legs!

I've had a hankerin' to do some embroidery lately, so when I got together with a group of artgirl friends last Sunday, I gave it a whirl. I used a piece of nice, soft cotton left over from an old table runner I had cut up previously. I grabbed my big bag of color-sorted embroidery threads and dove in. I had a vague notion of making a bird sitting on a tree branch, surrounded by flowery vines.

Patterns? We don't need no stinkin' patterns! I could do this freestyle.

Well....turns out it's very helpful to have more of a pattern than the random thoughts floating about in my head.

I actually really like the hanging vines and the branch, but the bird and especially its poor scrawny legs need some work. It looks like someone with really, really skinny legs is carrying a huge bird-shaped poster. One of my friends noted that's because BOTH legs appear to be BEHIND the body. I think that's part of the problem, but additional suggestions would be very welcome!

Book nest

I altered this book by turning it into a nest for a vintage bird. First I carved out a niche through the cover and the first 75 pages or so. Then I carefully filled it with twisty paper-wrapped wire, crinkly ribbon and silvery velvet leaves. Lastly, I wrapped little red-tipped floral stamens onto the wire. A snippet from an old book review, sandwiched between 2 layers of mica, was then glued over the nest. The 2 strips of black ribbon hold the book closed.

ROY G BIV

Remember the nifty memory aid to recall the colors of a spectrum...ROY G BIV? Well, that prompted me to make a journal supposedly created by the great, late, intrepid ornithologist, Roy G. Biv basically so I would have an excuse to make a bird collage in every different color.

Even though "brown" doesn't really have a place in Dr. Biv's world (the "B" stands for blue), I felt compelled to make several pages in that color family.

The first page consists of a fabric transfer on muslim, layered over several very textured pieces of fabric and ribbon. The background was done from several shades of brown acrylic paint. The second one used a page from a book so old and deteriorating it literally crumbled as I tried to glue it down. But how perfect is "Birdies' Ball" for goodness sake?

Spring fling

Feeling the need for a little spring in my life, I crafted these little stitched paper collages. The background is a stack of pages from an old foreign book held together by sewing the bird image on top. The bird images came from a fabulous sheet of upscale Cavallini wrapping paper (with 25 images per sheet, it's just pennies per serving!)

I love those little flower stamens that come in all sorts of colors, so I added a few along with a strip of fun ribbon to the botton. I used a circle hole punch at the top of the first page and then glued an image behind the little window.

I love the look of the vintage game tiles with letters so I crafted a "faux" set by painting a piece of chipboard with acrylic paint, then slicing it into small squares, onto which I stamped letters. I threaded a short length of ribbon through two holes punched at the top corners for hanging and it was complete.

The blue collage contains stamps I collected from Roratonga in the Cook Islands when I was lucky enough to go scuba diving there several years back. A few matching buttons, baubles and scoopy little scallops on the edges finished it off.

Hope is a grand thing

For this stitched paper collage I used text scraps with 6 different languages (7 if you count music). I'm thinking if they all work together in this project, they should all work together on the planet, n'est ce pas?

Pizza cutters and polkadots

I collaged this green bird that I rescued from last year's Cavallini calendar onto a mat board previously embellished with random stripes of green, white and black paint applied with a pizza cutter.

"A pizza cutter?" you ask.

"Yes, a pizza cutter."

I did not invent this technique, but I've tried it several times with fun results and nary a scratch. You simply squirt a blob of paint onto a paper plate, frantically roll a pizza cutter (mine obtained from the local Goodwill) back and forth through said blob, ensuring that the entire wheel edge is coated and then roll it over the paper. The pizza cutter doesn't hold a lot of paint so you can only apply a thin stripe of paint at any one pass, but that may not be a bad thing if you want to leave a lot of background showing.

Then of course I got out my nifty white gel pen and outlined everything with polka dots. Ever notice how polka dots make just about anything more fun? Then I added some swoopy-loops with black dimensional fabric paint and made sure I placed my masterpiece in a cat-proof place while it dried.

Et voila! Un oiseau! Verte! Estee Lauder! Chanel! Lancombe! C'est la guerre! Je ne sais pas!