Sunday, April 26, 2015

Brit's NY Mixed-Media Painting

I finally got brave enough to give some of my art for gifts last Christmas. I gave some 6" x 6" mixed media pieces, and a few weeks later our gr-niece asked if I would be interested in doing her a bigger one, like an 8" x 10", to hang in her closet, which is actually one of her bedrooms made in to a walk in closet/computer room. She and her husband love New York City and have been a few times now, so she wanted it to have something about NYC or Sarah Jessica Parker, who she is also a big fan of. I told her I would see what I could come up with if she wasn't in a hurry for it.

I set about working on it in my head while I prepared a 9" x 12" gallery canvas to play on.


I have been playing around with mixed media for a while now, so I collaged a variety of bought and made papers on to the canvas surface with gel medium. I also printed off some photos of Britt and her husband made in NYC. You can see part of one with Britt sitting on a rock in Central Park in the upper right of the canvas, and I really meant for her to be in the final piece, but that didn't happen...


A thin layer of gesso was brushed on over the whole canvas and let dry, then I loosely wrote New York is our kind of town in a Pitt sanguine marker all over the front and sides...


I scrubbed some thin blue paint on top of the gesso/writing, let it dry, then stenciled letters on top of the blue...


Then I got the bright idea to use the same paint to stencil through a ribbon all over that. It looked a bit like skyscraper windows to me; still building layers...


When that was dry, I used gel medium to glue down color photos of Britt and her husband standing in front of Carrie Bradshaw's (Sarah Jessica Parker) apartment from "Sex in the City" and of the NY skyline, and I found a photo and quote (about NY) of SJP online, printed it off and added it to the collage...


Here I used modeling paste with a stencil to make some texture, pasted the words "You have stolen my heart" over the window, tore the words/music for "On the sidewalks of New York" out and pasted down, added three "buildings" out of gelatin printed paper that I had made and stenciled the bird, re-sized the owl to small enough to fit (because Britt loves owls) and pasted it down, and painted some on the sky and foliage...


I painted the leaves and branch, added some scrubbed in paint over various parts of the canvas, painted the bird black, and added a punched out star to represent the stars of Broadway on the bench. I also decided that it needed a few more modeling paste leaves and a branch for the birds to kind of balance it out.

 The little snowman canvas has nothing to do with this project. I was making my aunt a Christmas ornament at the same time (that's another story)...


Here, the whitish area between the buildings and SJP decided to represent the water in Central Park, I wrote "In a New York state of mind" up the side with a Pitt marker, went over the SJP quote with a white gel pen to bring it out more, and I used the aforementioned ribbon to make windows in the lower right corner...


I added metallic dots around the star to resemble neon lights and continued trying to bring out or push back elements, more branches grew...


New York, New York wanted to be across the top, a sailboat appeared in the water (painted), the birds decided to sit in a flowering tree, I continued to fine tune things, and I'm not liking the star with the neon lights at all, because they don't look like neon lights...


I printed the names of different places in NYC around the sides, except for the Today Show and date, which I printed off and glued on, because that's one of the dates that they were there. I did go over the letters with the same pen I printed the rest with, and I added a black grungy edge around the canvas...


Even after using alcohol on a q-tip to take the paint off the star, and writing Broadway in a gold gel pen, it's still not making me happy, but it does represent the stars on Broadway, I guess. I continued making marks with a marks all pencil, colored pencils, pen, etc. until I thought I had done all the damage I could do, and I called it done, put it in a gift bag, and delivered it to its new home.

What you see on the surface isn't always all there is to a story. There's a whole nother world going on in the process of getting to the surface, and it's the process that I love playing and experimenting with. I never know what the finished piece will look like when I start, even if I have a plan. And that's the fun of it for me!

I think I managed to represent the grunge/glamor of NYC, Sarah Jessica Parker, and the seasons blended together pretty okay, and maybe it will continue to evoke happy memories of their times spent there. The blue building isn't actually that bright in the last picture. It's more like the one before. In fact, this is not a great photo of the piece. Sorry! :)

I had no idea when I did this that I had picked one of Britt's favorite quotes to put on it, but I was glad I picked it. They seemed to be pleased with it, and that makes me very happy indeed!

More posts with projects in draft mode and more projects in progress! Feeding my soul all I can!

Thanks for visiting and I hope you feed your soul by doing something you love!

No comments: