While recovering a sense of integrity, as I was studying and working through the tasks of week 4 of the Artist’s Way, I felt that for this week’s artist date, I should clean my studio space, organise all my art supplies and especially all the new mixed media things I’m creating almost daily.
While learning something new is exciting, managing its storage is equally difficult.
So this Sunday I put my cleaning lady mode on, and organised all my collage papers, wrote all the prompts I’m loving working on, and all the new ideas I’m getting daily, categorised the collage papers based on colors and types. I had already bought some file folders for this organisation.
It was exhausting by the evening, but I also felt a bit of calm from all the chaos. I knew exactly where I can find something, and where should I keep my new creations. I labeled my scraps also and kept them organised. I never knew I’d love the scraps so much… especially after last week’s snippet rolls, they seem so precious now, lol.
While all the cleaning was going on, my artist craved for creating something new, may be something out of the scraps again… she really loves scraps 🙂
I had accumulated a lot of brown paper bags in the kitchen. I had thrown away hundreds of them in the past, but over the last 4 weeks, so many things changed. I felt I could create something out of them. And I got the idea ofcourse from all the mixed media artists you can find on youtube.
Here are the brown paper bags before they got worked on.
And they got converted to these:
I loved creating these mountain textures specially, being a landscape lover.
The way I created them is so easy, it hardly took 5 mins to create one page.
First tear up a size from the brown bag, and simply crumple the page multiple times. Open and crumple again. Repeat it for 5-6 times. Then open and lay it flat and color the hills. I used acrylic paints and I applied the color using a rag. Make sure to not put too much pressure so that the valleys remain untouched with color.
Then spray some water on top to spread the colors out.
By the way, in the video they showed it with a stamping pad. I did a couple with stamping pads and then wanted to experiment with acrylic paints and they look just the same.
I tried a couple with white paint, and they looked just like the snow covered mountain peaks I had seen while flying to and from Kashmir. I love this abstract expression of landscapes.
And for some of the brown papers, I created some marks using acrylic inks, and doodled with a paint brush. I mostly used burnt umber and black for this.
I could see my fear of making these marks – as if there are some written laws that every artist has to make a mark in a certain way which is deemed right. And I had to tell myself continuously to be brave and keep making marks of some leaves and flowers.
I reminded myself that these are just waste brown bags and not to take them so preciously. After creating 2, I could feel the fear fading away, I started to loosen up, and I made marks. Some crazy random marks, and then wiped them with a rag and that made some marks too. I especially love the rag marks, than the brush marks.
All of these brown textured papers went inside the folder I had just organised.
What started as a cleaning project, ended up with some unexpected creations by the end of artist date #4.
