The Bird Challenge & Handmade Sketchbooks

My most recent work has been non-representational and mixed media.   And most recently, I’ve been working on a Challenge my friend Valri Ari threw out on Facebook.  More on that later but here’s today’s piece for the challenge.

 

The mixed media is a combination of monoprint and collage.  I’m  using more acrylics and one of the things I do when I’m using them is keep an extra sheet of paper next to me that I can use to blot some of the paint off a piece.  I also use the paper to clean my brayer as I’m printing..My intent in using that paper was to create papers for collage.

Enter sketchbooks.  I use a lot of them.  There are always a couple in the studio and I keep one in my purse and in my car.  I thought I would try to make some signatures of my own using the same paper but without anything on it.  The idea being to use the signatures as the sketchbook and eventually putting some of them together into one book.

One of the blogs I follow is Jane Davies.  She is the one who gave me the idea of lifting paint onto a separate sheet and she sometimes puts those sheets together into a handmade sketchbook.  I thought it would be a good way to work out some non-representational ideas so I made a few of those too.

A spread in one can end up looking like this….

The idea is to connect them somehow or use each page individually. I hadn’t been brave enough to use them until Valri Ari’s bird challenge came along.  The first challenge was birds, 20 in 20 days.  One of my signatures has 20 individual pages so I got brave and decided to give it a shot.  I am loving the results… Here’s the cover of the Bird Challenge…

For this one I’m doing individual pages, here are the rest that are done to date..

You can see that the last two are from a spread that is in the middle. 

I’m looking forward to the next challenge and using another of my signatures.