Golden Traveling and Wreckage

Golden Traveling
43/100 in 100 Creative Challenge 7/14/09
Golden Fluid Acrylic on watercolor paper, 5"x8"

Here's a new one. Moving away from the washes, and back to thicker more painterly effects. I was inspired by yesterday's painting, which was orange, but I almost wrote as gold. I thought, hey! why not try a gold landscape? How would that work? If it doesn't work out, I still get a post out of it. This is actually gold and bronze paint, with white and a touch of green and a turquoise, which surprisingly ended up being the same color as was actually in the bronze paint if you let it sit and separate. Like oxidized copper.

The blue I had thought was the sky beneath the clouds... but when I looked again it seemed like mountains. So hey, whatever you want. It's supposed to be abstracted. And then when I was done, I waffled over putting in the light streaks of the other Travelings... was it a gimmick? Was it just thrown in there randomly because I'd done it before. I must have sat there for a good long time with the paint on my brush before deciding that I liked the streaks for the feeling of movement, along with the graphic, flattening element.
What is Left When I Close My Eyes, (Wreck This Journal)
44/100 in 100 Creative Challenge
Golden Fluid Acrylic, Gel Medium, Dryer Lint

Ha Ha! My first inclusion of Wreck This Journal into my 100 paintings in 100 days creative challenge. Let me tell you, with one readjusting of my personal constraints, my totals will shoot up and I will no longer need to feel like I HAVE to paint just to keep up my numbers. I will be free to experiment, to try new things, to be meaningful or explore things that are outside of my Flying Girls or Travelings or what have you.

This wreckage, for instance is from the page that says to collect your pocket lint. I don't have that much pocket lint, and often don't wear pockets and besides, I just didn't like the itsy bitsy pieces I was coming up with. And I remembered seeing some artist somewhere who used dryer lint in different shades, so I thought, what the hey? Why not? I took the lint out and folded it and cut it like a snowflake, then painted the page black, even the instructions. I've decided to not let the instructions rule my wreckage. Then I used gel medium to stick it on. I thought I'd collect more lint, but when I brushed the lint with my hand some of it came off and some of it dusted down onto the rest of the page. Instead, I decided to paint on it. I kind of like the way it came out although I don't know what it means or anything.
Breathe and Release (Wreck This Journal)
45/100 in 100 creative challenge
Golden Fluid Acrylic and Lavender shower gel.

This is the page marked "infuse this page with scent." The kid dumped all my essential rose oil out.. so my night table infused with roses, but I remember reading that to make regular moleskine paper work with watercolors was to wash it with dishsoap, so why not use this pretty smelling soap and mix it with my paint? That's what I did. And it now makes me feel so good and calm whenever I open the book and take a breath in that I wrote about breathing and releasing on the page. Ahh.

There's more wreckage, but a lot of it is in progress. I think I'm using the instructions as kind of background for something that I want to say. Not just exercises for exercise sake, but as kind of prompts into exploration and creativity.