gg's functional art: March 2012

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Echinacea Art - Painting with Paper

My Friends are Flowers - By GG Burns

For a long time, I have admired artist who create collages or paint with small pieces of paper. Until now, I have only dabbled with this technique. After creating two exploded views of Echinacea Cone Flowers, my thoughts are this is an extremely time consuming and a back breaking method to create art.

'A Walk in the Garden' by GG Burns

Consequently, I will no doubt return to painting with either watercolors or alcohol inks since I enjoy painting quickly with instant results. Now, I have more admiration for my collage artist friends than ever before.

First, I altered various vintages pages from old books, sheet music or clippings from garden magazines.

Then, I painted an undercoating with acrylic paint of each flower on canvas.

Next, I used a paper shredder, hole punches and scissors to cut up thousands

of tiny pieces. After about 20 hours of tedious, eye straining work, the paper paintings are complete.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Creation of my latest Derby Chic

First a few sketches on tracing paper, with

emphasis on a large and fancy derby hat.

Next, I copied articles and newspaper headlines from previous derby races.

Using Golden's Gel Medium, I collaged dozens of

vintage pages with derby quotes and derby related articles,

all over an 18" x 24" canvas.

Next, I used various models from magazines as my
inspiration for hat and face.

I polled my Facebook friends for suggestions on the
hat color decision. I needed help to decide if Derby
Chic's hat should be black, red or pink.
Most suggested hot pink.