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Today I received Creative Paint Workshop for Mixed-Media Artists by Ann Baldwin and I love it!  First of all, I love her style.  She combines  collage with paint and ink in a beautiful way.  The book starts out teaching about layout and composition and goes all the way through to teach the reader everything they need to know about creating mixed media pieces.  She details paints, media, pens, and other materials.  There are several chapters with step-by-step instructions that are very detailed with many instructional pictures.  One whole chapter is devoted to encaustic techniques.

I read a lot of art books, and I usually get some inspiration from them, but this one is the best I’ve seen in a long time!  In summary, an artist I truly admire shares her process, her materials and her experience in a beautiful, spiral bound (within a hard cover), 141 page book.

I have done so much art this past week.  More than I’ve done in a very long time.  I got this surge of wanting to do nothing but art.  But I find myself at a stump.  I feel something coming, like a shift in what I’m doing.  Maybe pushing me to a new dimension.  But right now I’m not satisfied with anything I’ve done.  And yet, I can’t stop!

For the first time ever, I took an online art course.  I took Traci Bautista’s monotypes and drizzles class.  It was great to inspire me and get me to doing something each time we got a lesson.  But I have to admit that I didn’t learn a lot for the amount of money I paid.   I had hoped to get a lot of new ideas and techniques, which I didn’t, but as I said, it was good to inspire me just to make art.

I also, for the first time, looked at a lot of videos by various mixed media artists like Millande, Willowsong and Suzy Blu.    I am so impressed that they a) know how to make a video and b) are willing to share their process with everyone.   Millande, especially, was very inspiring to me.  But the thing I noticed about all of them is that they draw a lot.  I can’t draw.  Well, I can but only in pencil and only certain things and only when I work and work at it.  It’s not something I can just do quickly on a canvas like they do.

It seems that successful mixed media artists have a very distinct style.  Claudine Hellmuth – poppet people; Kelly Rae Roberts – girls with big skirts and tilted heads; Traci Bautista – graffiti like, multilayered paintings.   I have  my own style, in a sense, but I have several styles.   I like the simplicity of dresses done in only two or three soft colors with lots of texture.  I also like bold colors with lots of smudging and messiness.  And I do a lot with neutral colors accented with dark browns and blacks.  So, I wonder do these artists really only do the one style?  Or do they only  market one style so that’s all we see?

I’m wondering if a “real” artist has such a distinct style that all their work is very recognizable.  If so, maybe I’m not a real artist.  Maybe as I continue to create, my styles will merge into one unique style.    In the meantime, I’m going to continue to paint and glue and play – creating what I’m inspired to create.

I cleaned my art table and made room to work on some large canvases.   I started out like I used to, to create a collage – going through images to find something to inspire me. I selected some images and laid them out on the canvas but nothing was working.  I started hearing that critical voice that told me I suck at collage.

The actual process of applying to paint to anything is very meditative for me. So, I decided to paint the canvas and just let the muse take over. Two days later I had finished three canvases and they aren’t truly collage.  More mixed media, I guess, but here’s the exciting part! Remember my last post where I talked about how I wanted to get back to collage but it would probably be different than it was before? Well, I think this new art is coming more from my soul than previously.

There is the art that you look at, then there’s the emotion and self-expression that’s in the piece. Doing these collages, I was not very interested in what the finished piece looked like to anyone else. I was expressing some important personal and spiritual things with these pieces. When I look at them now, I don’t critique them, I feel the message that’s in them for me.

Here are two of them.

It’s cloudy so it was hard to get a good picture.  On both of these, I used spackle.  I used it as the background in the one on the left, then glued paper dresses over it.    I created the dress from the spackle in the right one.  This spackle is so cool!  I feels just like shaving cream!  Then you can sand it later if you want.  It’s by Red Devil and it’s called One Time Spackle.  I bought it at Home Depot.