Collage Chicken - Trying Something Different

We've been learning about Henri Matisse lately, which led to experiments with collage and it was but a short hop to try collage illustration.

I'd never really tried to use collage for anything more than a few simple kids projects with my daughter until now, so we both turned to Skillshare for inspiration. After watching the course through, my 11yo and I both got to work.

Collage chicken - work in progress

This is my first attempt as a work in progress. Until now I'd always assumed collage was a simple art form, but designing, making our own papers, preparing a background surface, cutting, piecing things together and finally assembling this small greeting's card, was an incredibly involved process.

I opted for a small, square format card which I prepared using gesso coloured with a little acrylic paint. I added some glitter marker over the top to give more definition.

The papers are prepared with either watercolour or water soluble pastels, just playing really. Rather than copy paper, I used really cheap and thin watercolour paper from Hobbycraft.

Collage chicken greeting card - several days work!

Overall, I'm pleased with the way this turned out. It took much longer than I thought it would, with cutting and sticking alone taking three nights! Not a technique for when I'm in a hurry, but the results are very impressive. Fun, but like stippling, something for when you have plenty of time to do the technique justice!

Long Time No See

 It's been a while since I posted here, but I thought I'd say hello as I was passing through and considering what to do with this blog. Looking back at the archive and my last post was 2017, so as you might imagine things have moved on somewhat.

I'm still very much creating, but much of my focus is on art these days. What started as something I was doing mostly to amuse my daughter, blossomed until it became my primary creative pursuit. I still like to knit, sew and do general crafts, but with only a little time available to do these things, I've had to choose and art has won... For the moment anyway. I'm a serial crafter of longstanding, so undoubtedly once I have more time on my hands these things will creep back into my life.

In January 2018 I created a new Instagram for my art (JulieSpriddleArt) and in combination with my personal Insta, it pretty much replaced this blog. I've been posting regularly, just not here.

However, Instagram has changed a lot since 2018 and not really for the better. It used to be a good place to see art from emerging artists, shown in the order they were posted and ads were few and far between. These days, the algorithm favours stories and reels, ads are every 4th post and it's SPAM galore. Nothing is posted in chronological order and I'm not at all sure people see most of what I post. Meca (or Facebook) the parent company is now threatening to shut the site down in Europe unless they are allowed to steal our data and target ads even more than they already do, all of which is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

I've spent the past four years building up the account, so I'm not intending to shut down my Instagram, but it may be time to think about establishing my own site... Except I don't really have any budget for that right now, hence why I'm casting a speculative eye over Blogger again.

We shall see...

In the meantime, here is an African Wild Donkey.

African Wild Donkey - Created by Julie Spriddle.

This is prompt 3 in the #WildlifeWednesdayChallenge over on Instagram, which is an art challenge intended to highlight the plight of endangered animals from around the world. In the case of the wild donkey, this is a cousin of the domestic donkey and is considered critically endangered in the wild with numbers estimated between 400 and 800.

Here, I've attempted a colourful African inspired pattern for the background, using my Artistro paint markers. I drew out the pattern first, then sketched the donkey before colouring around it, leaving a donkey shaped hole. This colouring process took a very, very long time and was an exercise in patience. Once the paint was dry, I filled in the donkey using Faber Castell PITT brush pens, with the reference courtesy of Holly Cannon via her Facebook group.