Art Show at the Library

For the month of March there has been an art show at Brewster Ladies Library.
The show ends this Saturday.  These are my two pieces on display.

Four Seasons

16"x20"

I made the four panels on French ledger paper from the 1890's.

I wet the paper and added color ink to get backgrounds for each season.

I stenciled the tree trunks onto cream colored cardstock, cut them out and pasted them to the ledger paper.

  I used a coordinating stencil (both from Stencil Girl) to add leaves.

Then I added paint & paste embellishments.

Winter has texture paste thru a small dot stencil  for snow.

Photo a bit fuzzy, but you get the idea.

Winter was easy, Summer was easy, Spring took two tries to get the background and Autumn was a bear.  I actually made that panel three times before it looked right with the other ones!

I covered the edges of a canvas with more French ledger paper, painted the inside a tan color and glued my panels in to give it the look of a shadow box.

Birdsong

This collage was made on a book, whose pages were torn out.

Due to the way the Arts Council requires art to be hung  I couldn't add a hanger to the book.  So,  I glued the finished book to the front of a 20"x16" canvas, covered in more French ledger paper.

Here are a few close-ups of the piece:

My funny little steampunk birds

I was in the midst of Zero Procrastination, an online course taught by Karen Kingston, when these pieces were due.  And yes, I did wait til the last week and a half to start them.  What I didn't know is that the course would provide me the space to have a life-changing "ah-ha" moment, where I remembered when my procrastination began.  It's not something touted in the class info, I didn't expect it.  But having that realization allowed me to work on these pieces steadily and easily and get them delivered on time (in fact I was the first artist there!).

My usual refrain is, "I wish I had more time to ... (fill in the blank re project due yesterday)"  This time I was only sorry I didn't have more time because I was having so much fun creating!