Weather Alerts = Creative Alerts

This week Minnesota has been the bullseye for another April Blizzard. Snow, wind, sleet, thunderstorms and hail have all been predicted for a three day monster storm. We all groan, head to the grocery store, fill the bird feeders and plan how the days inside might be spent. Such has become the new normal for April in Minnesota.

I love these hiatuses from my normal routine. A weather alert equals a creative alert and this latest early spring storm provided time for an opportunity to try some new collage ideas. I had seen some new techniques and materials for collage that I wanted to explore. According to the weather channel I would have three days to do so.

For the collage, “Eggs for Sale” I documented the process and I hope you enjoy seeing the process as much as I enjoyed doing it.

I began with the idea of a chicken and sketched out the shape on a prepared 16″ x 20″ artist board. Working with various papers I added foreground shapes.

The chicken was painted with gesso. Using a high flow acrylic I covered the foreground with a deep blue, allowing the paint to dry and then used various grades of sandpaper to distress the shapes and the foreground.

The background was the next step that needed to be developed. This area had a coat of chalk paint applied to it.

Collage papers were added that included hand painted papers and washi tape. Letters cut from magazine pages of various fonts were added. A chicken wire fence was drawn with a micron pen to give the image a sense of place.

The final steps included using a tinted gesso to knock back the collage letters, adding more shapes to balance the background and adding more collage elements to add interest to the chicken. The last step was shadowing the chicken with pencil values. 

As the weather grew more and more intimidating the beauty of it all was that I cut, painted and glued and never noticed. Art helped me forget that the spring blooms were being covered with snow and ice.

Thanks for reading and lets hope that spring is truly just around the corner!