Bianchi Bike Collage Art Project- Finished!

Done and done! This little project took about 6 months when I initially thought it would only take 1-2 weeks. Approximately 3,000 postage stamps later (mostly vintage from about 30 different countries)  the great bike collage project of 2011 is finally done.  Admittedly, it's a bit overly pink, but I love it anyway.  I've been wanting to do some larger projects and this fit the bill perfectly.

I'm ready to do another bike (or a car!) except that I don't have room for any more bikes so until we live in a house with more bike or car storage this will have to be it for now unless I take on a temporary job and do one for someone else.  I'd love to do one with maps.

Last weekend I rode it to Jazz in the Park and went through a bout of heavy rain & hail.  She seemed to survive just fine and it was great to be on a faster ride than my cruiser finally.

Happy weekend riding everyone!
Andrea

Waves

There are few things I love more than sitting on a beach watching the waves roll in.  Even in the dead of winter.

I've been working on a series of water pieces and it's taken a while, but I finally finished this piece yesterday. 

Photos updated 1/6/11

The Bike Collage Project- Midway Update

I'm about halfway through my bike collage project now.  Here are a few pictures of my progress.

Angus & Mathilda Mixed Media

I started a series of small mixed media collages a couple weeks back and am just now finally finishing them.  They're based on a set of old black & white photos that I found in Portland last month.

Postage Stamps of the Week- Indonesia and Other Things

Well, this post isn't really about Indonesia, but I rarely ever come across postage stamps from Indonesia- this is only the first or second one I'm gotten out of close to 50,000 stamps.  I don't know why.  But I got married there and it's an incredible country, so it's a special place to me and I love seeing a stamp from Indo.

I just love the graphics this next set. 

It would be nearly impossible for me to pick just one favorite postage stamp because there are a lot of great competitors in the pool, but this Espana stamp below would be in my top three.  In person, this stamp has incredible color- it's wildly pink!  And I find it rather hilarious with Mr.'s very non-wild expression.  I've used many of these stamps in my art as well.

Numerous Mr. Espana in this one!

Water Series Update

Work on this piece has been a little slow, but it's coming along.  Here's an update on the piece.  I was hoping to finish it this weekend, but it doesn't look like that's quite going to happen but I'm still hoping to finish the series of 3 by the end of the year.

'Profusion of Blooms' is Finally Finished!

I've been working on ,and talking about, this piece for a couple of weeks now. I finally finished it this morning and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I was hoping to capture the colors of all the pink blooms that come out for such a short time in Denver each spring. Here's the finished piece:










I've posted a couple of earlier posts on this blogs (see below) on the process for putting this piece together. First I laid down the vegetation (green), then the sky (blue) and then the tree trunk and branches. These two pictures show what the piece looked like before I laid down the blooms.







I didn't take any pictures during the process of laying down the blooms, which took me several days. I laid down approximately 3 layers of blooms and then added just a few more until I had achieved the tree that I set out to create. There are more pics of the finished piece on my Etsy site here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23236467



My next project is going to be something a little different. Stay tuned for updates later this week....



Cheers,
Andrea at Studio 6

Coveting the Work of Other Artists

I like a lot of work by other artists. I learn from them, appreciate their hard work and envy their ideas- wishing some of them had been mine. But from time to time, I positively covet the works of others, wishing I could live with a piece on my wall to look at everyday. This is one of my favorites:

I found this artist, Johnny Taylor, on Etsy (http://www.johnnytaylorart.etsy.com/) and then found his website (http://johnnytaylorart.com/). I think his work is amazing. I love all of his pieces, but this one speaks to me the most. This piece is called 'The Day I Had Everything'. I think it's the title, in conjunction with the picture, that I love. We've all had those singular, rare, wonderful days where we felt like we were positively on top of the world and 'had everything'. Those have been the best days of my life.

This piece, for me, clearly captures everything involved in those special days. I love the colors, the picture, the musical design. Yes, I covet this piece of art. Ahhh, if only the student budget allowed for it.... He actually has several versions of this piece and I love them all.

Here are some other fantastic pieces from his online collection:

So, who's work do you covet today?

Andrea at Studio6

New Piece: 'Extinctions'

I finished this new piece today called 'Extinctions' (more photos in my Etsy shop: http://www.studio6or7.etsy.com/):

I worked on a research project last summer looking at native and invasive butterfly species in Colorado and comparing the data to records from the 50's (I actually did the plant surveys for the project, not the butterfly data). Invasive butterflies and climate change are indeed pushing native species into smaller and smaller ranges now, with many on the edge of extinction. Butterflies are well studied because they are a good indicator species of what is happening in the environment as they generally respond to the affects of change more quickly than most other species. Sadly, someday we simply won't have many of the species that we have now. We will be left with blank spaces in our beautiful ecosystems.

Andrea at Studio6or7

Things are happening!

I'm really excited today because one of my pieces, 'Last Flower Standing', has been featured on someone else's blog for the first time.

http://lovarevolutionary.blogspot.com/2009/04/flickr-picks-lova-revolutionary-blog.html

This piece took me a really long time to make- about 40 hours. It's one of my favorites because of it's brilliant colors. There are more pictures of it in my Etsy shop here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22068425

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Today I've been laying down the sky for the large piece that I've been working on over the last week. This took me about 6 hours today- it is a very painstaking process but I'm happy with how it turned out. The colors are a bit dull in these pictures but once I apply the varnish at the end, they really brighten up and you get the full effect.

Someone asked me why I bother covering the entire canvas with a background, only to cover it. The short answer is that it would feel unfinished to me if I didn't. There IS a sky behind every tree, and grass or other vegetation behind the trunk. And behind the blooms there are branches. I would always feel it was a shoddy half-finished job if I left those things out. So I don't. Which is why it takes so long to put all the different layers together. I did the same thing to a cityscape piece that I made which is about 2/3rds covered up, yet it had to have a full sky. Perhaps it's the nerd in me.

The next step for this new piece is to lay down the trunk and the branches of the tree and then the blooms, which is my favorite part. I started picking out the stamps for the blooms today. This is a small sampling:

I was really hoping to have this piece finished today, but I always underestimate the length of time it will take, usually by many hours. If I can get the trunk and branches laid down tomorrow, then I can finish it on Friday. Stay tuned....

Andrea at Studio6

Putting the pieces together

I'm working on a new piece in anticipation of all the pink spring blooms that have to arrive in the city. I thought I would post some pictures along the way of how it all goes together.

First I decide on background colors. In this case it's greens & blues for grass and sky. The first step is to wrap stamps around the sides of the canvas. Sometime I do all the sides first, especially if it's all going to be one color, but in this case I only wrapped the grass and then worked my way across the front. I try not to have too much overlap of stamps because I hate to lose any of their artistic 'face value', but I find it nearly impossible to lay them out in such a way that there is no overlap. This is the incomplete piece with the grass laid down.

Next I'll lay down the sky. Then the tree trunk and branches and then finally, the fun part, the profusion of pink blooms. I'll post more pics along the way as I go through these steps. I'm hoping to have this piece completed by tomorrow but that might require working most of the night, so we'll see.

Andrea at Studio6

Almost an art disaster...

I very nearly ruined my latest piece. Luckily, it's small, because I was experimenting with a new technique, so it wouldn't have been a huge disaster to have to throw it away, but I would have been bummed.



I've been experimenting with acrylic. I have been using stamps of one or two colors for my backgrounds, as in the two pieces below, but as you can see , the backgrounds get noisy sometimes. I like them for their colorfulness and the backgrounds are interesting if you take a close look, because of course I think most stamps are interesting, but sometimes the stamp backgrounds drown out my message.

Which is why I've been experimenting with painted backgrounds. They definitely make my pictures pop out more, though to me these backgrounds are a little less interesting. But the paint is really difficult to adhere the stamps to. They slip and slide all around, frequently become crooked and have to be completely reworked- it takes a lot more time to build on the paint background than on a background made of stamps.

Today I tried sealing the paint first, with varnish, before laying my picture down on the black paint, but the varnish and the adhesive had some weird chemical reaction and all of my yellow stamps looked gray from smudges of paint! Very disappointing- especially because yellow stamps are incredibly hard to find- countries just don't make many yellow stamps for some reason. Luckily, I was able to take the whole picture off, repaint the canvas and rebuild another yellow house. I actually like this one a little better than the first one, so I suppose it all worked out.

Here's my latest miniature canvas 'Spring House':

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22466370

Andrea at Studio6

New Stamps

Yesterday I received a fantastic shipment of a couple hundred triangular stamps from someone in Argentina, which I've been waiting to arrive for many weeks now.  Well it was well worth the wait.  These are just a very few of them.  The colors and designs are really striking.  

 I love when new stamps arrive either by post or by friends, and I get to sift through them, imagining the stories that they tell and how they will play into the stories that I tell in my art pieces.  I probably spend entirely too much time on this phase of the process, but it's mesmerizing, for hours sometimes.  

My problem now with the new stamps is deciding just what to use them for.  Sometimes I get stamps that are just so interesting!  And I have a really hard time giving them up to a piece because I know that most of them get partially or fully covered up by the time I'm done.  

I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the triangles when I originally ordered them, but they're such great stamps, I may need to find a more interesting and prominent use for them in my work now.

Andrea at Studio6

Here we are!

We're throwing ourselves out to the world finally.  Studio6or7 is really two studios (6 and 7) at the moment.  Studio6 (that's me!) makes mixed-media art.  Studio7 (that's Cori) makes beaded and upcycled jewelry.  

Intro to Studio6:

My main materials are postage stamps, canvas and paint which I use to create my own personal vision of the world through my art pieces.  I've had a fascination with stamps for a long time because each one is a miniature little story in itself and I find the colors mesmerizing.  I spend a lot of time sifting through my huge stamp collection sorting by color and themes (like ships, planes, sports, animals, flowers, country, writers, etc...).  

I do mostly small works because they take a really long time to put all the layers together, but some new, larger pieces are currently in the works.  My initial idea with the stamps was to create a huge world map on a wall in my house.  Unfortunately, I just haven't had the right house yet in which to do it.  I imagine that will be a huge project of possibly 100,000+ stamps, but one I've been talking about and thinking about for probably 10 years or more.  In the meantime, I'm quite happy creating smaller visions and working on other ideas.  

Cori, over at Studio7 is really tied up right now with her 'real' job and working on her Masters degree, but she'll be posting more info. on Studio7 soon.

If you want to check out any of our works you can see them at:

www.studio6or7.etsy.com

I'm currently working on a website for Studio6or7 and will post the information for it once we have it up and running, which will probably be sometime in April.

Andrea at Studio6