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

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