This is the second block print image that I made. I 'd done a few drawings on the fun foam and was liking some of them and not others. I'd done another barn and it was nice but I didn't like what I'd drawn in the foreground and after I took it back to class I realised from what Bonnie was doing that I could just cut them apart and get parts of the image to use as I chose on my collages.
But this image I wanted to do as an entire image so I worked at thinking a bit about the composition as I drew it and what was going to be in front of what and all that. You don't have any opportunity to erase when you're essentially carving the image out of the fun foam as you draw. I guess I could make a drawing ahead of time and then "carve" it from the foam but there is something sort of spur of the moment and loose that I like about doing it the way that I am right now. That may get old soon but right nowI Ilike it so I'm going to keep working that way - at least for now. The image is a little dirty and there is a paint blob on the bottom but that's because I haven't worked in pencil for awhile and forgot how easily they can smear on the side of your had as you work. I made a mental note to use a paper under my hand to protect my work next time.
There was a technique on Split Coast Stampers that I hadn't gotten a chance to try and I forget what it was called right now but essentially there you were stamping with white ink onto black paper (ah there you go - it was called "Black Magic") and then colouring with pencils on top of the white and then some of the girls were outlining with white gel pen to make the images POP! I stamped mine in black and because it's a negative image thing the outline turns out white already and that makes it POP for me. I guess if I wanted to have a black outline and a white ground I'd have to use white paint on black paper. You can do whatever colour background paper and whatever colour paint you like. And you can also do this with inks although I haven't tried that yet because I'm enjoying playing with my paints and pencils right now.
The inspiration for this piece is a photo I took of some wild black-eyed susans in the ditch here last summer. I caught a small bee in flight just about to land on one of them. I've made another stamp inspired by the same image using only the flowers and nothing else and have used them on a collage I'm working on now in class. I'd like to find the picture again and work on the little bee image a bit because it just delights me. But that may be hard to do because when I was moving last spring I very carefully kept all my photos and scrapbooking papers aside so they wouldn't get wet or spoiled in the move and put them into my Pathfinder to move. That night I was in a car accident and rolled the truck and all of my pictures (which were actually organised) and all the paper got tossed around the road and ditch after the windows smashed out of the truck and the truck did a very effective roof slide with a twirl. I wasn't hurt but it's really hard to lay my hands on most of my pictures still because I haven't had time yet to go through them all and see what I still have and what's missing. If I can find it digitally I'll post the photo later. I just looked now and it isn't on the computer so it must have been on one of the disks that went through the crash.
This one I called Barnyard Black-Eyed Susans #1 (6x9 paint and pencil on cardstock).
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