Years ago the kids and I experimented with using modeling clay on a Styrofoam head to make a weirdly inhuman mask shapes. They took forever to dry and the modelling clay was hard to pry out from the paper mask. We painted them but they ended up just sitting around for years gathering dust, never quite finished. I decided to revisit the masks this month and giving them an all new paint job, adding materials to them and creating glass eyes. My first mask redo was a cat like mask with a ridge of bumps up the centre of it's face. Once painted, I added wool to create a mane and painted glass beads as eyes which I then mounted in behind the mask. It looked even better when I lit the mask from within making the eyes light up. My next mask was a tad weirder. My daughter had originally made the shape by adding modelling clay to the mouth area before papering over top. It had a strange gas mask-like appearance. I ran with this idea but added bits of black spray painted plastic I melted with a match, small glass vials filled with different materials, a pair of glasses and again glass eyes lit form behind. I love how it turned out even if it's a bit creepy.
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I am always looking for free materials to use in my large drop in classes. Therefore, I rarely throw anything away that may have an artful purpose. So after saving up all my family toilet paper and paper towel tubes I thought about how I could combine them into a sculptural art piece. I was pretty happy with my end result which I had built as an example for a drop in art program I was running. It was really interesting to see what everyone created using these simple cardboard tubes.
I was intrigued by some posts I saw online about altered book art. This style of art uses pages from books and adds art work on top of the text to create the pieces. I saw examples using ink, pastel, acrylic paint and watercolour. Since I have a class coming up that is based on an artist that uses both images, words and weaving I decided to do some experimenting. The first thing I did was pick up a used book that look old. I bought a copy of "Mostly In Clover" by Harry J. Boyle, printing in 1963. I loved the old look of the book and the older way it was written. From the snippets I glanced at the book seems to be about growing up in rural Ontario. The next part was the hardest for me. Being a book lover I would never support destroying books so cutting a page out of a book was hard to do, not psychically but mentally. It took me three days to start the project because of this. I felt like I should at least read the book first but then thought maybe I'd get attached to it and then I wouldn't' be able to use it for this project. Silly I know but that's what ran through my mind. Eventually I sliced a page out and started in on my first experiment. I looked at the page I cut out and started to read though the text circling words that stood out, trying to weave together an sentence or thought with those words. I then decided on the imagery I wanted to reinforce the words I had chosen and the method by which I would create the art around the words. I experimented with different materials including watercolour, acrylic and ink. I even did some simple stitching with embroidery floss to lead the eye from word to word. |
Jennifer MorrisonHere is a catalog of my creative adventures and experiments Categories
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