Monday, January 30, 2012

Inspiration from Jo

One of the blogs I follow is One a Day by Jo Reimer. My inspiration for this mosaic came from her post, Piecings, continued. While Jo created her collage with papers, I started from a print I made on fabric. With acrylic paint, I painted the inside of a mailing envelope lined with bubble wrap. Placing the painted bubble wrap on my fabric, I rolled over it with a brayer. This provided the circles for the background. After the fabric was dry I scanned it into Photoshop Elements.


This is composed of several layers over the background. To make the large line in the middle and the rectangles I used brushes and adjusted the opacity. The bird is cut from a photo of mine using the magic extractor of Elements.

I also made some prints on paper. As I was cooking the ground beef for spaghetti sauce, my eye fell on  the styrofoam meat tray. I cut it into shapes and used it like a stamp. My material was a paper grocery bag that I crumpled several times then smoothed out. I will scan those pieces to show another day.

Be sure to check out Jo's blog for a dose of inspiration! Thanks, Jo!  I'm joining Little Red House for Mosaic Monday.


After a critique from Jo, I altered my collage and this is the result. What do you think?



Here you can see the two side by side. Jo suggested the picture would be better with fewer of the circles so they could be an accent. I agreed so I moved up the opacity of the layer with the color blocks to make them solid. I don't like the resulting intensity of color. This could have been done a different way to keep the original color. Jo also suggested moving up the two birds in the lower right.


15 comments:

Tina´s PicStory said...

lovely collage :)

eileeninmd said...

Very creative and pretty image. Love the cute finches. Well done. A lovely mosaic. Have a great day.

Maggie said...

Love this! It's wonderful what you achieved with "waste" products and a lot of ingenuity.
Will be checking out Jo's blog for sure.
Happy MM.

http://jackieinsurrey.blogspot.co.uk/ said...

Very creative and different. Look forward to seeing some more. Have a good week, Jackie in Surrey.

Carol at Serendipity said...

Just lovely and very creative. Your work is just getting more and more beautiful.

Carol

~Lavender Dreamer~ said...

That is so gorgeous and it's interesting to hear how you created it! It looks 3D even on the computer screen! WOW! ♥

A Garden of Threads said...

Fabulous job, love it.

Cathy said...

How pretty is that! I love the colors and the textures you have combined here.

TexWisGirl said...

you are incredibly creative!

colorchic said...

Very fun! Those colors work so well together!

black eyed susans kitchen said...

Beautiful and so creative...this is a lovely work of art!

Carol said...

It's beautiful. I love the colors and the designs! Very pretty mosaic, very creative.

Stephanie said...

Clever idea for the collage. It is quite pretty to look at.

Mary Howell Cromer said...

I see your son is living in LA. My 28 year old daughter also lives there, but has been traveling the USA in her work field recently. You are so creative, I love what you learned from you blogging friend and how you gave it your own mark. The birds so lovely anyway and then add what you created, very lovely~

Deanna said...

Very creative. I like your collage a lot. In my opinion, though, your original is more interesting than the changes! Both are great though.