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I was looking around on the internet for inspiration and one type of abstract artwork that catches my eyes are the squiggly lines one, and thats what I went with for the background. Since I dont really have any color pencil nor marker in my toolkit, so I just used some color powder lying around to do some basic coloring. Next up is I sorta jog down different type of marking/sketches on paper, and picked only my best one to use for experimenting with shapes. Finally I play around with the stacking order to form interesting shapes, I had them photographed one by one and picked the best one out of the 4 variants I had.

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Photo 1: Experimenting with gestural line

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Photo 1: Experimenting with gestural line

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I used felt pens, ink, acrylic paint and fountain pen on paper. I noticed that my fountain pen ink is not permanent and I like the way that the line 'blurs' when water is added. Mostly vertical movements are evident within the gestural marks. I think that this page could be cut up to create some interesting textural variations. There is so much going on that I'll probably include some solid colored elements to offset the hyperactivity!

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After moving shapes around and around, I came upon this variation that pleased my eyes.  I used a textured background/substrate to balance my 'Cairn' on.  (It may be advantageous to lighten the value a bit on the background.  I might put a light, transparent wash over it to make the asemic page compete less with the cairn in the foreground).  I used my  palimpsest envelope from today's demo and a black and white shape that was cut from a magazine photo.  I like the combination of geometric and organic shapes together. This composition is not glued down.  It’s just a design idea ‘in process’.

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I made extra elements so I decided to glue this one down. It was an improvisational process. I laid the big red square down and then balanced the other shapes around and on top of it. I used a red China marker line to unify the design a bit. I don’t typically work with collage and found that I really enjoy the process. More to come….Remember, you need three variations AND a completed composition. I’m going to continue too.

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My First Swirl of Ink Pen, and Permanent markers.

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My First Swirl of Ink Pen, and Permanent markers.

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Well the first step that I did with the ball point pen was I did tight swirl circles. Then I took permanent color markers with orange, blue, red, and did side parallel swirls over the black point pen swirls. Then I rubbed water over the permanent colors on the page, it made it blurry, messy, and it changed the color blue into a purple color, which is amazing. I made a vase form from the black swirl circles.

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My First Cairn with a Variety of Geometric Rock Forms with Different Textures.

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My First Cairn with a Variety of Geometric Rock Forms with Different Textures.

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Most of my geometric rock texture forms are situated with points pointing towards the center of the page. The gold brick textured rock wall is the center piece, the circle swirls, and permanent marking pen colors are the backsplash. On my top row of my geometric textured rocks, I have them stacked like stalactites. This is a different way of looking at stacked geometric rock texture forms.

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My Second Cairn, my Geometric Shapes are Situated to the Left.

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My Second Cairn, my Geometric Shapes are Situated to the Left.

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My texture geometric rock forms are situated to the left, but I did stack rock forms more. My permanent marker color splash is coming out in the back ground to give it a beautiful sunset look. The hexagon rock texture form is a rose to give my rocks a soft final touch.

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My Third Cairn, I have My Geometric Rock Texture Forms, Situated Around the Outer Edge.

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My Third Cairn, I have My Geometric Rock Texture Forms, Situated Around the Outer Edge.

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This third time around I used a thicker pen that made bold black lines, to give the geometric forms a lethal thick swirl to all the textured rock forms. I find stacking the rocks in a certain laid out way, can give the picture a certain dynamic edge to the picture.

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My Fourth Cairn, I really Stacked My Geometric Forms With a Soft Rose on the Top.

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My Fourth Cairn, I really Stacked My Geometric Forms With a Soft Rose on the Top.

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You really can see my bold black pen that I went over my permanent color markers. The stacking of my geometric texture rock forms was my final choice. I glued this down after I took the photo, but I did learn stacking my textured rocks has given the picture a different combination to the picture.

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I made some marks on a previously painted background that I didn't like

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I made some marks on a previously painted background that I didn't like

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then cut up some old art projects and painted scraps

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then cut up some old art projects and painted scraps

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I enjoyed this project so much I did 2 more

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I enjoyed this project so much I did 2 more

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Just little pencil swiggles..

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I put marks of thinned acrylic on canson media paper.Marks should have scrubbed in and made it bleed more to be atmospheric.

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A supply of vogue and vanity fair...

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I got to use that Ritz cracker. I chose opposites in color wheels for color balance and of course vertical lines against the background diagonals for contrasts. Differing shapes for contrasts.

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I love the shapes of these faces as stones in a cairns stack the varying shades. The colors of faces are earth tones and the of shapes are stone like. The sizes of them decrease creating balance. I mix faces and non- faces for balance and variety.

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I tried stacking varying color textures as stones. Actually some of these stones are arms of the models wearing various outfits. the one model was wearing a klimt-like dress. I saw the shape and thought it would be a perfect stone shape for a cairn.

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My final cairn has a lot of textures overlapping each other to maje a stackable cairn with a topper.

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Watercolor, tombow pen, scribbles on 140 pound watercolor paper

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First cut. Very boring to me.

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Old watercolor study. I blended it together

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I drew shapes on the back of the watercolor so it would be a surprise what I got after cutting.

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Results from cutting. I like this one much better.

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One idea

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Another possibility.

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Another combo

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I used Tombow pens, gel pens, paint brush tips, pencil markings with erasings and watercolors for the background. I scribbled words to songs with both hands.

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My final in my notebook.

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This is just a background I made with some water color

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I wrote and then erased to make it look like a palimpsest

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I wrote and then erased to make it look like a palimpsest

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This cairn is my favorite and my fourth 

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This cairn is my favorite and my fourth 

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So…I’m not really happy with the final product but it’s likely because I over thought it.  Always a problem with me.  Two recent experiences interjected themselves into this exercise. (1) Lately I have been reorganizing my old books from college and grad school.  I ran across my old Wittgenstein philosophy of language and several foreign language books. It was fun to revisit all of them. (2) I recently ran across, and saved into my Pinterest file on “Life” certain photos of microscopic life forms and cells such as neurons.  These forms were very much on my mind when I started painting the stones.   

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So…I’m not really happy with the final product but it’s likely because I over thought it.  Always a problem with me.  Two recent experiences interjected themselves into this exercise. (1) Lately I have been reorganizing my old books from college and grad school.  I ran across my old Wittgenstein philosophy of language and several foreign language books. It was fun to revisit all of them. (2) I recently ran across, and saved into my Pinterest file on “Life” certain photos of microscopic life forms and cells such as neurons.  These forms were very much on my mind when I started painting the stones.   

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I then painted a background and got carried away with the colors and ended up with a way too busy backdrop for the stones.  I then cut the stones out and arranged them on the background. But first, I photocopied several passages from different foreign language books or websites: Hebrew, Japanese, Xhosa, Mayan, Cherokee, Farsi, Japanese…I dragged these passages through the wet paint of the background and then pasted these selections onto the background.  Then I arranged the “stones” in a way that seemed most balanced to me.  This is when I changed the orientation from portrait to landscape.

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Not content to leave well enough alone and wanting to somehow tie it all together, I added in print and cursive passages from Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Color.” These concern the relationship between color and the language/terminology used to describe different colors. Do we ever really know what another person sees? Is my green the same as your green? I scattered the most compelling passages from Wittgenstein’s little treatise around the “stones” and biological forms. It is very busy and much less interesting than I had hoped.

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These are all actually made out of homemade ink. The yellow ink is made from cumin and the green one is made out of raspberry tea. I made the marks with leaves! You can’t really tell that a leaf was used as the mark maker but it does appear to have a botanical shape to it. I ended up using one of the sheets with the raspberry ink because the green matched the color scheme I wanted to go with.

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I really wanted to use the green paint sample but I ended up not really liking how it looked.

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The 2nd stone shape has marker splatters on it, I was aiming for a certain effect but I think I chose a color a bit too similar to the green I used for the writing.

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I liked these stone shapes the most so I knew I'd probably be going with these.

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Here is just an extra shot, I kept it on the Padlet because I thought that the background blends very well with the cutout. Also the pizza looks a bit solid even though it was flat.

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A closeup of the background.

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Here is the final product! I thought my previous composition looked a bit too plain so I added a lot to it. I used stamps, washi tape, stickers, borders and the flower on top of the mushroom from the bottom left side is a design I cut off of some stationary paper with an xacto knife. The same can be said for the flower on the right corner that has the words “botanical records” below it. I tried to rip off some paper and the tape so that my cairn could have a type of lost and found look. Looking back on my cairn, I realize now that it looks a lot like a collage because of the different elements I included. Also, for the 2nd stone on the right I at first made some squiggly lines with graphite but ended up covering it up with the acrylic marker. With the acrylic marker, I made crosshatched lines.

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Here it is in different lighting

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This is a color study painting from last year I believe? I don’t really like it but the colors looked interesting so I decided to use it. I used an xacto knife to cut out the shape of a eucalyptus plant. It gave it a nice gradation! I also really like how you can see the brush strokes so I thought it would add some interesting texture to my cairn.

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Here I printed out the cover of one of my favorite albums with the intention of writing over it. The concept of palimpsest sounded very interesting. Though, I felt strange writing directly on it and instead wrote on tracing paper and used that to put on top of the album’s writing. For the writing I did, I wrote the lyrics from my favorite song off of that album.

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For this one, I used an acrylic marker and I did a blind contour of one of my favorite characters. I ended up cutting out a piece of the face and drawing over it again with another character from The Moomins.

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Somehow my mark making photo and writing ended up in Chad's column! I used a poem by William Blake that I love.

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Somehow my mark making photo and writing ended up in Chad's column! I used a poem by William Blake that I love.

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As background I feel compelled to share these images of real and imagined biological forms that I have collected from Pinterest. Why take drugs when you can look at these? Everything under a microscope looks 2-dimensional but in reality, they must be 3-dimensional. I believe dye is used to photograph these forms (unless they are paintings, obviously). The colors absolutely astound me. The

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As best I can tell, using Google reverse image look-up,  this is a painting by an artist in Chicago, Bruce Riley.  http://blues.gr/m/blogpost?id=1982923%3ABlogP

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I started out by coloring a piece of paper with colors pencils and used scissors to cut them out. I then glued it to my sketchbook and defined the shapes by using green for the background.  

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I started out by coloring a piece of paper with colors pencils and used scissors to cut them out. I then glued it to my sketchbook and defined the shapes by using green for the background.  

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This is the finished product for the first one. 

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This is the finished product for the first one. 

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I found some old sticky notes with some quotes on them and I decided to fold them into some butterflies to put in the piece.

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This took about 5 minutes but very calming for me. I make butterflies out of sticky notes to help with negative thoughts so I found this to be very stimulating for my mind !!

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I was taking out the trash and saw fun designs on a trade joes bag so I cut them out and I really liked the idea of a man looking at a bunch of crazy things

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i started playing with my old tombow pens and made some asymmetrical circles and cut it out by ripping it to add texture.

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I ripped out all my shapes and ripped out some black paper to add a texted background. I love abstract work that has bold lines and used my black pen to do so.

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I didn't like how the blue looked and made and long up boulder look. I like the bold colors and shapes that i added outside the background

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I created marks using Crayola watercolor, Sharpies, fine-tip felt pens, gel pens, and gel highlighters.

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I combined cut-outs from both my mark making page and scrapbook paper to create my design variations. I also chose to use a neutral, patterned scrapbook page as my background. I absolutely love pattern clashing.

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I used some of my least favorite shapes in this design. I liked it but ultimately only wanted to use the shapes  I thought were beautiful so I kept trying.

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I liked the design but was not happy with the orientation of some of my favorite shapes so I continued on. This felt chaotic to me.

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The final design glued into my sketchbook. I love the balance of cool and warm tones and the variety of patterns. I can see this as a kinetic sculpture.