Feb 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

This may be one of 4 or 5 squares where nothing much is happening in the foreground. It seems like a hard way to start, but it made me think a little about what I want as a result of the month, so it must have had a purpose!

I realized I wanted more uniformity of effort across the page than I first thought. Probably because I am not interpreting someone else’s art, I still want the end result to be a coherent object. Had I chosen to interpret an existing work piecemeal like this, then letting the techniques rule the day would make a great deal of sense. You could treat it as an exploration of media and techniques so long as the colors were correct for each square, the end result would be a sampler, in a classic sense, and still show the sense of the original work. Since no one but me has seen the original work for this piece, I realized I needed to use more constraints to keep the end result cohesive rather than not.

A-4

Feb 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I spent a chunk of yesterday getting this picture ready to work on for this month. That is, I drew it and colored it (because I realized there was much confusion once the pieces were apart) and labeled the back, and cut it up. For the next couple weeks, I pull a piece from the stack, and make it on my 4″ square pieces. At the end of the month, it all fits together in a mosaic, and looks fabulous.

That is the plan, at any rate.

I had forgotten that I like using paper sometimes. I pulled out my water soluble oil pastels for coloring, and they were verry creamy and lovely on the page.

Maybe I need to keep a sketchbook after all, except that I still feel it bleeds off creative pressure in ways I don’t want like. Rather than recording and feeding the ideas for where I want to go next, spending too much time with paper keeps me from getting to the fabric, and frequently makes me unhappy with the fabric results because I spent too much time envisioning what it was going to look like, instead of pushing the actual object along to see what it could turn into.