This week I am drawn to gentle grey-blues.

My last several works have had much more intense colors. I want to experience calmer colors for a bit.

These photos are my inspiration

I shot these photos several years ago and had thought they were gone forever.. Rediscovering them has been very exciting to me.

I have also been inspired by the knowledge that I have some already-printed pieces that will work well together in a grey-blue palette. So, I began with transferring my tree photos to muslin, going into my bin for coordinating pieces, and trying out some composition.

I am in the beginning stages of this piece. Still, I have had some helpful discoveries.

ORGANIZING - This is a little thing – I know. No big deal. But, sometimes the little things help one’s studio work practices. These are paper folders I made to sort the fabrics.

 These are the liner sheets from 18” x 24” watercolor blocks – a nice Bristol weight, just heavy enough to act as a file folder, and nice and big. Because I will be working the piece in sections, quilting as I go, after I had it all assembled on my worktable I had to take it all apart to do the assembly. I photographed the composition I had created, then separated the fabrics into folders, one for each section I’ll be creating. So organized!

REPURPOSING

I will be using some strips of muslin I had created a while ago that I did not consider successful printing. The final product was overworked and uninteresting.

BUT.. I took a section of it and overprinted with a different pattern, and I love the result.

I also flipped the piece over to reveal the random, parchment-like markings on side 2. I like those a lot. Now this fabric will get used!

RESTING
This little section of muslin is about 8” square. It is monoprinted muslin – just some subtle color.

At one point I tended to think of these pieces as serving no purpose, just needing more added. And that can work. But I also now try to plan for places of rest in a work. I am likely to fill up much of the space with pattern and images – lots of things to see. So, it is helpful to have places for the eye to rest.

- - - - -

While I was focusing on trees this week, I also created two new paper works using tree motifs, in very different ways. Here are details of the trees.

If you’d like to see more about these, they are on my website Here:

https://www.bobbibaughstudio.com/wednesday-collage/

To the artmakers….. Happy creating.

To the art-lovers……… Happy appreciating!

Thank you for reading.
I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

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