Creating A Mixed Media Painting With Collage And Mark-Making - Full Process

Welcome everybody. In this week's video I'm going to be working on a mixed media piece that features collage and mark making. In last week's video I worked on doing um creating a bunch of birds that I would be able to use in a collage in either a painting or a journal something like that and so in this piece here what I'm aiming to do is to integrate one of those collage birds into the piece that I'm working on. I'm just working in my sketchbook here. This is a sketchbook that I got at Michael's. The paper is 75 pounds so it's not too heavy not too light and I'm working in an intuitive manner right now. I'm just starting off getting some color on the paper. I don't have any ideas of where I'm going with this. I'm just starting out by having some fun laying down some color and just letting things go and having some fun with it. The color palette that I'm working with here is really limited. It is yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, titanium white and mars black. Now I'm going in here with some pencil. This is just I think it's an HB pencil and I'm doing a little bit of botanical stuff here and what I'm doing is I'm just responding to whatever is going on on the page. So you know if I don't like something I'll paint over it. If I love it then maybe I will hold on to it although I like to try and not be too rigid with it. I would rather keep things open and you never know what will happen when you're open to seeing what will develop in the piece. So by keeping the color palette really limited it really helps to just have me create a harmonious piece that looks very cohesive overall. That right there I believe is a neocolor 2 in black and you can see I was just smudging it with my finger there and then I'm going in and I'm also using the neocolor up here to just put in these circles. Now this is the bird that I selected from my previous video and I really like the way this bird looks. I liked the looseness of it and I also liked that I had drawn it with a brush so I like that brush loose brushwork sort of a look. So I decided before I was going to paste it on that I wanted it to be going on a little bit of a darker background. I just thought that that would look nice with the brown paper and the dark color of the outline of the bird so that's what I'm doing here. I'm just kind of going in with this mix here. It's ultramarine blue and mars black just letting down a little bit with white. So I'm looking at the bird again deciding do I like it? Do I feel like it's good? I say yes so I'm making sure everything is completely dry here and I'm using an acid-free glue stick here to glue it down. I'm just going to smooth it out with my palette knife there to get it as smooth as I can and I'm looking at putting in another piece of brown paper here just because I feel like with just the bird alone it maybe is a little bit strange and I want to balance it out so that's why I ripped off another piece of the brown packing paper and I just glued that on as well. This is another collage paper I have and I liked the lines on it. I was looking at it but I didn't want to actually collage that paper and that's why I just practiced my strokes on that blue page and then I go in with my brush here and I create it on top of the of my actual journal. I'm making some more marks and if you have seen my previous one of my previous videos on mark making then you know that this is one of my favorite brushes to make marks with. It's a very old mangy brush and it really makes good marks. That mark here that I'm going over is a neocolor 2 that's the dark olive color and I'm just using it in a few spots just to give this piece a little more color interest. Again I want to put some more lines in and so before I commit myself to doing on my actual piece I do it on that scrap paper and that scrap paper is going to become collage paper in the future so I don't mind testing it on you know that blue paper. Now I'm wanting to like integrate the bird into the painting a bit more and that's why I'm going in with again just a straight black paint and I'm making these marks in other places on the painting and I'm hoping that it'll just help to integrate the bird a little bit more into the piece because it just was standing out a little bit too much for me. So you can see here I'm not satisfied with what I've done. I just don't like it and you know if you don't like it go over it. I mean this is your painting and you can do what you want and so do that you know respond this is what I mean when I say responding to what's there. I didn't like what I had done and so I'm getting rid of it. Here I'm contemplating using a blue paper and collaging it. In the end I decide no I'm not going to do that. That's a neocolor 2 in Payne's gray that I have just scribbled on there and I'm just wetting it up a bit and giving a little bit more texture to the piece. This is a 2B pencil here and I'm sketching in a little bird. I think my thought is that I want to kind of echo the bird in the bottom by having another bird up top. I then quickly decide no I don't like it and so I get rid of it. This is just a Bic pencil and I wrote in the word home there because I thought it kind of suited the bird. Then I decide to go in and draw in this little house. I'm going in and covering up some of the stuff that I don't like and you notice that I don't really cover it like super thick so that the background is completely blotted out. I do like to leave some of the marks in the background to show through so it it really adds like a depth to the piece rather than just completely whiting it out or using a very very opaque paint to get rid of it. So you notice I'm trying more to integrate the bird into the piece and that's why I've gone into the brown paper with some of the yellow ochre and some of the line work in the lower left corner. It just helps to you know make it look more harmonious not like it's just something I stuck on which of course I did but you know what I mean. I want to make it look a little more like it fits in naturally with the painting. Again here I am practicing my brush strokes before I actually do them and here I'm creating a sort of a tree like thing and my thought in doing this is that you can see that the bird in the lower left like it really dominates because it's got a heavy amount of black in it and a heavy black line so I'm wanting to balance it on the other side of the page and doing so would be sorry the best place I feel like would be the upper right portion to do it. Now I don't like this at all so I end up going over it and getting rid of it and you know do that if you don't like something don't keep it. Again here just kind of trying to integrate the bird and drawing into the wet paint and creating more texture in it. So here I have decided to go about balancing the bird out in a different way. I'm adding these are they circles are they eggs I don't know what they are and then I'm adding this sort of vine of leaves or botanical sort of creation and I feel like that is a nice way to balance it because it's not full on stark black it's a watered down combination of ultramarine blue and black. So we're coming to the end of the piece here and I'm just tidying up and this I did speed up this video overall this took me about 45 minutes to do but I really enjoyed this process. I didn't have any plans for this and I just let myself go about it in a fairly intuitive way. I mean of course I did think about the composition but it was more of an enjoyable experience when you just let things happen more naturally rather than trying to plan it so hard it really is good. So that's it thanks very much for watching!