My week in Vancouver was split by a quick trip to Vancouver Island, full of rocky beaches and driftwood. Okay, that was summer — now, back to work!

Connecting

Before we headed to the island, Mary Lang was kind enough to meet me at a local coffee shop.

I’ve been following her work since last fall’s Culture Crawl, and ran into her at a spring show too. We hit quite a few points of reference, from abstract composition to local printers to mixing digital and analog work, and I look forward to seeing her at more local events soon.

Meetings & Making

I kept going with my spelling book collages. I never know what I’m going to get when I slap two collage-covered pages of this book on top of some sort of background. But then I play with combinations of opacity and blending, and slip some kind of scribbled extra piece in to join the two sides — always fun to see what comes out.

Some of my week was very small changes to existing pieces: time to check on the series as a whole.

These are my current faves from my Aerials series. I see teals, pinks, browns, per the plan, and lots of grid and navigation references, as well as natural edges. I might like these ten enough to give them names soon. Do any jump out at you as not belonging?

Experimenting

I spent more time on playing this week. First, I attacked the big manila paper sketchpad with a LARGE brush.

I’m really happy with the texture — nothing like a big ol’ beat-up brush! Left behind from some renovation work, maybe? I’m looking forward to trying that some more, not to mention using this page as collage fodder. Though maybe a scan first? I’m going to have to do it in sections; it’s way too big for my scanner!

I stopped by my scribble sketchbook at some point. I used some of last week’s manila paper scribbles, plus my new electronics magazine fodder. Yep: scan-worthy!

And I had another round of work on the other larger piece too. I added some plain manila paper and yellow scribbles, to continue the sense of layering.

I am learning that the physical layers of paint and marks are the right way for me to build the sense of history I’m looking for.

Then, on the digital side, I had some new camera images downloaded, and decided to make them into a pretend horizon. As in, I couldn’t quite get them to fit into a panorama, so I invented some new places to stitch things together.

With a softly textured pink background to improve on the sunset I didn’t quite capture myself, I think I’m getting the effect I wanted. It’s a nice counterpoint to the beaches we saw on the weekend, and either viewpoint works for me as a recurring, orienting image. Do you have a preference: mountain or water?

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