After relaunching my portfolio site, I’ve finally had some time to make some new artwork. This is the first eagle portrait I’ve ever done, and it was interesting tackling an animal portrait after spending so many weeks immersed in coding websites and not making artwork.
The original is available for sale in my online store.
You may have noticed that over the past few weeks my website has gone through quite a few changes. I redesigned the overall look and feel, and then started adding a few improvements here and there. One of the big improvements of the new site is the new online store experience. Previously I used Etsy to sell my smaller, original collages. Now you can purchase collages of all sizes directly from my site.
If you swing by the online store, the top section has several icons that link to different products that you can buy directly from me – original art, prints, custom art services, handmade magnets, and also a section that will include artwork that’s on sale.
This is a graphite self portrait drawing that I did back in high school – I think I was around 16 at the time that I made this. I remember that I had a mentor at a local gallery back then, an artist who gave me feedback on a few of my works of art. This portrait was made during the mentorship program, and the last piece I created during the program was this self portrait painting.
In general, I think that self portraits are really difficult to do. It’s really tough to portray yourself, especially since we have so many assumptions about how we look based on the everyday routine of looking in the mirror. It’s difficult to take a step back and peer at yourself like an outsider in order to create a portrait. As a result, I feel like most of my self portraits don’t entirely capture the way I look, however I do like to refer to them as portraits that are version of myself.
Marcie, a teacher from Barbe High in Lake Charles, Louisiana, recently contacted me about her class that completed a collage project. She sent along these impressive images of the student artwork, which were completed by high school Art 1 students in grades 9 – 12.
The class looked at my animal collage art and also saw my time lapse videos of how I piece together my collages. Then they used magazines to create a paper collage wheel – which helped the students look at magazine pages for specific colors instead of fragments of photographs.
Next the students selected an animal to focus on for their project. They researched the animal and created posters that included facts on the animals as well as a drawing of the animal in color.
A local interior designer donated old wallpaper books to the class, and Marcie also added scrapbook paper to the materials the students worked with.
Students sketched their animals on black poster board with white charcoal. They used liquid glue to complete the background first so that their animals would sit on top of the background paper.
It was exciting to see each colorful and expressive work of art that was created by this class. I think the class could easily put together illustrations for their own children’s book.
It really is wonderful seeing the work of budding artists. My favorite part of being an artist is seeing how I can inspire or teach other artists. And it was truly wonderful to see the work that the students in Marcie’s class came up with. Hopefully this project will inspire the class to make even more collages in the future.
This is a mixed media collage that I made back in high school – can you tell that I may have been inspired by Picasso at the time? Growing up, I was an aspiring writer. I was constantly scribbling poetry and stories in spiral notebooks, so it was only fitting that I made a work of art inspired by my life as a writer. This piece is made of magazine clippings, oil pastel, pen, and includes an actual broken pencil and balled up piece of paper adhered to the surface.
This is a commission that I completed for an author who lives in California. She wrote a story about a collage artist in the DC area, and she thought it was only fitting to hire me to make a collage inspired by a description from the book. This piece was inspired by a passage that described a work of art created by the fictional artist – a box of memories with light swirling from it. I definitely had a lot of fun creating this piece, especially since it was a little different from what I normally make.
This is the first oil painting I ever did, and I made it back in high school. I really enjoyed painting reflections back then, and a couple of years later when I went to school for painting, I created a series of paintings that focused on still life and glass reflections.
Here’s another collage that I made back in high school. This was during my phase where I was focussing a lot on figurative art and also liked to draw on top of my work with oil pastel. As you can see here, the figure was drawn almost completely in oil pastel. There was actually cut paper underneath all that drawing. It was during this phase when one of my classmates asked me why I always covered up all my hard work by drawing on top of it. It was at that point that I realized I should try to make works completely from paper – and see how I could accomplish adding shadows and highlights just by manipulating cut pieces of magazine strips.
“I Dream on Sunsets with my Head in the Clouds” is a collage that I completed back in high school. This was back during my phase where I’d draw on top of my collages with oil pastel – which you can see a little bit of here.
This piece is a little more abstract than the other collages I was making at that time. And yet again I find myself getting inspired to make new work as I sift through pieces I’ve made in the past.
Today I received an email from a teacher at the British School Caracas in Venezuela. Her class of 7 year students studied my work and made their own collages.
The teacher was kind enough to send along images of the student artwork. It was a lot of fun seeing what they created – and how each piece has its own style.
There’s no better feeling than hearing that your work has inspired others.
And here’s to hoping that this budding group of artists keeps making art!
