Tip # 3 - move color chips around

The color chips placed in a styrafoam plate can easily be arranged using gravity to give the appearance that they have been dispersed naturally. I work hard to make my art look like it happened easily.

Tip 2 Collages are excellent for expressing your emotional color preferances.

If you do not have old paintings that have become a little boring, make colors just for the sake of it to be cut up for arranging and rearranging. I have learned that I hate most of the red pieces but love themnext to their compliment. I love the yellows but have relatively few of them. They are more difficult to manage in paintings without them popping.

My watercolor paintings going back ten or more years are a source for my play. My play is sorting the colors and textures into piles of color harmonies each pile having a dominate color. I have a pile of each of these blues, greens, yellows, reds, salmon oranges, whites, metalics, blacks, and neutrals. Within the color piles there are hints of every other color all in harmony because of their similar dominate hue. I have compressed the piles into zip lock bages and stored them on shelves. I feel like with paper I can weave and quilt using little pieces from c paintings that have sentimental memories. I get inspiration from just looking at these color bags. I have a quantity of greens from mostly Oregon landscapes, Salmon from Utah landscapes, reds from abstracts, yellows also from abstracts and flowers. Blacks from gesso I purchased to encourage a student about 20 years ago who liked black. From the same period I did abstracts with purples. The amazing thing is no matter how worked over a painting is, breaking it up into small pieces, each and every piece can be places in an awesome harmonious new home.

Tip 1 for creativity

Surround yourself with inspiration. The carpet on my studio floor probably helped me in seeing an exotic picture in the scraps of paper I have been recycling from older paintings.

Collage abstracts from cut and torn watercolor paintings

These collages except for some more recently painted backgrounds are made of old paintings that have bored me. They are 10 years old or older. It is best to keep more recent work as a gage of my development.

Jean Valjean emerging from Paris sewer

One from the red nose series

My studio taken over by collage making

Red nosed dandy clown

Red nosed deer whistling, watercolor collage

The lips said the whole face had to relate to them. The decisions I make with a collage are fun because of the greater fleximility than wet paint. I am allowed to try this piece and that piece before they are glued. In these collages expression is what I value.

The Clowns, Red nosed puppy, man, woman and two birds

One of the interesting things about doing collage, is seeing more and more faces and animals in radom color. First I did the clown and then the woman, folowed by the dog and two birds.

Red Nose, watercolor collage series

Last year I went through hundreds of watercolors sorting them into keepers. The keepers were sorted onto labeled shelves - ocean, water, people, animals, gardens, flowers, and abstarcts. The unselected went on a shelf waiting for collages. Then when I heard that at the Oregon State LaSelles Stewart Center Guistina Gallery is having an open African exhibit i remembered the collages of Matisse and Picasso influenced by visits to Northern Africa. When I started arranging torn and cut pieces of my watercolor painted paper, I saw clowns. Looking in Wikipedia, I learned the earliest known clowns found were in Egypt thousands of years ago.

Gray Clown Watercolor Collage

Collage of clowns and discovery of natural phenomina

The natural phenomina: I see suggestions of faces looking through my old experimental paintings, especially this one that I made to answer the question: "What if I influence the flow and drying of the paint by placing the paper on an uneven surface and dropping stones here and there? I am having great fun. I feel gratified when I see what I like in random marks. I feel gratified when I move torn painted papers over my painted backgrounds until I make a face with the just right expression for me.

The editing functions are back for this blog.

I am ready to celebrate.

This is a painting I did in 1986 in honor of the style of my Portland State University Professor Frederich Heidel. When I was a student I made a proposal for a mossaic in the Portland State cafeteria. I did not get the commission. But I did write a paper about a color theory of using tinted grout in back of broken glass and ceramics. In addition to setting limitations on color, I addressed the different kind of shapes off the more brightly hued chards. This theory is adapted to paint.

Clown Collage in honor of Matisse.