Re-Imagining

I am having fun "re-imagining" old artwork and playing with new concepts. Here is another before and after:

This is a piece I did back in 2011. The face is pretty bizarre...even for my standards. I loved the body, eyes and the 2 birds on the head, so it was tricky to work around the painting. I added a book page to cover up the bottom part of the face to make it easier to paint, then added a new figure's face who worked better with the winged body. At one point I painted over the turquoise with orange, hated it, painted a warm grey over it and sanded it back a bit so the orange showed through.
Here it is a few stages past that...already dramatically different. The pigtails on the main figure came about because of the odd line at the top of the head. I had to keep it if I wanted to keep the birds!

I painted over the other bird - it was distracting me. I did not like the nose and went a bit crazy trying to fix it. Somehow the turquoise crept back into the face....

I move the nose over a bit....Here is the final piece:

At least I think so....I am going to let it sit a bit, before I varnish it.

My take away from this exercise:

Each painting has something new to teach me.

Keep at it until you love it again.

Many layers make for a much richer background.

Love turquoise, orange and gray together.

When you can't make it work, cover it up with collage or paint!

When things are drying, I try to work on journal pages. I am still getting used to the handmade paper in the leather journal I picked up. It is becoming clear that I need to just relax and not try to control the surface. I have sketchbooks for drawing. This is becoming my "get loose" book.

Here are a couple of pages:

Watercolor and collage

Medium resist and watercolor

Playing with which watercolor set I like best ended up being  really fun.

The Ultimate in RE-IMAGINING

Stay Curious!