Heather Eddy Art

This painting didn't get any better. In fact, I'm pretty sure I ruined it with the colored pencil. This all comes from trying to accommodate a HUMONGOUS stamp into my painting. From now on, it's only little paintings. At least for these super color-saturated paintings. I just can't make them do what I want over a large area of space. Now this painting will go into a sad pile to languish until I can look at it with fresh eyes and see if it is salvageable. Maybe putting some book paper over the totally awful parts will do... I had a box of books and access to a drill press. So I drilled holes. Then I kept the box for several weeks because I didn't know what to do with them.  The other night, I sewed one. Frankenstein book! I am making a wedding bouquet of paper flowers for a friend. Here is one I made from a paint chip. And here it is on top of the Frankenstein book.

I had an idea last night to border the hearts with words. Colored pencil seemed best because I could match the color to the piece and I like my handwriting. (THANK YOU MOM!) Blue heart words: Water Serene Peace Tranquility Breathe Rest Drop Patter Ripple Still Listen Sky Ponder Relax Thought clouds Breeze Quiet Still Small Voice Whispering Take a minute to just remember Green words: Growing quietly whisper soft and too slow to notice until one day you realize everything has changed and its amazing that it all happens without you realizing what part you played bringing it to flower Hmm.. got a bit poetic. Oh well. Red words: Love heart tingle of delight and the thought of this could be the time when it really happens and then after years go by remembering before and without and being so grateful that it is Now Yellow words: Yellow is the beginning of strength it is the ??? of the Sun heating preparing for action the warmth of knowing truth the expansive feeling of ...

  This painting is 6x10 in., 4 times bigger than my normal size of 5x3 in. It was this size to accommodate the proportion of the two stamp-sized houses. Now I've gotten completely lost in that huge background sky part and am not sure if I'm going to be able to save it. THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON!! Maybe I can put a clear, clean flat wash over it to pull it together and just start doing the houses. See if that keeps it from being totally whack. :( If not, I might tear it apart for parts.

This painting has a red house. Like most of my paintings. I should call it Red House #?. Red house with a stamp! In the future, I need to handle the stamp differently. I like not having windows on it and I really like the empty door look that's in the painting above. Yellow house! With silly fish in the windows! And with water ripples that look like a face with a fat nose! Sometimes it is good to do paintings that are less serious. It also let me experiment with colors. Since when have I EVER used yellow? Again, I love the look of this house - the door not being painted and its size relative to the size of the house. I think I'll do without the crazy feather-in-a-cap chimney thing going on... I am really loving the rainbow-like combo of colors. It's SO satisfying. This is an old picture I pulled out last night to try and salvage the edges. They still aren't pretty and perfect, but that's not all I worked on. Obviously, from the other paintings...

I got an idea yesterday to do a whole picture with stamps. When you look at it in person, all the colors of the picture are pretty much the same value. It made it hard to see so I put the white strips of paper (cut out by perforation like a stamp) around the main shapes. Oh, then I used some of my favorite phrases from a book to put around the entire picture as a border.

This is the product of last night's painting session. I put Kiff to bed (Brian was already in bed - he conks out early) and, in the quiet of the evening, painted. I was especially pleased with some new things I'm learning about color - it felt so much more intuitive last night. I just had to go slowly, keep the paper wet and feel what color was missing and how much I needed. There is a new color in my arsenal - well, a few actually, but the ones I found myself using again and again were the Pat's coastal blue and perylene (green). I got both from Cheap Joe's. The coastal blue is one of those colors that pushes everything else out of its way when you lay it down. I ended up dabbing it down in points. It chased the other colors. It's opaque, too and covered up some areas that were too dark. VERY NICE!   The sun is washing out the colors, but I like how there is an almost rainbow-like effect with the combos here.     This one has a lot of similar...

My Dad had several books of stamps from when he was a kid. I checked with a REAL stamp collector and found they weren't worth anything. HURRAY FOR ME! I made hearts on handmade paper I made from scratch in college. It's the perfect background for the colors. There's still something missing from the hearts but I haven't figured it out yet. And speaking of unfinished works, I piled together all of my watercolors-in-progress: The thing with my watercolors is that they require so many layers which need to dry between applications. And they pile up because I forget about them (and don't keep them all in the same place!). I cleaned up my art room so everything has a place for now. Can't wait to see what happens with the hearts and watercolors!