What Makes Us Tick, Tick, Tick

I keep coming back to anatomy as a theme. I love old technical drawings and illustrations of how things work, especially anatomical renderings. This piece is an exploration of black and white based on anatomy.

The skeleton fit so perfectly in this space that he inspired the whole theme.

I placed a jar with a tooth over a drawing of a mandible with some pearls.

The clock face is from an old pocket watch from the collection of parts I won from an art challenge ages ago.

Another drawing, this one of a rib cage with a small metal heart.

The large section has the number 206 in the background.

The last section is clock gears to tie in with the "ticking" theme.

Tempus Fugit

This is a work for the Three Muses Weekly Challenge: Balloons. It is an encaustic collage with 2D & 3D materials. I used wooden pocket watches as the air balloons with gears for the baskets. The colored lines are white string dipped in colored encaustic. The background stripes, clouds, and text are all paper collage. A very airy and light and fun piece.

And I got these wonderful swirls by painting the background with white acrylic paint before I did the clear fill. :D 

mantle clock, redone

this is a re-do of an old piece, which aparently i didn't even like enough to give a name. a link to the old piece can be found here. 

it started with an old mantle clock body that i found in the trash (whoo!) i kept with the old theme of time and death, but added some different pieces. 

since the recent encaustic workshops , i have had a surplus of supplies, and it's all out...so i can use wax in my assemblages!

the compartment with the wax and nuts is my favorite. i also love the rusty metal circle and the eye. 

much happier with this piece now!

Alter It Monthly: Time

the theme for March over at Alter It Monthly is.......time! so happy for this theme, and it gave me an excuse to use all of these gorgeous tiny gears and cogs i harvested.
so it started with a walnut. i found it in my yard and knew that it was a perfect piece of nature droppings, so i snatched it for art. i liked the idea of something "in a nutshell" and wanted to play on that, but i needed something small. luckily, i found these super tiny parts in an old watch.
so this is what the inside of a nutshell. who knew?
it's made of tiny gears that keep all the nut parts moving. not really. it was empty, the squirrels had cleaned it out for me. but there's not much to say on my technique here. i used hot glue to secure the gears, and copper wire wrapped around for unity....or something. i'm not sure why i keep doing that. i just like it. then i hung it on some jewelry chain.
note to self: walnut has to be the absolute hardest material in the whole world. it took me three days of trying then giving up to get the eye screw through the top. but it's worth it. :)

Nature Assemblage

Over the holiday break, i made a couple of new assemblages, but never posted them....so here is one! for this assemblage, i made my own box from cardboard with hot glue. then i spray painted it gold and used some green scrapbook paper for the background of the boxes and to frame the windows.

i wanted to make a kind of cutesy fairy nature themed piece. so i included elements like woodland creatures, little bottles, glitter, rocks moss, etc. the box in the top left contains clock hands and some parchment that says "thyme". (i thought that was clever, lol)

the next box below is contains a little key with gems and another parchment piece. this parchment actually is from the lord of the rings. i was completely obsessed with it in high school, so i learned how to write "one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" in elvish. so i wrote this out maybe....6 years ago? sitting in a craft box for that long made it yellow, and very pretty!

below that i have another bee, as seen in my field researcher's journal assemblage. i used some travel themed chipboard as the frame for this window that has text, keys and buildings on it.
below that i back a picture of some cute falcons and set them in.

the top right box contains a dragonfly pendent, some rock, moss and a tag with keys on it. next to that is the handle of a small paint brush, i love the little numbers on things. next to that is the top of the brush with two little bottles. i placed an old spool beneath that and the compartment next to that contains another gold arm as seen in assemblage 64 and a small wooden bead. i stamped the back of this box with a little "take some time" clock stamp. above these boxes is a small gold gear that i salvaged from an old clock.

directly below these compartments is a row of glass marbles. underneath that is a square bottle with a feather inside and some nature dropping on either side.
so that's my new nature/fairy themed assemblage. ta da!

what i love this week....

literature pieces! this piece was inspired by a pendant i found at Agnes the Red Gallery a year or so ago, pictured above. i love the simplicity of this piece and the use of found materials.

my piece was made with bundled newspaper as the base. i added some plastic sprockets and a metal "L". then i used glue and gold glitter for some swirls and dots (feeling very glittery at the moment). then i used some gold jewelry wire and the copper wire from inside the clocks to wrap the piece. it is all held together with a copper plate and some tie wire at the top. last, i used some brown suede cord to hang it.

this is a very different piece for me, i've never worked with paper before. but of course, it still has my style and is obviously a beth-like piece.

what i love this week....

egg art! the first time i saw this was in Altered Curiosities while i was flipping through it at a bookstore. didn't buy it, wish i had. this project is inspired by Carla Trujillo's egg shrine, pictured above.

i started with a paper mache egg i found at Hobby Lobby. then i filled it with a soft steel wool pad to give the inside some texture and also to build a solid background on which to work. then i added some miscellaneous clock parts and other little metal pieces intertwined with the wool.
i loved the effect of wrapping the copper wire i used in my altered clock piece, so i used it again in this piece, but with much more wrapping. i liked how the skeleton really took on some skin and muscle form as i wrapped the wire.
last, i used the same wire to bind it all together, which is my favorite part of the piece. in the picture, it is mounted on a small bottle to hold it up.


i'm not sure what i'll do with this; find a way to mount it as is, or work it into another bigger piece. i really see this as a work in progress still. i want to incorporate this into my time/death theme, i hope to eventually have enough pieces of quality and variety to make a show of it. but we'll see how that goes. for now it's all for fun.

altered clock

this is another piece in my time/death theme. i have been working on this on and off for about a year, and this is where it is for now. i think i may rework certain parts of it, but i do like some elements of it.
i used clock parts and bolts and nuts along with a plastic skeleton for the main components of the piece and set it in an old clock. first i made a simple paper bag clock face. then i mounted a few nuts and bolts to try to get a feel for what i was doing. originally i was just going to set the skeleton in the center, then i wanted to fuse it with the other elements. so i used some copper wire that i found in the clock when i took it apart and wrapped up the skeleton with some clock parts stuck inside. finally i fused all the elements together with the copper wire.
and this is the result!

i absolutely love the effect of the wrapping. i experimented with wrapping things in assemblage 64 and i will definitely be using it more. my sculpture teacher was always yelling at me to use some kind of wrapping in my pieces, but i thought it was a lame idea. now i wish i would have listened, because it is neat, and i would have made a better grade. :/

mixed media shelf

inspired by an image in L.K. Ludwig's Collaborative Art Journals, which consequently has more projects that just journals, i started collecting shelves. i found a great huge shelf at a consignment shop and the small one and the one used for this project were both found at the wonderful and amazing Dollar Tree! i actually got the book from a second hand book shop for only $10. this was an amazing store1 almost any kind of mixed media or altered art or journal art books you would want for half the price! but of course, before i had a chance to go back and buy everything, it went out of business and the books were probably just thrown away. :(

the project used in Ludwig's book (below, i couldn't find an online image, and i don't have a scanner, so here's an awful picture of it i took with my phone) used a self portrait theme. each shelf contained a hand drawn image of the artist, photograph, personal artwork, reproductions of favorite artwork etc., as well as a ton of adorable little bottles filled with micro beads, itty bitty dice, rocks, or nothing at all! about a third of the shelves were left empty, some had only crayon scribbles. the entire piece came together nicely with good balance of elements and a busy color pattern that reflects the artist's personality.


so, inspired by this, after my search for wonderful shelves, i created this piece: Trapped in Time. time and death are an ongoing theme i have been working on, i have a few other pieces to post with that theme. in this piece, each shelf contains elements relating to time or death, as indicated by the clock parts, wires, skeletons etc. the smallest clear bottle is filled with micro clock parts, the larger bottle i actually found at a gallery opening, and honestly doesn't have much to do with the piece other than a color balance between that and the copper wire. my favorite part of this piece is the mesh wire that covers the shelf with the parchment. the parchment reads "time wastes our bodies and our minds", which again is an ongoing quote in this series of works. the bars in the center were made from rebar tie wire that was simply cut an shoved into place. the cogs and gears are set differently. the Tim Holtz cog was glued in place, while the white plastic piece was placed in a hole cut into the shelf.
another interesting aspect of this piece is the top middle shelf with the skull and, i have no idea the name of this, the clock dinger thing? the gold dome is a piece of a clock that makes sound when hit, like the bell thing. anyway....i placed these two items together because i liked how the clock dinger (as it shall now be referred to) gave the feeling of an electric chair when hing from the top with a small screw. so i placed the skull beneath it in order to push that feeling. i also enjoyed the texture of the brown paper bag and hemp string tied around the contrasting silver watch back.
the color scheme of this is reddish orange, or copper, and green. the piece of the clock in the bottom middle section (the rest of this can be found in the piece 2:18; Ambush) is used to balance the green screws found in the mesh sections and the gears section. what you may not be able to see in the picture is the small amount of very thing copper wire that runs from the bottom right corner, wrapping around the bars, and ending around the small bottle in the top section.
and finally, the thing that pulls this whole composition together for me is the setting. this is a plain shelf like the one above that is set in an old mantle clock base that i found in the trash (art schools at the end of a semester are the best places to pick up random awesomeness).

so that's what i've done so far, at least two more shelf projects are in the future. what work have you done with shelves? i want to see your ideas and inspirations, so share!