Bin Art!

Hello there, you know that saying, Creativity is making mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep? Well that certainly applied to my last art project...

I had watched a Limor Webber Tutorial, if you haven't seen any of her stuff, search Youtube for her work, wow, she can create. Anyway, feeling all inspired, I decided to copy directly from her tutorial. Only problem was, I had NONE of the items she used.

No problem, I thought to my furry self, I shall impawvise.... So off to the art box I padded.... I leant over to see what I could use.....


And promptly fell in!


Wilbear rescued me, and made me a nice big bowl of chocolate cereal to console me.


I really wanted to use our new Dylusions stamps, which we bought with Christmas money. Aren't they great?


Limor created her background with acrylic paints, I didn't have the colours she used, so chose the closest matches I could find.


Once I had applied my paint, I took a bearby wipe, and wiped it over the paint, to both spread and blend, and then wipe areas of paint off the page.


Next, I took a bright red paint


Splotched a little onto my foam brush


and applied it through a stencil.



Yikes, I was beginning to wonder what on earth was going on with this page. But thought I'd see where it took me (bad idea!)


My next mistake idea was to add some gesso to the page, to make a frame effect for my stamps.


Some of which I stamped, coloured then glued to the page, others which I stamped directly onto the page, in the bears' own inimitable way.


Yikes, what the heck? Limor's page was wonderfully arty, mine was a mess of grunge and, well, mess.


Despite really not liking my page, I left it overnight. Maybe I hoped it would marinade into something more pleasing to the eye?


But when I awoke, the art bearies had not visited to magically transform my pages


In fact. I disliked them intensely now.


On the advice of a friend, I gessoed over all but the Dylusions characters... But I could still see the mess underneath in my mind, so I finally ripped them out, and consigned them to the bin.


So, there it was, my experiment into mixed media was not successful this time, maybe I threw too much at the page, maybe It just wasn't my style, maybe it actually had so many styles that it ended up having no style, whatever, if you don't like what you've done, it preys on your furry mind until it's gone.

So, why am I posting this? Well a beary good friend of ours says she doesn't rate her own art work, and I thought that maybe it's because we all compare our own work to others' work, and as people (naturally) post what they consider to be their best work, we don't necessarily get to see the bin consignments. So, I thought I'd be brave and post mine!

Also, I have some beary honest friends, one of whom admitted they hated this, another who said they liked it. Proving that art is subjective. Isn't it funny, one bear's trash and all that.

Feel free to comment either way, especially with helpful hints of how we can manage a more pleasing mixed media page, is it that less is more, or that we needed to co ordinate our colours more? Answers on a comment form.....



With love from the bears.