Green paper, I love you

Oh my goodness, these papers.

I’ve used watercolor to fill in large areas of color for so long and I LOVE watercolor blobs, but gee whiz making blobs with colorful paper is so fun and satisfying! I’ve had various papers sitting around in my work area for a while, papers I’ve impulsively purchased like the magpie I am, attracted to shiny, pretty things, and I am not sure why it’s taken me so long to actually use the paper in this way. If you follow me on Instagram (or even Tumblr where I still post sometimes) you’ve seen some cautious, small applications of collage here and there. Maybe I’ve been afraid to waste it? You can’t erase an errant cut like you can an errant pencil marking. But, isn’t it a waste to just leave the paper sitting around in little piles? Yeah. It is.

So here is one of the pieces I am currently working on. I can’t decide if I will keep this as paper and linework only, or add some paint. I am still thinking about how to achieve balance in multimedia work. But not overthinking it, never!

Paper plus paper

Collage! That's what paper plus paper is, in this case. I've started incorporating cut paper into my works, which I'll write more about at some point.

What I've learned so far from this piece is be very careful with black paper because little fibers will get into any damp part of the surrounding watercolor paper and bleed their dye in tiny spots.

A home on the internet

It’s time to make a little home on the internet.

I’ve had a few homes for me and my art on the internet. The first home was deviantArt. I would use a scanner in my school’s computer lab to scan my work so I could post it on deviantArt. Then I started noticing people leaving messages on their profiles, saying they were leaving for Tumblr. That was my next home, too, and it was truly a wonderful home for me for years. I made my first internet friends, some of whom I follow on other platforms to this day! Then I had kids and could not keep up with making art, and certainly not with gaming the algorithms that came to dominate while I was busy living my real, important, mothering life. So now I post my art on Instagram. I had 30,000 followers on Tumblr. I have fewer than 900 on Instagram. I can’t and won’t feed that beast or try to game any algorithm.

But I still want to share my art with whoever cares to look at it. Social media platforms will come and go (did you try Artfol like me, only to be disappointed?) but I have a feeling that personal websites and the blogs within them might actually become the best home.

So thanks for coming to visit me here. Maybe I will enjoy updating my website? Maybe I’ll enjoy blogging a little bit? I’m a fan of people actively opting in to my content (that word, pfff) instead of it just drifting by in an endless scroll. Here’s the first blog post. More to come. <3

-Gab