Dancin' Dottie

Today I feel just like Dancin' Dottie up there. Cha-cha-cha, Ooh-la-la! ;) Hubby cut some plywood for me last night and today I'm laying down the first layers of collage for my Petite Dolls paintings. I have about three dolls I'm working with right now but I've only settled on a color palette for one of them so far.

The jazz girl doll (see previous posts) is the first one I'll be working on today. I settled on the palette of black/cream, purple, olive and gold. I have this awesome book called, The New Big Book of Color, by David Carter. It is mainly for graphic designers and is full of examples of different color palettes and how they work in different layouts. He even breaks it out into "moods" that you want to create. For this painting I wanted a more sophisticated color scheme just because of the jazzy style. The perfect palette was the one I just described.

I think I can intuitively put colors together okay but this book is a great help. I was stumped on color choices for the paintings but now I'll be able to browse through the book and see if my ideas will work. Yay!

Also new: have discovered a cool new artist: Kat MacLeod (awesome figure/fashion drawing with a mod twist). She is definitely an inspiration and I hope to get more ideas by studying her work.

I think it's funny how you can come across something you see on a website and then be so inspired by it that you just keep searching, searching, searching and narrowing your search until you end up with all the info you need to take off from there. I'm talking specifically about the little girl in this collage. She was from a piece of French wrapping paper that was put up on Helga Strauss' blog at Artchix Studio. I loved her face and the little outfit (I changed the colors for this piece). I just had to make a little collage with her in it! She reminded me of the little Japanese girl that Suzi Blu had on a piece of wrapping paper she used in her collage.

So I Googled (is that a verb now?) "Japanese wrapping paper" and "Japanese dolls" and "Japanese dolls on paper", etc. I got such a wealth of images and info! These little cuties will definitely be showing up in my art soon, along with my own little twist of course. Those little faces are perfect inspiration for petite dolls and other works that can blossom from there.

They also remind me of the Kawaii style of art which is kind of funky, cute art that incorporates characters like these along with other elements. I remember when I first saw Kawaii art I didn't really get it. Funny how all of a sudden your tastes or likes can change! Now I totally get it and I think I can twist it into something more to my liking.

Anyway, that's what's going on today. Hopefully the Gesso is dry on the wood by now and I can start the painting, inking and layering. Stay tuned for results...