Break On Through

It's funny how the Muse works. I find myself wanting to continue with the "celebrity" theme in my art. I think it's a result of all those hours working on the torn-paper collages. Plus the fact that I've been poring over the book of Andy Warhol's portraits.

In one of the free image sites that I haunt, I found the photo of an old dilapidated building with the words "the Doors" spray-painted on it's door. I loved that and knew I had to use it. Then I cut out the archway and steps from another freebie photo and merged the two. The background is a merging of about four different CitraSolv backgrounds that I made. I thought when the backgrounds were merged that they looked like a stone wall...then it all came together. The Jim Morrison image is from a Photoshop tutorial on how to make your image look like a watercolor. By the way, I'm using that portrait of Morrison (only much larger) as the base for my current torn-paper collage.

Speaking of collages, here is my "Blue Marilyn". I used Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portraits as the model for this one. At first I had all of the torn-papers showing in the background. But it became too distracting, so I covered most of them up with Shiva Paintstiks. I like this version much better:

And since he started the whole thing, I included another Andy Warhol piece. This is from the weekly challenge at Digital Whisper. We were to use the image of a ghostly swirl in our piece. Also, as part of the challenge, we were to include a watermark with our name. I did a lot of manipulation with the swirl image...I like the darker look. ;) The Warhol image is one of his many self-portraits; I just tweaked it a little to add to the ghostly theme. This is called "Warhol Ghost".

What's on the horizon: working on more collaged portraits. And something new: hubby gave me an early birthday present: the encaustic starter kit! Yay!! It should be arriving by the end of the week. DickBlick has an awesome starter kit that I've been drooling over for years. I've been itching to work with encaustic painting since I first saw Bridgette Guerzon Mills' work. My birthday isn't until May but my honey knows how to make me happy...buy me art supplies! ;)

As soon as I receive the package I'll be diving into the world of encaustics. I know from others that there's a big learning curve, but I'm ready! In between learning that art form, I'll still be dabbling in whatever else my Muse throws at me...