About My Artmaking Process

I have been struggling over what to blog about this week. The options seemed to be so many, ranging from completed works to works in progress and so much more. After some consideration I have decided to blog about my process in making art, in particular art that gets carried further from handmade pieces by digital magic.

I often start by making drawings and paintings by hand. I am visually oriented but also tactile, so, I doubt that only making digital art would ever work for me as sole option. I draw with ink and pencils and acrylic markers on paper. I paint with acrylics mainly on canvas and sometimes with watercolor on paper. My grandest undertaking to date has been the Joy of Design Series. These are small square acrylic figurative, organic or geometric and pattern abstractions. All of them are designed to hang in all eight directions, including the four diagonal directions, either alone or in groupings with each other. There are currently 64 completed original paintings in this series and 5 more in the works. I am aiming at minimum 100 originals. Truthfully, I am not absolutely certain that number 64 is done yet, so, to date I have published 63 of these paintings and their Part 2s, which are digitally horizontally flipped versions of the originals. I create these Part 2s to enable the creation of complex and/or symmetrical arrangements with the prints or scans of The Joy of Design originals and Part 2s. My The Joy of Design Mandala Series Puzzles show some of the arrangements I have created by using a select number of chosen painting scans in combination with one another. By digitally flipping and turning the originals and Part 2s I can create an endless variety of variations in arrangement when it comes to any one piece in connection to other pieces in The Joy of Design Series. I also more recently started creating inverted and other variation versions of these pieces. I find the potential with these works both dizzying and exciting all at once.

So, besides making handmade art, I use the scans of these works in part or in full as building blocks to create even more works and designs that can be obtained in print format ranging from wall art to textiles to prints on products like apparel and personal items and home decor that you can currently obtain at Fine Art America/Pixels and Red Bubble and Spoonflower. It is my plan to expand on how my art can be used in both fun and practical ways. Meditative puzzles that can be put together digitally or manually are not out of the picture. The fact that the pieces in The Joy of Design Series are all square allows for totally customized arrangements instead of prefabricated choices alone. I would like for people to benefit from my art by also using their own imagination and creativity.

I have chosen a few recent variations and compilations I created with the scans of The Joy of Design LXI and The Joy of Design LXI Part 2 to illustrate this blog. In near future I will be adding some of these digitally collaged and/or altered artworks on my FAA/Pixels Collections and/or on Red Bubble or Spoonflower. I will announce when I have done so.

If you have any ideas on how my art could benefit the world, I invite you to share your thoughts here in the comments section. Thank you!