NY Brand Mushrooms and The Many Glues

She offers you her finest selection from her personal collection of young budding New York Brand mushrooms.

Mixed Media on L'Anaquarelle 9 x 12
Acrylic, packaging from China, lomo fisheye pictures, Victorian paper doll, vintage photo, GEM salad oil cardboard box, laser print from Magnesia Spring (The upside down fisheye pic is of a decaying corn crib)

My own personal critique...These are the types of things that go on in my mind as I work on a collage.

This piece was pretty annoying to me, and even now I am not entirely satisfied. I did the background acrylic on it, and the colors were amazingly striking together. The center, immediately underneath her body the the top portion of the windows....there's the most beautiful bloom of green and brown acrylic!! But, as it seems to go with collage sometimes, you need to cover up things for the design, and the cool stuff gets buried. Makes me wonder if I need to toss these great paint pieces aside, and do another if I plan to cover the coolest part.

On this one, I managed to solve some of my weird glue issues. I haven't been happy with the Golden collage medium on certain materials. Photos are one of them. Altho the medium will certainly hold the glossies down, the excess medium is potentially destructive. There's almost always extra goo...and it leaks out and gets on the surface of the glossy. I use baby wipes (possibly alcohol based?) to clean this excess stuff off, but sometimes it ends up altering the photo surface, which is something I want to remain. So, inspired by David Hochbaum and my discovery of the different materials he uses, I looked into other glues that might work better. I used YES on this piece. Worked wonderfully...the tack that YES has keeps the photos from wanting to curl (another potential issue with the medium, particularly if you have torn the edges) and also keeps them nice and flat against my substrate. Sweet. Only drawback, I had to wait overnight so they stayed in position. They like to float if they are touched, and I am super anal weird about lining up images at times. (such as the little piece that rests at the bottom of the circle on her skirt. that HAD to line up properly. if it was crooked, it didn't look convincing)
I have graduated to combo glues! Instead of using Golden matte medium all the time, I am learning to be more discerning when choosing the sticky stuff. For this piece, I used YES on the photos, glue stick on the scrolls and medium for the piece on top and the green ribbed chinese packaging. Makes for a flat product, which I am hoping for on these types of works. Yay for the use of the many glues!

I did like the added green that is on the glossy bottom portion of her skirt. That worked well. However, I am critical of the embellishments on the tops and upper side of this, and then the bottom just hangs out. Not sure, but I was considering some sepia pen and ink to continue the lines out...That possibly will make it too busy, and whatever was cool that was showing from the bottom of the acrylic will then disappear entirely.

Sigh. Sometimes it's tough to know when to stop, or when to know a piece is done. I really liked this at first. I am considering the fact that I ruined it by adding those final 3 green scrolls. I like the fact that the green stripes repeat the bottom of the skirt. That's where I think my problem lies. There are no stripes in the center/bottom of ther skirt to echo this thought. I may have to go back one more time to this piece to address that. (no pun intended!ha!) But at this point, it's a delicate thing to touch it. I hate to add more confusion and totally ruin the lines I already established.