Ronni Hunter Studios

"art"

Artist Trading Cards

"ATCs", "art", "collage", "mixed-media"Ronni HunterComment
Last December I got together with a few friends to work on Artist Trading Cards (ATCs).  This is my first set!  A year or more ago I was playing with collaging in my art journal with colored tissue paper, some of which I had stamped with black acrylic paint.  I no longer recall why exactly, but I ended up tearing the pages out of my journal and cutting them into ATC sized pieces.  I also cut up the smaller bits into inchies that I have yet to use.  Sometimes it seems so insane to cut or tear up papers I've spent a long time working on but I so often find that the resulting bits are much more interesting than the whole.  Months after all that I came across these 18th C. images of women with these amazing (and frankly, really ugly!) hair styles.  Did you know that women actually wore things like live birds in their hair during this period?!!  Ping!  I had to use these images on those backgrounds.  The women are printed on cheap watercolor paper because I thought the texture was nice.  They took me forever to cut out and the whole project languished until my friend put together the ATC party.  The lovely damsel's are edged with gold pen and glued to the background with Collage Pauge.  There are three sparkly pink and gold stickers on each card.  After gluing some pretty scrapbook paper to the back I ran each edge through a puddle of gold acrylic paint to color and seal the edges.  Finally I coated the fronts with gloss medium to seal the ink jet ink and make sure it all stayed glued together.

Here's a picture of my work table covered with the tissue paper I stamped with acrylic paint.  It looks so cool when used in collage.

So here is a sticky, and probably tacky, question.  What to do with my ATCs?  Trade them, right?  I got to peruse my friends collections of trading cards and frankly most of them stunk.  Cheap color printouts and bad kitch that I don't want.  What do you do if you go to a ATC swap and someone wants to trade for one of your cards but they have nothing you want?  I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by saying their work isn't good enough, but I do want to collect art that appeals to me.  Also, while my cards may not be the worlds greatest, they took me a lot of time and work and I want to trade for equal value.  From the collections of cards I've seen it seems like a lot of people get into it more for the social aspect than the art aspect.  After thinking about this for a long time I've more or less decided that the actual trading part of making ATCs is probably not for me.  I really enjoyed making them though!

Journal Pages

"art journal", "art", "collage", "mixed-media", "paint"Ronni HunterComment

Here is another page from my smaller art journal.  One of these days I'll get organized to take pictures as I complete pages, or at least I'll make some effort to post pages in order of completion.  Right now it's just an accomplishment if I get something posted!  I actually completely filled my larger art journal recently - the first one!  I'm not sure if it's complete or not since there are pages I'd still like to do more with, but it will take time to tell.  I do art journaling sporadically as I'm still trying to make up my mind why I'm doing it in the first place.  At the moment I'm trying to use this smaller journal for working ideas for new artwork which makes for rather ugly journal pages but I'm trying to get over that.  Do you ever want to get past the stage of figuring **it out and finally understand your own process?  I do!  But then again, learning is fun too.  Waffle anyone?

Color Studies

"art journal", "art", "collage", "color studies"Ronni Hunter1 Comment

These are pages from my art journal.  I decided to collect images in color schemes that I don't normally work with and make a collage with them.  All these images and scraps came from magazines or catalogs, with a few bits of scrap paper thrown in.  I am so often disappointed with my journal pages but I ended up really loving these collages.  It was a great way to change my perception of these colors.  Now I find myself using orange and yellow green in more of my work.  These could also make fun concepts for a art quilt.  Hmmmm.

Leda's Flowers

"art", "beading", "collage", "embroidery", "fabric-paper", "mixed-media", "wall hanging"Ronni HunterComment
Here is a new piece that I finished a little while ago.  Getting the pictures taken and edited for posting takes me forever!  The down side of bloggin! LOL.  This began with a piece of fabric-paper in shades of red and purple, which is a favorite color combination.  So many of my pieces begin after experimenting with a technique I want to try and this is no exception.  This is a remnant of my first piece of fabric-paper, made a couple of years ago.  I also wanted to to try printing images on silk.  I chose one of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and was really pleased with the way it came out.  This piece includes embossed velvet (so much fun!), embroidery, beading, and stamping (with acrylic paint).

Black Flowers

"art quilt", "art", "collage", "mixed-media", "paint", "wall hanging"Ronni Hunter1 Comment
Here is a new mixed media piece that I recently completed.  In the March/April 2011 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine there was an article by Susan Pickering Rothamel and Frankie Fioretti about making restructured paper using Perfect Paper Adhesive.  As a collage artist and art journaler I had about a ton of scraps so I thought this project would be just right for me.  I was totally thrilled with the outcome but could not decide for quite a while what I wanted to do with it.  It was so pretty just the way it was that I considered calling it finished but in the end I decided to try adding some flowers.  I did all this work creating and stitching down some paper flowers and hated the way the looked.  LOL!  So I carefully cut the shapes out, leaving square flower shaped holes.  I like the way the collage paper looked on a background of black brocade so I added some batting to the back, secured the whole shebang with fusible webbing and stitched it down with gold thread.  The flower centers are pieces of black card stock that I cut, folded, and edged with gold Smooch ink.  I mounted the whole thing on a small canvas that I painted with various antique-y colors, and stenciled with punchinella.

In this detail picture you can see some of the black on black brocade and the little gold spiral I stitched in various places.  The Perfect Paper adhesive is really great to work with and I find myself using it in my journals as well.  My pages don't stick together like they do when I use matte medium.  Yea!

Cat Hair Studio

"art", "cat"Ronni HunterComment

So this is what I have to deal with! All six of my indoor cats like to come into my studio, but Harry here is particularly helpful. This is one big cat and his favorite place to be is right in the middle of whatever I am working on. Needless to say I have to be vigilant when working with wet paint and glue. I named my studio and blog after this lovable guy. He leaves cat hair all over everything in my studio! Some people bleed on their art. I do that too, but mostly I have cat hair on my art. If I ever sell anything I'm going to have to include the caveat that people who are allergic to cats might want to reconsider. I do try to remove the cat hair - that roll of packing tape is always near by - but getting it all of is totally impossible. Thank goodness for photo editing software!