I just love seeing my pieces from many different angles, distances, and perspectives. In this case, getting *very* up close and personal with this piece, which this month's header comes from, feels so different than stepping back and looking at the whole picture.
This piece is from one of my favorite series that came out of my summer session: the Amoeba Series. The series started as an exploration of creating interesting backgrounds on which to overmarble. When I teach, I like to show my students how surface tension and the order in which the paints are thrown affect color. I do this by laying down the same color over and over again. This way they can see that the one color comes out in various shades, making it look like you threw four or five or six different paint colors even though you only threw one. The more often I demoed this and the more I perfected a particular technique, I started to see something interesting...the end result was what I can only describe as cloud or cotton-ball like. And this is what I was exploring when I created a ton of backgrounds sheets.
Since the background themselves were so intriguing and could stand on their own, I knew the next step ~ the overmarble ~ needed to be understated yet dramatically complementary. I did not want to cover up or hide that gorgeous background but whatever was on top needed to be strong and stand on its own as well.
A few weeks later, I was playing around with dispersant to see what kind of unique shapes I could make and that's when I decided to combine the two techniques ~ and the Amoeba Series was born.
The pieces in this series are so thought provoking to me and I had a hard time picking which one I wanted to use to create the header this month ~ especially because of the different look and feel it creates when the original is resized and cropped. It took me a while to warm to this header ~ I was so into the background that I didn't give much thought to the overmarble (the "amoeba"). But now I am in love with the fluidity and the texture of the overmarble ~ I want to ride those waves and rivers and see where they take me!