More Inchie Paintings

I actually completed these a while ago, but at the encouragement of my friend Nena, I'm finally putting some new paintings up. I really like both of these pieces. Unfortunately, the scanner won't let me show the whole painting, but most of it is here. Both of these paintings are square.

I love the variety and richness of color in this painting, and the way meaning is implied in the letters, but not clear enough to be understood.

Thing Be

Acrylic on canvas

11 x 11

AVAILABLE

$45

Again, I love the colors in the painting below, but for the minimalism as opposed to the variety. I also love the way the composition suggests a human face, through an accident of inchie randomness.

Suggestion

Acrylic on canvas

11 x 11

AVAILABLE

$45

Painting an "Inchie"

When you make hundreds and hundreds of one-inch-sized works of art (inchies), the question inevitably arises--what do I do with these? A friend suggested I make large paintings of them. Sounded good to me, so today I made a 12 x 12 painting of a 1 x 1 inchie.

Here is the 1 x 1 inchie:


And here is the 12 x 12 painting (due to the size of my scanner, you aren't getting the full painting, but this is pretty close:


I liked how it started to look like a landscape painting, so I decided to leave out the diagonal yellow lines, even though those are what attracted me to this inchie in the first place.

Inchies

Ya'll, I am obsessed. I first heard about inchies on http://www.craftster.org/. They are little one inch square pieces of art. You can pretty much make 'em any way you want, but from what I can tell, most people use a collage technique. Right away, I wanted to try making some. So I made a set of about 100 using a map of the Pearl District (Portland's arts district), some scrapbooking paper, and some handwritten messages I collected from the women who were with me at the scrapbooking weekend. Here's a sampling of the result (affixed to a notebook with brads):

Once I got into these, I realized they are all about RANDOMNESS for me. So much of my art is about control--making the image perfect--making the line just the way I want it--trying to get the light right. But the way I make inchies, I have no control over the final image, and each little square that comes out is a little miracle of composition, line and color. Of course they don't ALL turn out that great, but out of 100, you might get 25 really great images.

So I made some more (4 of 100):

And then some more (4 of 100): Then, I went to Chicago for the GREAT ART WEEKEND (more on that in a separate post), where I collected found paper all wekend, and created some more. In fact, if you look at the first picture on this posting, you will see approximately 540 Chicago inchies in progress. Here are a few complete Chicago inchies:

If you don't get it by now, you probably never will. But that's okay; I'll be making enough for both of us. However, if you want to make some, here's a tutorial on craftster: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=211483.0;images