I started playing around with one of my old collages called Hammerdots No. 3. This was a piece on watercolor paper that I never got around to framing. Someone saw it in the gallery and bought it. Luckily I had made a scan of it right after I finished it.
I played around with brushes to add concentric circles and X's over the orange dots. Then I inverted it to result in the lovely turquoise blue on a black background.
I repeated the design four times at different rotations:
Then I switched back to the red/orange and replaced color to darken the background to get the one displayed at the top of this post. I even made this hard-to-look-at color halftone version:
First is a high-contrast photo with the digital camera. I like the color tones of the scanned version a little better. Unfortunately, the image is too big.
Dots of decorative paper and book endpapers. Paper for the brown and yellow squares is called chiri. The 3/4 dots are from cigar box art. Ground is 300 lb. Arches. Image dimension is 13x10 inches.
Well, the rain brought me in from yard work long enough to rescue my first hammerdots collage from the Archive of Indecision! Image size is 7.5x5.5 inches with 5/8 inch dots from found images and fabric.
I have just made what I think is my second (my first was the use of acrylic medium as adhesive) most important collage discovery: the arch punch. I've had one for something like 15 years sitting in the second drawer of the metal filing cabinet in the kitchen. I even have the wooden mallet to strike it with and the black pad to cut on.
