Splashing Through Life - Art by Patricia Henderson

I decided to work on a companion piece to "Puzzled". I had such fun with that one, I thought I'd go the same route again! You can't drive very far in the country around here without seeing one of these guys. The Red-Winged Blackbird and it's song really says summertime to me. I decided to call this one "Country Singer". The background is covered with old sheet music and the bird and cattails are small pieces of hand painted paper and a few pieces of other found papers. This and Puzzled will be entered into the Annual Desmond Juried Art Exhibition and Sale this summer.

I was very pleased to see that my "Follow the Leader" geese collage was sold at the opening reception of the Desmond Juried Art Exhibition and Sale last night! Thank you to Jennifer Wilson's mom for purchasing it! It's going to a good home.

I've had a couple of weeks off from work and have been using some of that time to work on a new Paper Collage Painting to submit to the Desmond Juried Art Show and Exhibition. I thought I'd paint something we see around here A LOT. Corn. A lot of corn! I kind of like how this turned out. It's a bit more "abstracty" than some of my collages and was a lot of fun to do. Corny 24" X 12" Paper Collage on Canvas

My newest collage painting "Our Daily Bread" and two others, "Frenemies" and "Marshland Morning" have been accepted into the 7th Annual Desmond Juried Art Show and Sale. Stop on by the Ridgetown Campus of the University of Guelph from July 22-August 2, 2012 and check them out! Our Daily Bread Frenemies Marshland Morning (formerly titled Elegant Ecosystem)

During the spring and fall, parts of our community are taken over by crows. They tend to gather in flocks of hundreds of thousands along the Thames river in Chatham, right by residential areas. Of course this has caused problems such as the birds getting into garbage and leaving nasty surprises on cars. Some people want to get rid of them by shooting them, others send in birds of prey to scare them away.The intelligent crows seem to figure out our tactics and steer clear. I decided on the name Frenemies for this piece. The crows must think of us as friends sometimes, since we provide them with tasty food such as garbage, and vast fields of corn. Yet we are their enemies and attempt to eradicate them. Many people think of the crows as our enemies when they dirty our cars, but they are our friends when they eat rodent pests, damage-causing beetles and road kill. They are also a wonderful sight flying en mass at sunrise to go about their day. This painting is also about "frenem...

Today I started to block in the colours in the underpainting. As you can see it looks really rough, but it will all be covered in paper eventually. The paint acts as a guide for me and also to test colours and values.

I discovered a great art contest the other day called  Eco Arts Awards . I thought it would be a great contest to enter. Artists will submit artwork with their interpretation  of the meaning of Ecology.  The first thing that sprang to mind was Wetlands. I love Great Blue Herons, so I thought I'd make one the main focus, and also in keeping with the ecology theme, I'll be using my paper collage process, using primarily papers recycled from old books and magazines if I can. I found my heron reference from  Paint My Photo  a great website where photographers can post their photos for artists to use as copyright free reference material. Thanks Tracee Murphy for the great photo! After doing a couple of thumbnail sketches, I drew my scene onto a 24 X 12" canvas. Since this piece will be fairly complicated I will loosely paint it first with acrylics to give me a guideline while applying the papers. Here is my drawing so far. I will be fixing that poor dragon...