Now we are having fun!

Searching for cool art on the internet I found the work of Lena Nyadbi and Betty Mbijana.

First Artist Inspiration

"Lena Nyadbi is a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist from the Warmun Community in the Kimberley region of Western Australia." More information about her can be found here.  Isn't she fabulous?  Her is the picture I used as one inspiration.

I started out with a pink and blue screen print that I hated. Then I squirted lines on it.  I like it better but the line quality is all wrong. Don't they look like your sex education class drawings of sperm?  This piece definitely needed painted lines rather than squirted bottle lines.

Second Artist Inspiration

"Betty is a hard working artist, whose works are very popular and have wide appeal. 
The paintings are aerial views of women's ceremonies and depict the waterholes (often in sacred places) where they take place." She does not have a website but here are more images of her work.  This is the one I used for inspiration.

  So starting with a yard long piece of cotton that I had already done some surface design on I started drawing trying to emphasis the underlying designs.  Of course I was using my handy dandy hair-dye squirt bottle.  She used a brush to create hers.  I am still trying to master my squirt bottle so ...

Because the cotton was very tightly woven the dye did tend to bubble more than it would have on muslin.  You can really see the bubbling on most of the pictures.  Since I didn't care whether the lines were perfect or not (think of it as an element design) just kept going.

See the copy of the inspiration art in the above picture?

Brought to you by Judith