Juxtapose!

There's a simple combo I've been turning out lately with my 6-inch tiles. A tile of course, is once again, a two-dimensional concept.......

Because I've moved down here to the American Southwest, I've discovered that the huge tall saguaro cactus (pron. sah-wah-ro) is a visual concept that is very easy to draw, or represent in two dimensions (I'll get to the tile in a minute). And this is proved by all the hundreds of published photographs of same: picturesque saguaros throughout the media-realms, in so many magazines and newspapers and ads and TV shows, and paintings and decorative themes!

And in the ceramics studio, there are some glazes that you might call "randomly explosive"glazes: there's one that turns out to look exactly like the Milky Way galaxy, and it's a perfect background for my doodled saguaro cactus in the foreground! Point is, a person can juxtapose one simple shape in the center, or foreground of, say, a 6" tile, with a crazy pattern in the background, and it works!

One of the many fun experiments you can conduct with calligraphy is using this double pencil described in my last entry....you can change it to two ballpoints, or two marker-tips, or two different colors.

Now make some doodles that you feel like making, or even try a one-letter image, like a lower case "a", not letting the pen-angle change (see my last entry) as you "make your marks". Feel free to go back afterwards with a single implement to correct things: bring loose ends together as you want them. (Nobody is perfect the first time.)

Now the fun part is filling in the spaces you that you have made with your calligraphy: you can go to another media altogether, like a colored pencil or a marker, or a ball point, or watercolor, and you can make stripes, or polka dots, or wiggly lines or solid color, or whatever your heart desires, fear not! If you feel like attacking a whole word, or your name, or the name of a loved one, or a logo, you'll have even more fun.