Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

  At Tag Tuesday . Pinky O' Hagan is hosting a tag challenge which  asks for 'a bit of pink".... not so difficult if you like pink.  I don't use a lot of pink in my work, so it was quite a bit of a challenge when I thought only of pink - my thoughts went to pink roses, pink hearts, pink confectionery !!!  Then I referred to this week's colour prompts, #coloricombo by artists Este MacLeod.... pink with sap green, dark tea, and sea green. I'm not sure I got the colours in this palette exactly, but here is my tag, a stylised landscape  -  The collaged background of the tag has torn pieces of watercolour art rejects, painted magazine pages and a little bit of gift paper. The tree silhouette is decorated with paper  dots, cut with a hole puncher. 

  I couldn't have hoped for a more suitable theme set for this fortnight's Tag Tuesday ..... "Add a Postage Stamp". I often use postage stamps in my collage work, and I admit I really enjoy working with these miniature artworks.  The two stamps I've chosen for this exercise are both Australian.   The first one depicting a white tailed kingfisher is from a 1980 issue and this series is amongst my favourite "bird" series. The second is from an Australian animal series issued in 2019  .... who doesn't love a wombat?  The tags are both paper collages - with some stitching and  in the second, I stitched a real dried eucalypt leaf. And just to add a but of interest, I also decorated the backs of the tags, complementing the theme on the front.  I hope you enjoy this glimpse of  the natural world in Australia... 

  The current challenge at  Tag Tuesday   is NUMBERS ...  Here is the brief ... I would like to see Numbers on your tags, as in the title, I mean more than one number, I don't mind how many numbers you use, but you must have more than 3. They can be all the same or all different... On my desk, I happened to have a box of old postage stamps ... and there were numbers of course, as each stamp displays its value.  Here are my tags for the Numbers challenge.  The first is  a collage of the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, standing on a podium with a random set of numbers  . The second features  a lovely set of stamps from New Zealand , again with the three numbers prominently displayed , complemented by a cut out from an old greeting card.  Thanks, Sandie from tag Tuesday - a different and challenging theme. 

At Tag Tuesday the current theme is cats ... my first thought was the famous riddle.  While on my way to St. Ives, I saw a man with 7 wives. Each wife had 7 sacks. Each sack had 7 cats. Each cat had 7 kittens. Kitten, cats, sacks, wives, How many were going to St. Ives? Was that 49 cats total ?  Anyway I decided to make a Mr and Mrs  Cat tag  for the  Tag  Tuesday challenge using the colour combinations for this week in my #the100dayproject. - forest green, saffron, dusty pink  and sea foam. These are  weekly colour prompts #coloricombo, curated be artist Este MacLeod ... I think I got most of the colours into the background with a predominance of the forest green and saffron in the cats.  In case you were wondering what is the real answer to the riddle  "how many were going to St Ives?"   Answer : one , only me! 

 When 'anything goes", does it follow that "nothing matters" ? .... I think not.  When I interpret "anything goes", I think it means taking a few risks and experiment, but also care about what you are doing and finding a purpose in the process.  Currently, the Tag Tuesday theme is "Anything Goes" ... This describes my daily art practice at the moment. I am doing #the100dayproject and each day I am responding to weekly published colour prompts #coloricombo, curated by  artist, Este McLeod.  During the last week, the suggested colours were jade green, primrose, vermillion and  purple grey.  Each day, I've been trying to experiment with colour and technique with the goal of developing and learning.  Here are some of the tags I created using these colours, or at least as close as I could manage with stuff from my stash...  I have titled these "Fragments from Afar" as all of them feature an image or a postage stamp from somewhere far from...

 Tag Tuesday' s theme is Spring Flowers. Of course, it's not Spring here in Australia, but that doesn't matter - anytime is a good time to celebrate flowers.  My tags  were little 'nature notes" I created for #the100dayproject, where I am responding to colour prompts, #coloricombo, curated by Este Macleod. The first is a collaged "tag" with a painted background (watercolour) and a blue flower ( fabric) appliqued and stitched. The tag itself is a scrap of inked paper with magazine text.   The second  tag is a another collaged "nature note" with postage stamp. Torn paper and fabric have been used on a background of  white washed print and my own  garden notes.  The third, strictly speaking does not depict flowers, but those little gum nuts were once  flowers and if you look carefully, the snippet of fabric in the right bottom corner is a floral print.  All of these are responses to the colour combination of soft blue, pea green, green...

 It has been such a long time since I participated in a Tag Tuesday  challenge … This fortnight the theme is ‘Gothic’  and  it really engaged me because I really couldn’t at first think of anything I could create as a tag. I recently have  been playing with photo manipulation and editing so here is one of the results - a double exposed image of the interior of a gothic cathedral and the head of a sculpture I made a few years ago . I also added a few touches of gold leaf and coloured a few areas of the image with Prisma pencil to add some depth. I was thinking the gothic arches created mitred headgear ?  Or is just a spectre of a saint interred in the cathedral crypt? … it’s gothic! 

 Coinciding with Valentine's Day, Tag Tuesday's current theme is "Love/Hearts" .  My tag is inspired by the song:  … What the world needs now is love, sweet love It's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world needs now is love, sweet love No not just for some, but for everyone … This tag features a postage stamp issued in 1995 by Australia Post to mark Valentine's Day. The rest of the tag involved some fussy cutting from old magazine pages and a few little "doll buttons". So simple but I hope it conveys the message.

Here comes the Sun,   Here comes the Sun and I say It's all right Little darling It's been a long cold lonely winter Little darling It feels like years since it's been here ....  At   Tag Tuesday , the current theme is  "Here comes the sun" . The challenge is to create a tag with the sun on it, with an optional twist of including a Beatles image.  My first tag is simply a gelli plate print background, with a photo transfer of grass and a stamped image of a fairy. The second tag suggests a  peace-loving Beatle (or a look alike) against a sunny background. In both these tags, the sun is implied rather than figurative image and  I have associated "gold" with the sun.  (    

  The current theme at Tag Tuesday is "Christmas in July" - .enthusiastically celebrated here in Australia, but I wondered if there was more to it than just a reason to celebrate in Winter in the Southern Hemisphere . Here is some information I came across.  from  Trivia Hub Live   1. Christmas in July is usually recognized as occurring on July 25th. 2. The first mention of Christmas in July dates back to a French opera in 1892 that mentions “When you sing Christmas in July, you rush the season.” The term “Christmas in July” originated with the 1940 movie “ Christmas in July ” which follows a man who buys gifts for his family during the summer. The official celebration of the pseudo-holiday is believed to more formally begin in 1944 when the U.S. Post Office and American greeting card companies launched a Christmas in July campaign to encourage the early mailing of cards to overseas soldiers. In the Southern Hemisphere, seasons are in revers...

  Nature does not hurry, but everything is accomplished ... Lao Tzu  For Tag Tuesday's theme "time and clocks" ,   here is my  collaged reflection on time.  Do you have  favourite saying about "time"? 

  It's been a long time since creating a tag for the Tag Tuesday  fortnightly challenge....  The current theme is 'orange and purple' .   I made this tag for the challenge as a collage constructed from magazine pages , with a photo transferred as another layer. The photo is one of a tree in my street  and from a laser print, I  transferred  part of it  to the collage background with acrylic medium. With such bold colours, the silhouette of the tree branches seems to enhance the vibrancy of these colours.  I am always interested in working out why colours seem to "go together" , so it's always good to go back to the colour wheel.  While not quite analogous, orange and purple are close  secondary colour neighbours  and they present as a brilliant pairing as they also come from the opposite hot/cool families of colour.  We only have to look at Nature to see how well orange and purple go together.    References...

 A collaged and embroidered art tag  submitted for the Tag Tuesday theme "Faery Garden "  Materials : gel print paper, tea bags, coloured paper.  Techniques: gel plate printing, mark making with acrylic inks, machine and hand stitching.  The stamp was on a tea bag, and is from an unknown source,

  This is my tag for the current theme at Tag Tuesday - Book Print. I like using text as a background for tags and today, I reduced one of my recent  line drawings and printed it on a small book page .... as you can see,  the book's chapter is entitled "Of Holy Living and Dying ( from The Book of Books) .  I thought this was appropriate as this 'Covid man' drawing depicts Nature happily thriving while man appears to be "unravelling " at the edges of body and mind...  Original drawing - Wilma Simmons   Silk screen print on fabric  : Wilma Simmons  Silk screen print on paper : Wilma Simmons  And here are some other tags on book print backgrounds - these are free motion stitched "Nature" portraits done earlier in the year.  

  "Down on the Farm " is the current theme at Tag Tuesday - an art tag fortnightly challenge . With lots of other projects 'on the go', I quickly  made these farm inspired tags probably with more fever than fervour.  The technique is simple - tear up a magazine page and randomly and quickly paste all the  torn pieces down onto a sheet of paper. Cut out the required size for the tag and complete by choosing an image(s) as a focus . With these I also added some hand stitching and a button as embellishment. The vintage images are from a purchased collage sheet by Eleven Nine Design.  And here is another "farm" tag which I free motion stitched  in February, for another challenge, 29 Faces .