Wednesday, June 25, 2014

DLP Week 17

This week's prompt was to draw my favorite shoe(s).  Since I'm retired and it's summer in Southern California, my absolute favorite shoes are my flip flops.  I drew one of my flip-flops.
  I then added the acrylic background but did not like it. 
 I pondered for a few days on what to do with the lackluster page in my journal.  Aha….. I decided to collage it.  First the shoe…..
Then the background….. I just had to get rid of the hideous green background!
The most time-consuming part of collage is picking the papers.  And then there's all  the little scraps of paper lying around on the workspace and on the floor….glad nobody came to visit while I was doing this project.  My final reward was getting rid of the glue on my fingers and fingernails.
 I debated whether to add just a bit more red to the background but
 after careful consideration decided to stop where I was.  As my artist friend Jacki says, it's important to know when to stop.  
~ Calm ~

Friday, June 13, 2014

Art Adventures Part 2

I'm taking Jacki's class at Catalyst on Thursdays for the next few weeks.
There are about 15 terrific artists in the class, and we are having a ball.  She first taught us the technique of using a credit card to paint.  You might remember my posts with my "sassy girls" here 
and here. This week we worked with 4 x 4's.  We just tore out
 4"x 4" papers from anything - junk mail, catalogs, newspaper and brought them to class.  We added them to our journals and embellished with more torn papers.


We worked on adding borders to our pages and doing crazy text from a prompt across the page like this.  The border was done with a W I D E black marker.
And finally I did a  credit card face with a border of tissue paper.
I always have so much fun with other artists.  I wish I didn't have to clean my house and do all those mundane chores - I'd rather play with art, wouldn't you?
~ Calm ~

Art Adventures Part 1

OMG, I've had a terrific week - two whole days with like-minded people.  
Linda of our Eastside Art Group was the teacher/host this month.  I've been waiting patiently - no, really impatiently,  for her to teach us this technique…..plaster over various substrates such as wood, cradle boards, masonite, with acrylic wash and then beeswax.  While we were waxing we could add various items.  Actually we could have added these items by embedding in the plaster too.  We used various tools to punch, gouge and otherwise grunge up the surface.  
This second image is a better exposure photo-wise.
I was so preoccupied with my own work, I forgot to take pictures of everyone else's.  There were some fantastic pieces.  You can see Jacki's post here.   She has a couple pics of Libby's work in this post too. I had so much fun, I ordered a beeswax/UTEE melting pot and beeswax beads.  
Thank you, Linda for a really fun workshop!
~ Calm ~


Sunday, June 08, 2014

More Credit Card Faces

This credit card face thing is very addictive.  They don't always come out a "work of art" but sometimes it's fun just to see how they do come out.  It's just so difficult to control the marks the credit card makes.
I'm now wondering if I should have switched the captions on
these two…
 
The one below might be a better "Bad Hair Day" but that's what Photoshop is for .
Actually none of their hair looks like a good hair day.
I'm thinking these might be good for a calendar.
~ Calm ~





Monday, June 02, 2014

Documented Life Project - Week 12

I finally finished Week 12 objective - cut up a magazine and use in a spread.
I actually did two halves of a spread.  This half was actually cutting up images from a magazine.  Could not resist making a face from an image of a speckled egg.  The hair was made from an image of some sort of grain.
On the second half of the spread I used only one magazine image but I love it because of the quote from Brian Andreas of Story People.
 For the background I used some of my prints I pulled from a homemade gelatin plate.  I layered stencils over those and attached paper doily paper to the bottom.
~ Calm ~