The theme for the challenge at Three Muses this week is round - what a great theme! Perhaps a day late and a dollar short but I brainstormed with pencil and paper and came up with an idea over lunch at work today. After settling on one particular idea I was able to visualize the piece. It is always exciting to be able to picture something in your mind before starting as well as to give yourself the freedom to change the piece as you work on it. Things don’t always turn out as planned but often they turn out better. If not you can always change tack and try something else. Remember that nothing is cast in stone. The clipart is from Dover Publications and the background started out as a vintage book page from Stampington which was then altered using multiple filters. This is a digital piece created using Gimp photo editing software which is open source software and comparable to Photoshop. This is also my first challenge piece from the MacBook that my wonderful kids gave me for my birthday to replace the 8 year old G4. What a surprise indeed!
The challenge theme at Three Muses this week is Word Salad. All sorts of great ideas immediately came to mind. Since I am having problems with my hand today it was easiest to work with scrapbooking paper, glue, and ergonomic cutting tools. This piece expresses my feelings about the theme and where I’m at right now. Don’t think you’d ever catch me on a surfboard although the snowboard my daughter left behind in the garage sure looks tempting some mornings. Ride the wave!
This week’s theme at Three Muses is Up, Up, and Away. It just so happens that I have already created a Hot Air Balloon quilt that is perfect for this challenge. The hot air balloon pattern came from the PC Piecers web site and my hot air balloon blocks came from a block swap with other quilters on the Internet. The quilt is my own design with the hot air balloons arranged in a random pattern in the sky. The quilt measures 30″ wide x 16″ high and hangs in my kitchen on the long wall over my kitchen table.
My sister Anne, Anne’s Creative Cornucopia, told me about a wonderful new creative art challenge group that started up last week with the first week’s theme of Mona Lisa. This week the theme is doors and here is my first entry to Three Muses. I did an initial pencil sketch and then decided to build the piece as an 8.5″ x 11″ oval using cardstock, glue, and scrapbooking paper, adding brads and knotted embroidery thread around the edge to create a talisman. My door is figurative and represents the world of opportunity that awaits when we open the door and cross the threshold into the unknown.
