Posted by: Mary @ 5:03 pm
It was such a beautiful day today that I decided to drag some collage supplies out on my front porch and work with my masonite painting board in my lap. Somewhere on the web I remembered seeing a book made of paper lunch bags, so I have been saving Dunkin’ Donuts muffin bags for an occasion like this one. I took 6 bags and folded them in half, nesting them. I measured in about half an inch from the center edge and marked holes down the fold spaced .75 inch apart, then used an awl to make the holes. There was a small ball of variegated chenille yarn in my basket of embroidery threads so I used that to loop in and out of the holes from back to front to make a simple binding. I cut 4 lengths of the yarn spanning the book to be sure it was long enough to make it all the way back and forth. Then I got out a used puzzle I had been saving for collage work and glued some puzzle pieces on alternating pages of the book. Next I used my old typewriter rubber stamp alphabet to stamp some letters and some words. This is just a beginning and I plan to play with and work on my book some more as this has been a lot of fun!
Posted by: Mary @ 12:26 pm
I am taking the True North Arts Vision Journaling Workshop with Kathryn Antyr and am finding it very helpful in facilitating my creative journey. At this point I have created the journal collage for the first week which is pictured below and have started on making the ATCs to go with it. I wrote out a list of intentions for the ATC cards on my lunch break at work and keep a notebook handy there to record creative thoughts that come. This whole vision journaling process has given me more awareness of things that I am struggling with and how to address these things.
- The cat jumped up on my work space, sniffed the flame of the candle and ran away, startled but uninjured.
- I am just not comfortable with candles anyway due to the fire danger and need to honor my own feelings.
- I am having problems locating my tools and supplies (where are my markers, where is the spray bottle, etc).
- My creative supplies are still scattered around and I need to take the time to go through everything and reorganize.
- It is an effort to carve out a block of time, create a work space, and get focused on one thing, but I am doing it.
- Once I get started I am fine and lose myself in the process. The dining room table seems to be the best place to create.
Posted by: Mary @ 9:54 pm
After reading about vision boards and dream boards yesterday, I decided to put together a dream board of my own to celebrate the New Year. Jamie Ridler Studios shows Full Moon Dreamboards which resonated with me and are on the wavelength of what I had envisioned last night. There is great info about creating vision boards on Christine Kane’s Blog. My word for 2010 is create, with the intent of creating new work in mixed media, quilting, drawing, painting, photography, scrapbooking, book arts, and anything else that inspires me. The following words are important to me and are listed on an index card on the dream board:
Organize
Play
Learn
Grow
Live
Love
Be Yourself
Connect
Visualize
Here is what tihe dining room table looked like when I was getting ready to prep the board. Looks like I have some cleaning up to do around here later as stuff seems to have spread out everywhere. This was a very empowering exercise and helped me to focus on what is important to me in the coming year.
Happy New Year!
Mary
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!
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.
Posted by: Mary @ 8:43 pm
This week’s theme for Sunday Postcard Art is Butterflies. I decided that it would be fun to use a typography treatment to interpret the theme and filled in the space created by the letters with butterflies and flowers. The butterflies are free clipart from Dover Publications and the flowers are free vector art by DragonArtz Designs downloaded from Qvectors. This was a very enjoyable postcard to create on what turned out to be the first real day of spring here - sunny and warm enough to ditch the jacket 
My postcard for this week’s SPA challenge was inspired by the wonderful Flower Vector Art created by DragonArtz Designs and found on the QVectors Quality Free Vector Graphics site. More inspirational work by DragonArtz Designs can be seen at http://dragonartz.wordpress.com/.
Posted by: Mary @ 12:14 pm
This week’s theme for Sunday Postcard Art made me think about what I am most grateful for, and that is my kids who are growing into young adults and have become my best friends. The digital scrapbook paper background and the button elements are all by Michelle Coleman of LittleDreamerDesigns.com. I used Photoshop to build the scrapbook style collage and create the frames, and the font used is Garamond Italic.
Posted by: Mary @ 5:32 pm
This week’s theme for Sunday Postcard Art is Mothers. This was a really special theme and I was fortunate to have a vintage black and white photo of my mom with me and my brother. There are seven of us in all and mom is not in too many of the pictures, so I was glad my dad took this picture of us. The background and border is digital scrapbook paper by Michelle Coleman of LittleDreamerDesigns.com. I used Photoshop to build the collage, created a duotone of the background and photo, and then went back into RGB mode to bring in the black and white closeup shot and the color border frame. The font is ITC Galliard.
When my daughter saw my art journal open and covered with wet paint drying on the table, she asked me if I had been finger painting. That was not something I had thought of when I laid down the acrylic washes for a background to get started. It only seemed fitting to cut out cardstock paper tracings of my hands to express the idea of finger painting not quite.
There are a lot of “words of wisdom” which come to mind for the Sunday Postcard Art challenge this week.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Be true to yourself.
But when you think about it, what’s most important is where we make our nest: our home. The clip art is from Vintage Moth and I isolated the elements and arranged my collage in Photoshop.
A whimsical take on the theme for Sunday Postcard Art came to mind this week. Inspiration came from my college age son who went to Providence, Rhode Island with friends last weekend and they were driving around lost for an hour because the GPS went out. Evidently the younger set does not believe in maps and this is an update to the men don’t need directions thing The free clip art map and ship are from Clip Art Graphics - Free Clip Art Now and I used Photoshop filters to create the background. The map was originally greyscale, so I changed it to a duotone with blue and black and then added a 20% transparency of color over it to give it an old world feel. The fonts used are Goudy Old Style and Frutiger.
My sister Anne sent me a postcard that depicts the once upon a time myth about Pandora’s Box and she said that I could share it here. She used free clip art from Dave’s Mythical Creatures. I have been showing her my postcards and my new blog and she has been following the Sunday Postcard Art challenge. She does not have a blog but is really enjoying the wonderful variety of work here at SPA and all the inspiration. She makes beautiful decoupage boxes and likes to do creative things. Anne just started her own blog Anne’s Creative Cornucopia.
Here is my postcard for the Mardi Gras theme on Sunday Postcard Art. This postcard was created in Photoshop and is based on a shape collage of mine that I found mixed in with my kids artwork yesterday, which I am going through to make school days memories scrapbooks. Mardi Gras time… can 40 days of dieting and no junk food be far behind? After thinking it over during the day, I decided to change the postcard a little bit and added layers with 3 masks from The Free Clip Art Store which were re-colored from the confetti bits… sometimes it is hard to know when to stop!
This is the beginning of the art journal I started last week. I have kept written journals for many years and sketchbooks as well. After seeing and reading about the wonderful art journals that people are creating, it seemed only natural that I should add art journaling to my palette. Here are my first pages…
Here are some art journal pages for inspiration:
*e*: mini art journal challenge
Flickr: the 52Q a year of mini art journalling Pool
Flickr: art journal challenge
Daisy yellow blog
ArtJunk Girl~
journal junk
You Tube - Art Journal Workshop: Layers
a girl & her journal
illustratingstories.com: Art Journal
Hearts was a great theme on Sunday Postcard Art this Valentine’s Day weekend. The background is scrapbooking paper from Joann etc and I painted the edges with watercolor paint. I used my new Marvy circle punch to cut out pictures of my kids. My daughter Marianne is on the left with her boyfriend Tyler and my son Joe is on the right with his girlfriend Kelly. The puffy red glitter hearts were found in the clearance section at A.C. Moore yesterday morning. My Rapidograph pen was used to make the squiggle lines around the photos and a small text block completes the postcard.
Ergonomic Tools
I have been adding ergonomic tools to my supplies as I don’t have a lot of hand strength anyway and then had a serious hand injury last September. Fortunately my left hand has healed and it works for which I am very grateful, but I am having problems with my thumb. I am left handed but write with my right hand which in this case is a plus. The Marvy punches have a lever which is easy for me to use and they don’t require much hand strength (I can’t use the push down punches), the Fiskars Deluxe paper trimmer makes it very easy to cut paper, and my new Fiskars Softouch Micro-Tip scissors are ergonomic and easy for me to use as well. My new Fiskars craft knife has a curved handle and my new Olfa rotary cutter is also curved with a safety lock, but I can’t do much cutting with a blade as it stresses the injured hand to press down on and hold the ruler in place. Before the injury almost all of my cutting for both fabric and paper was done with a rotary cutter and an Omnigrid ruler, but I can’t do that right now other than to make a few cuts as it hurts. One good thing that has come out of this injury is that I am getting back into artwork using paper, paint, collage, etc. and am really enjoying myself instead of focusing on what I can’t do.
The chairs theme for Sunday Postcard Art had me stumped until I went on a marathon shopping trip Saturday and came home exhausted and needing a rest. I went to four different art/craft supply stores and found some great items on sale and was very happy. This digital postcard was created in Adobe Photoshop. The shopping bags are taken from a design piece I created a few years ago and the clipart is from Vintage Moth (chair and butterfly), Graphics Fairy (clock face), and Dover Publications (angel). The font is Adobe Garamond small caps.
Here is the original shopping postcard that inspired me again (I like to reuse motifs from my previous work) and there is a poster too.
This is my digital postcard for the Sunday Postcard Art circle theme. The free clip art is from The Vintage Moth, a wonderful site for mixed media and collage artists. I created the circles background in Adobe Illustrator, something I thought up on the long commute to work. Then I brought the background into Photoshop as a pdf, resized it and added the flowers, the butterfly family and the saying. In retrospect, the text should probably have read “Think Spring” as we have had weekly snow storms this winter.
This is my cat postcard for Sunday Postcard Art. The cat and ladder are separate images which were resized to fit together and I went to Yahoo Babel Fish to find the word cat in different languages. The color of the text strip block was eyedroppered from my tortoise cat’s fur colors in Photoshop. The background is scrapbooking paper and the card itself is cut and glued, not digital.
Mary
This is my digital collage for this week’s Sunday Postcard Art Turquoise theme. I used photos of my kitchen window and one of my quilts, created a background using Photoshop filters, and added one of my favorite quotes. My kitchen cabinets and windows are close to turquoise so I adjusted the color slightly.
Mary
This is my Winter Mystical postcard for Sunday Postcard Art. This angel was a gift from a special friend and she sits on a shelf in my kitchen where I can see her. While finishing up with shoveling snow today the sun came out, so I brought her outside for a quick photo. I printed the photo on 70 pound white paper and used scrapbooking paper, adding watercolor paint on the edge.
Mary