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.
My local quilt guild hosted a quilted postcard mail swap last year and I decided to keep two additional postcards for myself. I layered the front and back fabric pieces with Pellon peltex from Joann etc to make the postcards stiff enough to go through the postal mail. Then I free motion machine quilted or needle painted a free form thread design onto the surface of whole cloth Bali batik fabric from Indonesia and satin stitched around the edges using Sulky rayon thread. The green postcard has three rows of embroidery thread couched down to the surface.
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.
