Make It Mondays - Vintage Photos

I'd fallen off the MIM bandwagon this last month or so, but this past week's Make It Mondays theme is Vintage Photos! Hmmm.... wonder where I'll find some of those.... So here are two digital ATCs that I've been working on since I took the "Intro to Photoshop for Non-Professionals" class at Mount Mary College. This month's theme for the Milwaukee ATC group's live trade is "May Day! May Day!" so the Queen of the May above started out as a vintage lady from the Ten Two Studios Tinted Twenties Cuties image CD. She quickly became smothered in flowers from a Dover "Old-time Floral Vignettes" clip art CD and then run through some of the Photoshop standardized filters just to see what happens. Poor girl doesn't know what hit her (hence the dazed smile)!

And I say "quickly," but actually the process took me hours of cussing and redoing and so forth as I learned my way around the commands. I'm planning to do a limited edition series of prints of these, but even then one print will probably represent an hour of grumbling - I mean "work" :D

Below is "The Merry Month of May," which uses a scanned black & white image from my personal vintage photo collection.

The right edge of this one is cut off by my blog format, but you can click on the image to see the full version on Flickr. The original photo is tiny, only about 1.5" x 2.25," but scanning on a higher resolution picked up more detail of a group of women outside taking photos of each other in artsy poses. I thought it looked a little like they were doing a May dance. This scan below shows the original at actual size (or close enough depending on your computer!)

Make It Mondays - Hats

Put on your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it....

Life has been busy, and I'm running a week behind on Make It Mondays - Last week's theme was Hats, and I actually made these ATCs last weekend but haven't had a chance to scan them until now.

The Milwaukee ATC group's April theme is "Altered Photographs," so I used vintage photos from the Ten Two Studios Octavia collage set and embellished with acrylic paint, ink and these colorful flourishes cut from some fancy-schmancy wrapping paper. The two ladies above went the most over the top. The lady and gentleman below are a bit more subdued in their approach to fashion.

Crafting 365, Days 92 & 95 and some others

Make It Mondays - Found Objects

This past week's Make It Mondays theme was Found Objects, which comes right after my adventure last weekend photographing and collecting random rusty things in Walker's Point. Yesterday I took a workshop in Resin Jewelry at UW-Milwaukee's Studio Arts & Craft Centre and got to use of some of my growing beer bottle cap collection (right side of photo above - top four caps use images from the Ten Two Studios rounds sheets). Does it count as a found object now that family and friends just hand me bottle caps?

I've made bottle cap charms before using Diamond Glaze to seal them, but had been nervous about using the two-part epoxy resin because I had heard if you didn't mix your ratio of resin and hardener correctly, you just ended up with a sticky mess. So getting to play in a workshop overseen by someone who actually knew what he was doing was a lot of fun! SACC provided all the materials for us to use, including the resin jewelry molds shown above and lots of beads, doodads and findings.

Here's our fearless instructor Ben (left, in the act of encasing some cicadas in resin) and my art buddy Gary (right, a found object aficionado).

Last October, Gary and I took workshops with Michael deMeng at the Raevn's Nest Art Retreat in Cedarburg, WI. (This is a segue, in case you were wondering.) And I'm FINALLY finishing the Morpheus Box that I started then.

Found objects incorporated into this include rusted metal and broken glass from my sister's farm; the burnt stick shift knob on top (found in the fire pit where we used to live); and a broken pair of spectacles (found in a parking lot?). The vintage photos are from my personal collection gathered over the past fifteen years (the source of my screenname "vintagepix").

Last week I got everything wired together, and this week I need to figure out finishing touches on the exterior of the box, attach the turning knob(s) and decide whether this will stand on feet or hang on the wall. What do you think I should do?

Make It Mondays - Self-Portrait

This week's Make It Mondays theme Self-Portrait was a tough one for me because I really dislike photos of myself. I debated using a baby picture, but that would have required digging into the as-yet-unpacked boxes that have old photo albums. So I actually used a recent photo of myself and masked out the background and sized it to ATC format. Then I traced my face with permanent marker onto a clear ATC blank from Ten Two Studios. I doodled flowers around my head (because I'm still hoping for spring to show up - 40 degrees today) and colored it all with Sharpie markers. This is the closest I'll come to having purple hair!


Crafting 365, Days 77-78

Make It Mondays - Spring

This week's Make It Mondays theme is Spring, who is being very fickle about arriving in Wisconsin. We had temps up into the 60sF, and then the wind came out of the north, and we woke up this morning once more in the frozen teens.

So here's a wishful ATC using a purple paint chip and one of the less naughty ladies from the Ten Two Studios Nudie Cuties collage set (and I wonder what sort of hits those words are going to bring this blog :D) I happened to buy a box of fun letter stickers for class use, and the background image is from the cover of a Tiffany postage stamp booklet.

This ATC is for my class sample board. I'm teaching an "Intro to Artist Trading Cards" workshop for Alverno College's Telesis program in April (and amazingly the class is already full :). The hard part about making samples is that they have to be somewhat enticing to make people want to do the class, and not so complex as to intimidate, but also not so simple that they think, "Well, heck, my kid can do that." I'm not entirely sure where this one stands!

And let's hope this spring arrives with less snow than Spring 2008 did!

Make It Mondays - Turquoise

Part of these scans will be cut off, but you can click on them to see the whole shebang!

This week's Make It Mondays theme is Turquoise and this month's Milwaukee ATC theme is "I'm Game," so if you look very closely at these ATCs you can see that the backgrounds are playing cards from the game Mille Bornes. The vintage images are from the Ten Two Studios Little Aqua Things collage sheet.

For the cards above, I sanded and lightly inked the front of the card and stamped it with acrylic paint using some woodblock numbers and punctuation. Then I collaged and doodled with paint pens and white acrylic ink (and a dip pen, which I haven't used in YEARS). The cards below are collaged on the backs of Mille Bornes cards, which are that lovely turquoise color to start with.


Crafting 365, Day 60

Make It Mondays - Going Postal!

I made this Purple Postage ATC for this week's Make It Mondays theme "Postage Stamps" using images from the Ten Two Studios Little Purple Things collage sheet embellished with a purple Crayola spider-writer pen (now discontinued *wah*). I almost called this "Purple Haze" but "Purple Postage" was more alliterative!

I love using postage stamps in my art. There's a whole Flickr group for that called Postage Stamp It! Art.

Crafting 365, Day 57

Make It Mondays - Travel

This week's Make It Mondays theme is Travel, and after I made this "Globetrotter" ATC, I realized it was very similar to another ATC "The Italian Tour" that I made last year, also using the vintage travel sticker designs on the Ten Two Studios Little Collage Sheets.

Make It Mondays - Love!

Happy Valentine's Day! Fittingly, this week's Make It Mondays theme was Love (and for some reason I keep getting the theme to "Love, American Style" stuck in my head).

I made some more pop-up Valentine ATCs just because they're so fun to make. These use images from the Ten Two Studios Little Love collage sheet.


And my husband just stuck his head in the door to remind me we're leaving in 15 minutes to have lunch with his mom and son. (We're doing our Valentine's dinner date next week, when the restaurants aren't so crowded.) So toodle-pip, y'all!

Crafting 365, Day 43

Make It Mondays - Pink, I think

This week's Make It Mondays theme is Pink, so I made this ATC "Pink Honeymoon" using images from the Ten Two Studios Little Pink Things and Little Love collage sheets, which seemed appropriate for February. The ribbon is more pink that it looks in the scan. The train was from a Dover clip art book.

I don't think of pink as being one of my colors, and yet the background for this ATC is a pink paint chip that I picked up when I trying to figure out what to paint the wall around the fireplace in our living room.

I finally settled on "Tree Peony" which was a little too flat salmon pink when I finally got it on the wall (and alarmed my husband with its pinkness ;o). So I kept piling other colors (Ash Violet & Sunflower Yellow) on top to see what would happen. I still can't decide if I like it, but its main purpose was to provide a contrasting background for a white Hoosier cabinet (and a mess of art supplies) while not clashing too horribly with the stone and wood around the fireplace. Maybe I'll paint it purple in another few years.

Make It Mondays - Masque Mode

Masque Mode

This past week's Make It Monday's theme was Masks and I knew I wanted to make an ATC using one of the "Mode" faux postage stamps from Ten Two Studios with these big haired, big hatted 18th century fashion models. But getting a mask on her was not as easy as I had planned.

I originally wanted to cut out a little paper mask, but after the several tries, the best of which made her look like she went to the same optometrist as Geordi LaForge, I decided I would have to draw her mask and hand (hence the goofy fingers :o).

I still had my dictionaries lying around from last month's By Definition trade with Milwaukee ATC, so I found definitions of "masque" and "masquerade" to glue on the background, which is one of the many paint chip ATC backs I cut from all the paint samples I found while cleaning out my collage stash.

Walk Like an Egyptian

Cleopatra, or Land of Denial

Rose Eytinge
Originally uploaded by libraryimages.net

Every once in awhile unrelated projects cross paths or intersect in some strange way. Over a week ago, I happened to be researching the family name Eytinge (no relation to me but it ties in with a history project I've had on the back burner for several years) and came across this print of actress Rose Eytinge on Flickr. As soon as I saw it, I realized I had seen her before in the Ten Two Studios Vaudeville Women faux postage set. So this was tucked away in my brain when I saw that this week's Make It Mondays theme was Egypt.

Rose was known for her portrayal of Cleopatra and had actually lived in Egypt for a time. I'm certain this print showed her in that role, given the hieroglyphics and Egyptian architecture in the background and the pseudo-Middle Eastern costume. So Rose's faux postage stamp had to be the central image on my ATC. Because the theme for the Milwaukee ATC group's January meeting is "By Definition," I added a dictionary entry that applied to Cleopatra: "ambition." At Clip Art, ETC, I found the hieroglyphics for Cleo's name and some other Egyptian motifs for my background. All these elements combined make my first ever Egyptian-themed ATC!

A Fresh Start

This week's Make It Monday's theme is Fresh Start, and this year I'm rebooting my Crafting 365 project. My goals for 2009 include trying new techniques and having a go at all those projects that I bought supplies for but never did!

When my mom and I visited Oregon in October 2007, we went thrifting with Corinne (shown here with her finds) and I bought some lovely tarnished silver-plated spoons intending to do the spoon pendant project I had seen in the June 2007 issue of The Monthly Muse. Flash forward more than a year later, when we moved house in Nov. 2008 and I rediscovered those spoons still waiting to be altered...

I had originally had more of an egg/bird's nest theme in mind because of the shape of the spoon, but then I decided to use the blue and white bead doodads that I had wire-wrapped on New Year's Day at Jess's art play date and from there I chose this lovely Ingres portrait from the Ten Two Studios Little Dickens collage sheet. And so I made something new that I had never done before - hurrah!

Alice & Tenniel

This week's Make It Monday theme is Cartoons, and since obviously I'm into the vintage thing, I had to go with a Victorian cartoonist, John Tenniel, best known for illustrating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

I made four ATCs using the Alice's Wonderland faux postage set from Ten Two Studios, hand-colored and collaged with related text torn from an old dictionary.


The Punch website has a British take on the History of the Cartoon, which also shows how the word "cartoon" came to mean a humorous (er...humourous) sketch to be enjoyed in its own right, and not just a preliminary sketch or study for a work of art.

Crafting 365, Days 175 & 176

If Music Be the Food of Love

I've been working on pages for the Mount Mary Book Arts Group. I had missed meetings all fall and winter, but some other members gave me their pages from the "Something Hidden" book project, so I'm finally making some in return. Since this week's Make It Mondays theme is "Music," my first completed page has sheet music and an angel musician from the Ten Two Studios Metal Tin Angels collage sheet. The angel image lifts up to reveal another musician angel hidden below. Page size is 8.5 x 5.5" with space on the left side for binding.

Crafting 365, Day 171

Spring is at Hand

The crocuses are slowly coming up, and all the ice in the yard has finally melted (though it's 40F outside, and I've got my office space heater on as I type this). I'm slowly working on spring-themed ATCs for the Milwaukee live trade on April 26. This week's Make It Mondays theme is "Hands" so I finally used this folding hand ATC pattern from the Ten Two Studios "ATC Art Dolls" CD that I've been wanting to try since last year.

I also made the folding flower ATC from the "Amazing ATCs" CD using floral patterns cut from a fabric catalog and a vintage flapper from the Little Women collage sheet.

Crafting 365 Days 161-162

"Make It Mondays" Returns

Lisa Vollrath has revived the "Make It Mondays" weekly creative prompt at Go Make Something, and I'm going to do my best to participate this year.

This week's theme was "Paris," and since I'm not one of those enamored with all things French, I didn't have any Eiffel Tower stamps or similar lying around. But I did find the brochure for the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit that I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I had the painted ATC backs and floral wrapping paper that I planned to use for the Milwaukee ATC group's April theme "Spring has Sprung." So this is what I came up with: