I'm Guest Blogging at Art Journal Every Day

I'm the guest blogger today at Art Journal Every Day! I'm blogging about using tangles in my art journal. Thank you to Julie Balzer for the opportunity! Also, if you remember my sunprinting post last year, where I used Crafters Workshop stencils to sunprint designs on painted fabric, I was very excited to learn that Julie has designed new stencils for them. Go check them out!

Art Journal: Totally (Zen)Tangled

I spent a good chunk of May and June drawing and then coloring Zentangle patterns from Sandy Bartholomew's great book Totally Tangled.
 
I had a very busy spring so it was great to just work on a couple of tangles each day in May, and then I went back and colored them a little at a time in June, using a combination of Letraset markers, Twinkling H20s and Prismacolor pencils.

I also did a Spring Tangle spread that was a bit more organic:

Little by little, I'm filling the pages! You can see other tangles & resources in my previous blog posts here and here and in my Flickr photostream.

Dr. Evermor's Forevertron & HH Bennett's Studio

I had a very busy spring, and now that it's summer (how'd that happen?), I'll try to take advantage of the holiday weekend to catch up on some blogging.  In June we had a family gathering in the Wisconsin Dells with the obligatory boat rides on the Upper and Lower Dells and a lumberjack breakfast at Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty.

But the two things I had always wanted to see in the Dells? Dr. Evermor's Forevertron and H.H. Bennett's Photographic Studio!

The Forevertron is an amazing outdoor sculptural environment created by Tom Every a.k.a. Dr. Evermor from salvaged items.


He was doing steampunk before steampunk was cool. I won't even try to describe this in words. You can see my full Flickr set here. We were fortunate to meet him on the day, and the official Dr. Evermor website is up, but still under construction. Besides the Wikipedia article linked above, you can read more at Roadside America and PBS.org.

On a slightly different tack, the H.H. Bennett Studio is small museum run by the Wisconsin Historical Society, which preserves a 19th-century photographic studio. (If you've ever wondered, my on-line name is "vintagepix" because I have a collection of vintage photos.)

So this site might not be for everyone's tastes but I am entertained by giant cameras and stereocard viewers (modeled here by my big brother)

and taking a family photo through the lens of an antique camera.

(For those of you who know your optics, we are upside down in the original photo.) So if you're in central Wisconsin this summer, consider a road trip!

Art Journal: What I did in April (and May)

Spring has been busy with work and catching up on long overdue art projects. I have been working in my art journal every day but tend to do a little bit at a time so it takes me a week or more to finish a spread. I've been playing with Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists, which has fun exercises.

This spread started with splotches of watercolor in which you try to find animal shapes:


One of her exercises involved doodling cats, and since the April Sketchbook Challenge theme was "Branching Out/Out On A Limb," this evolved:


"One Liners" required drawing with one single line (which I had to color, of course):


In between doodling faces, I did a bit of scribble drawing (on the upper right page):


I started May off with some "Cheater Blind Countour" drawing. (You get to peek while doing blind contour drawing from photographs, so you can make sure the lines meet up!)


Hope you're having a creative spring!
UPDATE: Here are the blind cheater contours painted with Twinkling H20 watercolors.

"Inspire My Life" Art Retreat - July 2011!

Looking for some mixed media fun this summer? Kim Geiser is organizing Inspire My Life, an art retreat in Manitowoc, Wisconsin from July 28-30, 2011. She hopes to have the full schedule up by early April, but instructors include Kim Rae Nugent, author of Interactive Art Workshop, and my fellow Milwaukee ATC buddies, Mel Kolstad and Kathi Pecor, among others.
UPDATE: Workshop Schedule is now up! (Scroll down that page for registration info.)

I'll be teaching "Colorful Faux Tintype Artist Trading Cards" on Saturday, July 30, 2011.  Hope you can make it!

Art Journal: deMengian Mumbo Jumbo

This past week, I've been working on a journal spread inspired by Michael deMeng but since the March Sketchbook Challenge theme is Spilling Over, I perhaps used some of his techniques to excess!

I was fortunate to take two workshops from Michael at the Raevn's Nest Art Retreat in 2008, and I learned a lot from his techniques creating the effect of age and patina using acrylic paints. All these images started out as black & white photocopies of Dover vintage clip art (and one 19th century portrait from my personal collection) and were colored with paint. My friend Gary used Michael's "ghostly glow" technique on his ATCs last month, so I had a go at that with mixed results. The interpretation of this collage is up to you!

March 1-5, 2011

Art Journal: Fantastic Faces Workshop

I'm taking the Fantastic Faces on-line workshop at ArtTrader Magazine taught by Annie Melione, aka Eraser Queen. So this past week, I worked on a journal spread where I sketched a few faces each day and then inked and colored. Here are some starting pencil sketches, fiddling with proportions and seeing where each face might end up.

Here is the finished spread the folding flap on the right side closed and opened. You can click on the images to see a larger version on Flickr.



February 21-23 & 26-28, 2011