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.

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

Finishing 365 for 2010 and Starting 2011

On December 31, 2010, I completed my 365 Milwaukee 2010 project, taking a photo a day for a year. You can see the slide show below or browse the set on Flickr (in reverse chronological order):

If you see less than 365 photos, that's because a few photos are only visible to friends and family. My family's like me - we don't like having our photos taken, much less posted on the internet. So you'll see very few self-portraits in this set! And I suspect a large percentage of the photos are still-life set ups taken after 9 p.m., when I realized I needed to take a photo before I went to bed. This project served more as a documentation of my creative life (after two previous failed attempts to do Crafting 365), so there are a lot of photos of art projects and supplies. OK, there are quite a few photos of food as well. And cats.

So what's next? In 2011, I've decided to fill this book that I made in 2010:

I'm not sure how the binding & wooden cover will hold up, but there's only one way to find out. Fortunately (and not due to any foresight on my part), I chose paper that was meant for printmaking, so it's fairly thick and sturdy and will hold up to paint & markers and who knows what else!

I don't expect to do something fabulous every day. My goal is to at least make some marking once a day, even if it's only laying down a wash of color, collaging an image, or doodling in a corner. So let the New Year begin!

Starting a 365 Project (AGAIN)

Back in 2006-2007 I made an ATC a day for 365 days, and that was a very satisfying exercise. But when I tried to follow it up with Crafting 365 on Flickr, I got bogged down not with trying to do a little bit of craft everyday, but with documenting it! I wasn't taking a photo of every little thing I did (5 minutes of sewing, etc), and while I tried writing down my daily accomplishment, I found this tedious (and tended to misplace my notebook). So after failing to follow through on Crafting 365 not once but twice, I let the whole thing lapse.

Flash forward to January 2010, when Rachel.::.K announced a Milwaukee 365 Flickr group. So I thought, what the heck, I can probably manage a photo a day. Some days will be crafty, some days may peek at everyday life. Some days may produce a blurry picture of a cat. We'll see how long I can keep this one up! Here is my 365 Milwaukee 2010 photoset on Flickr.

January 6, 2010 - Contrasting my ATC with the inspiration photo from Mark Simon's Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists

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

A Late Weekend Update

I meant to post on Sunday about my adventures on Saturday, but woke up at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday with a sore throat. Since I couldn't get to sleep, I turned on my computer about 6 a.m. and started editing and uploading photos I took on Sat., which meant around lunch time I completely crashed and fell asleep on the couch and was pretty much useless the rest of Sunday!

On Sat. from 12:30-3 p.m. I was at the Milwaukee ATC group's March meeting. We met at Art'n'Oddities, which started out as an appliance store, but slowly morphed into an art store as the wife took over more and more space from the husband. Lots of fun and colorful art by a variety of artists. The owner Meri Berghauer, among many other things, is a children's book illustrator and creates fiberglass dog sculptures called Bowzrz. (The colorful giraffe above is her work.)

We had about 25 people trading, and our monthly theme was "I'm Game." Some of our members post on Flickr so you can see their cards in the group's Flickr pool. (I'm still working on convincing more folks to get on-line ;o)

Then several of us went off to the Cream City::Milwaukee Flickr group's monthly photowalk. I don't know what local Flickr groups are like in other parts of the world, but the Milwaukee group is very friendly, and the pros are generally willing to answer questions from people like me who tend to just point and shoot and hope for the best. Also I would feel very self-conscious walking around by myself taking photos, but when you're travelling with a pack who think it's perfectly normal to photograph random signs and rusty things, it's a lot of fun (and probably safer too).

The best part is seeing what everyone else photographed because some people appear to have gone on a completely different walk than I did, or they'll photograph the same thing in a completely different way. Here's my photowalk set, some of which I've already resized to use somehow for the April ATC theme "Altered Photographs."

And here are the "art supplies" I collected on the walk.

Crafting 365, Day 80

Wild West Women APCs

I had so much fun with the men, I had to make some altered playing cards with women from the Ten Two Studios Wild Wild West image CD. And this time I gave them some color, because it's spring! "Magnificent" features Kitty Canutt, Prairie Rose Henderson, and Ruth Roach, three rodeo riders at the Pendleton Round-Up in Oregon.

I made two with Annie Oakley. (Note that she also gets more colorful bullet holes on one ;o) And here are a couple more women with fire power:

And other powers:

Had one more guy left over from the manly set, and made two with women and men as well.


These are all for the Milwaukee Artist Trading Card group's monthly live trade which starts in a couple hours. Better go get ready to trade!

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

Loteria ATCs

Yes, that's a dip pen in the above photo. I'm going old school! I made a few more cards for the March Milwaukee ATC theme "I'm Game" using images from the Teresa Villegas loteria set that my brother bought me in Phoenix awhile back. (Loteria is Mexican bingo, and uses images instead of letters & numbers.)

I had made the backs for these last year and had them in my stash, and I laid out the images more than a week ago, but only got around to gluing them down yesterday and then started doodling on them with the white acrylic ink that I got at Artist & Display, where we had our February ATC meeting. I also added some color with Permapaque markers and Twinkling H2Os.

The faux filmstrip images are from Ten Two Studios. I love the vintage romantic couple juxtaposed with "La Telenovela." (Telenovelas are like soap operas in extended mini-series form.) The bandaging diagrams on "La Cruz Roja" (Red Cross) below are from a 1950s first aid manual.

"La Poetisa" features Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and some nuns cut from an old art guide. The original card has a bit more shimmer than the scan shows. The background had metallic paints and there's a wash of Twinkling H2Os as well.

Crafting 365, Day 73 - worked on these while waiting for the breakfast muffins to bake!

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

The Manly Book of Men

So here's what I've been working on this month. Lisa gave the Ten Two Studios design team the challenge of using one of her paper bag books with a themed collection of collage materials. I used the brown piano-hinge book, which is deceptively simple in appearance but has a surprising number of surfaces to decorate! The open ends of the paper bags come with six cardstock inserts (approx. 5" square) and there are also six tags. I cut slits in the bottoms flaps of the paper bags to make pockets for the tags.

My theme was Men, which for me is a challenge because I tend to use mostly female images in my art work, so I went a bit over the top with The Manly Book of Men, full of masculine words! I let my husband chose the initial paint colors, and I applied acrylic paint directly to the paper bags without any gesso. Things got a bit messy but the brown paper was surprisingly sturdy, and although it did get a wee bit wrinkly, it took on a more leathery texture with the layers of paint and application of gel medium for the collage.

I also had to find manly looking designs in my scrapbook paper stash, which generally favors flowers and pretty colors. I found some browns and blues and geometric shapes. The hardest part was coming up with a list of Manly Words (that wouldn't destroy my "safe" rating on Flickr ;o). You can tell I read and watch too many things set in 19th & early 20th-century Britain.

And this is probably the first time I've done book pages on golf, fishing or baseball!



You can see the whole book in my Manly Flickr set.

Crafting 365, numerous days!