Category: Art

I woke up a little bit early this morning and decided to spend some time in the studio, working on a design for the Moo card swap I’m in.  I played with a few different designs before coming upstairs.  I sat down at the computer to check on email and see the new theme for the week at Wednesday Stamper.  I was delighted to see that Belinda had listed Moo cards as the theme for the week and honored that she had linked to my blog for examples!

Here is the link to my original Moo card post.

And here are a few of the pieces I played around with this morning.

I like working in this small size and am playing with rich background textures, with layers of paint and rubber stamping, and also with layering transparencies on top of one another.

I can’t wait to see everyone else’s Moo cards!

I didn’t have an internet connection after the first night at Serenbe, so I’m just now getting around to showing you more pictures.

Part of the fun was sitting around Friday night looking at each other’s art.  Kathy had brought along Susie LaFond’s Pock-et-ful round robin book.  It is house-shaped and is a real treasure.  I understand why several of the artists have had a hard time sending it on to the next person.

Andi and Lesley had a great time looking through it.

We all stayed up way too late and had lots of fun.  We woke up to a beautiful walk through the grounds and the garden to get to breakfast in the main house.

Even the gates and fences had a beautiful patina of lichen on them. 

We spent the morning doing Catherine’s Altered Book Class.  She is a fantastic teacher and really does a great job of teaching you little techniques along the way.  Most of all, I was impressed with her comfort with letting each artist follow their own vision — she isn’t at all wrapped up in having people make what she has set for the class and seemed to really enjoy the variations people came up with while using the same materials.  These are the books we made, all lined up, so you can see the little differences in them.

I love my little book (it’s the top right hand corner) and had just enough time to do a quick little spread, using a bible verse Karen’s sister Lauren had brought along.  It is from the book of Isiah and reads, "My kindness shall not depart from thee."

Our other class on this day was called "Silhouettes" and involving putting layers of paints and washes and glazes, along with texturized and stamped layers, on copies of vintage dresses, then embellishing them.  I thought this was the class I was least likely to enjoy– but I was wrong about that!  The class was perfect for my love of heavily layered backgrounds and Catherine uses some wonderful techniques.  Here are my dresses, part way completed.  I’m hoping to finish and frame them later this week.

Here is one of Robin’s dresses that I thought was beautiful.

We were all pretty exhausted after our long day, but I did manage a visit with the baby animals

and with this really cute little lizard.

I’ll upload the remainder of my pictures from Serenbe tomorrow.   I’m still trying to recover from all the excitement and restore my house to normal.

I’m slowly getting ready for the art retreat at Serenbe this weekend.  My Memento Book pages are done, so I thought I would share a few of them.  They are all originals, front and back, but with a consistent theme.  I think they look a lot better in real life, since my new scanner and I are still not all that good of friends, but I’m happy with the pages.

Here they are in progress.  After the background was painted on a large sheet of watercolor paper, I cut it up into 5.5" pages.  I laid it out and started playing.  I really had no ideas about where this was going.

While I was looking at the squares, the phrase "art is where my heart is" popped into my head.  I decided I needed big hearts.  I used some pages from an old ledger I have.  The pages are funny — they have a sort of blue tint and don’t really look old although the handwriting is beautiful and spidery.  I cut out free hand hearts and then doctored them with moonshadow inks and some splatters of white paint.

This is the difference between the original pages (the white/blue cast) and the more sepia tones after I tinted the hearts.

With the hearts in place, I pulled out the file with my favorite transparencies in it, some vintage images from Paper Whimsy.  I cut a few out roughly and put them down to see how they worked.

They seemed to have the right feel, so I hunted through my transparency sheets to find an image for each of the 11 pages I was making.  I decided to overstamp the backgrounds with white text, stamped randomly.  I also added a stamped bee in the left hand-corner of the heart (for Serenbe).

A little lace went onto the bottom of each page and I added tags with my original thought, "art is where my heart is."  I’m hoping the tag will peek out from the edge of the book just a bit.

Here are a few of the final pages, including the back.

I’ve stolen away a few minutes to finish up and scan my work in Lesley’s Pock-et-ful book before I run off to a mad dash of errands, Nutcracker ballet rehearsals, and little girl sleepover parties.  I’m still having trouble with my new scanner, so these aren’t great, but I hope you enjoy the art.

The concept for this round robin is to contain art in pockets.  I made a little pocket out of muslin, using an old telegram and some favorite images.  I stitched everything together, and then onto the page, which I had painted and stamped on.

I made three tags for the pocket.  Evil scanner will not scan them separately, so here they are together, with the ribbon cut off (very evil scanner), but you get the idea.

I journaled on the back of them, in a quick, sort of impromptu manner, trying to express what each tag represented about where my art-inspiration comes from, which is the theme for Lesley’s book.

Notice the grammatical error in the first tag, which I’m trying to force myself to leave because this was supposed to be spontaneous, but it’s hard for me to leave stuff like that alone.  One thing I’ve almost never done in my art is to incorporate my writings, and I have a sort of resolution to try and do that more and make my art more personal in that sense.

Finally, here is the back of the page.

This has been a fantastic round robin so far.  I’m looking forward to the next book!