Art Catch-Up

I’m still behind the eight ball, technology-wise, with a scanner hooked up to a computer that won’t talk to the internet.  So, I’m playing catch-up tonight, showing you all my art from the week, after burning the scans to a disc and bringing them to my laptop.  (I think I need a knight in shining armor to come fix the computer).

First off, I had Susie LaFond’s beautiful house shaped pocketful round robin book to work in this week.  Just deciding which page to work on was a challenge, because Susie did a crackle finish on her house-shaped pages, and they were very intriguing.

I finally did this for the front of my page.

I incorporated my favorite diamond shaped stamp in this piece, making it my piece for this week’s Wednesday Stamper challenge, as well.  The collage of the girl sits inside the pocket.  Here is the entire collage.

While I was working on this collage I heard that they had finally found the bodies of the Russian Tsarovich and one of his sisters, perhaps Anastasia, and the words popped into my head, forcing me to rumage through my current cut up book (one that had its binding chewed beyond recognition by bad-doggie) until I found them.

With the collage out, the pocket looks like this.

And here is the back of the page.  Susie’s crackle finish was absolutely wonderful to work on top of!

I also worked on the envelope rr’s this week, both the regular one and the valentines one.  A certain artist who will remain unnamed but who knows who she is, is incredibly prolific and it is not uncommon for three envelopes to show up in one day.  I absolutely love the freedom of working on this format in an unaffected, spontaneous fashion.  I’m really a background person — I like to work my backgrounds to death, so it’s a challenge for me to look at this as an exercise in composition without thinking about things like the overall background development.

Here are some of my favorites from this week.

This is Vicki’s envelope.  It arrived with the man, who I viewed as some sort of renaissance cleric or government official looking pointedly away from the woman in her crown.  The beautiful briar rose, which seemed to carry out the theme from that period was there as well, along with an all over background patterning in white with some red stamps of row houses.

I really wanted to create a connection between the two people on the envelope.  After trying out lots of different possibilities, I settled on the three eggs and the butterfly.  I’ll leave it to you to decide what it conveys and what the relationship between them is, but I was really happy with the outcome.

Vicki’s valentines envelope, on the other hand, was an exercise in frivolity.  I loved it and my addition is the five pink circles, made from micro-beads, which I hope will hold up on the envelope’s travels.

The last picture I have for you is Jood’s very whimsical envelope.  I have a hard time breaking away from my vintage ways, and didn’t go very far afield here, but I like how my little Paper Whimsy image works and how the stripes I made from cut up text play against the diamonds on the right hand side of the envelope.

That’s all of my art for this week.  I hope you enjoyed it.  My studio is an absolute disaster and I’m going to have to start contemplating a clean up as soon as Ellie’s Nutcracker performances are over.  It’s so bad I think I would almost do better to bulldoze it and start over!