Summary Review for May –er- June?

For weeks now I have been thinking of showing what I’ve been up to.  May was an exciting month, but somehow yet another month has passed by!  Sheesh!  What is the matter with me that I can’t seem to post anything?  Well, some of it is that the photos are all on the laptop downstairs, while most everything else is upstairs.  But, let’s get real here.  It’s a LAPTOP!!  Can you say portable?

Never mind.  Let’s see what I’ve been doing for two months:

Dolls

The big news here is that I attended another workshop with Deb Wood.  Our theme this time was Night Circus.

This is my girl, Domino.  I am really pleased with how she came out.  We learned some new techniques and I feel much more confident working in the clay.  Not that there isn’t more to learn!  It will just take practice (lots of practice!)

For now, I’ve gone back to cloth for the Hoffman Challenge. 

Yes, I know – her head and arms need to be attached.  Sometimes it is easier to construct a dress on the body without arms getting in the way.  Depending on what kind of sleeves I want to do, I’ll put sleeves and arms on together.  And jewelry and embellishments are easier without the head.  I know what I want the dress to look like – sort of.  Since the deadline is in two weeks (Yikes!), I will need to finalize the plan pretty quickly now.

Art Journal Emporium

One of the Emporium activities was to work through Diana Trout’s book, “Journal Spilling: Mixed Media Techniques for Free Expression.”  It’s always fun to explore new techniques.  Some of my journal pages:

Digital Scrapping

I must admit, this is where a lot of my time has been going.  I have a LOT of photos to go through, both my own and my family’s.  The challenges put up by the various digital scrapbooking sites have been really great as incentive. 

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, though, you know I tend to go overboard on my projects now and then!  OK – more than now and then . . . like ‘almost always’!!

So, Sweet Shoppe Designs has a monthly challenge called Bingo.  As the name implies, there is a Bingo card each month with prompts of all kinds.  A single row ‘bingo’ gets you a percent off coupon, a pattern (like X or square) gets a bigger discount, and black out is worth an even bigger discount.

For June, I decided I was going to get a blackout.  Who knows what I was thinking?  That’s 24 separate layouts and quite a bit more time than I would normally put into any one project.  In fact, every spare moment went to this effort.  And you know what?

I did it!!!!!

It may never happen again, but now I can say I’ve done it.  And I can go back to a reasonable rate of scrapping all these photos.

So here are some of the others I did in May and June.  I’ll put the name of the site the prompt came from.  Each layout uses papers and elements from that site’s designers.

The Digi Dares:

Scrap Girls:

OScraps:

That’s just a sample, really.  I could bend your ear and burn out your eyeballs with less successful layouts and boring excuses, but to what purpose?   If I were to post more often, I could share more of these, huh?

There has been some quilting happening, too.  Unfortunately, I haven’t taken photos yet.  There are two finishes so I should have something to show you in my next post.  Oh, and some fabric painting!  Wait until you see what that looks like!! 

But let’s not wait two months, okay?

April Recap

Almost a month since me last post . . . now where did that month go?!?  Well, I have been busy, so how about a little summary?

Art Journal Emporium

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I subscribe to Tangie Baxter’s AJ Emporium and we have a lot of activities geared to inspiring creativity.  Plus, it’s a lot of fun!  Check out the box in the right column if you think you might like to join, too.

One of the activities I take part in is a monthly Artist Trading Card (ATC) swap.  Here is what I received in April:

The Daily Art Dose

I decided to do lettering practice for April – here are some of my favorites:

Emporium Book Club

Yet another activity is the Book Club.  This month, our book was “Art Journal Courage: Mixed Media Techniques” by Dina Wakley.  Check out some of the things I created with the help of this book!

Digital Scrapbook

Since I’ve “discovered” the joys of Photoshop Elements, I’ve used a lot of family photos to create layouts suitable for memory keeping.  One way I keep focused is by joining on-line challenges.  The challenges mean I’m not doing things in any kind of order, but that works for me just fine!

Quilting

In spite of how it may look with all that, I DO have time for a bit of quilt making – just a bit!  These blocks took most of the month, but they are mostly done.

And there are three rows ready to be stitched together:

This is just a sampling.  Whew – makes me tired to look at it all together!  I’m ready for May, though.  Bring it!

Red

Thought you might like to see what all the red clay was about.

Cute!  He might need to get some friends!

A Peek at my Worktable

You might look at this and call it a mess.  I call it multi-tasking!

Let’s see . . . I have files being unzipped and imported on the laptop, an Art Journal Emporium Book Club lesson, raffia being made into bows for a future project, my art journal open to an in-progress page, and some polymer clay being conditioned. 

 

Here is my finished journal page.  Yep.  Actually finished one.  I also finished importing files, but I can’t really show that.  Not nearly as interesting.  The jury is still out on the raffia bows – not sure if I’ll use them yet or not.

As for the polymer clay – what I’ve got to show so far is red hands!  Red is the worst color for rubbing off on skin and other clays.  Black is pretty close, now that I think about it.  Not working with black today -– that would really look bad on the hands! 

So . . . how was your day?

10 of 10

Maybe I should start with a little background.  Last year I was a member of the Art Journal Caravan, led by Tangie Baxter.  Sadly 2014 was the last year for that journey (the badge in the side panel still works, but you can’t get into anything at that URL now).  BUT – this year Tangie has a new website and a new adventure called Art Journal Emporium and, of course, I am a member there.  Someday I will remember to add that badge to my side panel!

So . . . one of the projects for AJE was to do a series of ten artworks about the same subject.  I chose Houses.

Looking through my journaling scrapbooks and inspiration files, I found tons of pictures I had cut out, sketched, and saved of houses of all kinds – victorian houses, run-down houses, fairy houses, cottages, and hillsides filled with houses.  Hmmm.  Perhaps I have a thing about houses, huh?
Alright, let’s see what I came up with:






House 1 of 10
First I had a rummage through my stamp collection.  Can you believe I only had ONE house stamp?  Well, the only solution is to use it a lot on this spread in my journal.

House 2 of 10

I love Victorian style houses with their “gingerbread” and shutters.  I drew this one from my imagination, but there are some “Painted Ladies” in my town that I need to get photographed and sketched some day.

 

 

 

  House 3 of 10

This one is a little different.  I collaged this house using magazine pictures.  The house itself is from an article on handbags!  It was a lot of fun cutting out random shapes and figuring how they would become parts of a house.

House 4 of 10

There was a crooked little man who lived in a crooked little house.  I went a little wild with some of the crooked-ness.  I seriously doubt anyone wants to stand on that balcony!  I used Copic markers and Sharpie for this drawing.

 

 

House 5 of 10

This little fairy house was from an old catalog.  I scanned it into my computer and did a digital layout.  I used elements from Tangie Baxter and Rebecca McMeen (Tangie’s talented mom).

 

House 6 of 10

Another digital layout.  I have had these cool houses since I first started playing with digital art, but never got around to finding a use for them.  Well, I can’t say that anymore!  The collection is called Cosmopolitan by Maya.

House 7 of 10

I think this was the most fun to do!  Another idea I had cut out and saved, these houses are based on the legend of Baba Yaga.  She lived in a house with chicken feet.  I grabbed some felt scraps and started playing.  It actually stands by itself – amazing!

 

 

House 8 of 10

Another place I have been collecting houses is the designs for my Silhouette Cameo cutter.  Time to choose one and actually use it!  The details (shadows, grass, etc.) is done with Copic markers.

House 9 of 10

Almost done.  This time I made an Artist Trading Card (ATC).  Partly because the houses are pretty small, and partly because I was saving time for the Big Finish!  The image is from a needlework catalog.  I’d love to stitch this pattern, but I doubt I’ll get to it in this lifetime!

House 10 of 10

TaDa!  Last, but certainly not the least.  When I realized I had only one house stamp I did the only sensible thing – buy more!  Fortunately,  Barbara at Joggles.com has just released some new stamps, including some houses.  So now I can do houses whenever I want to!  I stamped them onto multi-media paper and colored them in using copic markers (I really love those markers!) and watercolor pencils.  I put Scor double-sided tape on the back before cutting them out.  It was pretty easy to just stick them down on a prepared background and – bingo – ten house artworks!



This was the first time I’ve tried working in a series.  Not my usual style, given my scatter-shot approach to most things.  I had fun – and I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the results.