Wait! The Buddha's a girl?

I spent some more time creating. I did not intend on The Buddha looking so  . . . female, but as my husband says, "Who says The Buddha has to be a man?"

My word for 2015 is Thrive. Below is my inspiration image to keep my word visible.

Happy New Year and happy arting!

Trying to hone my art skills

As an educator, I am lucky enough to get two weeks off for the holidays. During this time, I usually spend time with family, nap, and hone my creative skills. I have decided this time around to work on my painting skills. Instead of working in my art journal, I chose to work on loose-leaf watercolor paper.

In the interest of being brave and sharing more of my work with the world, I have decided to make an effort to post my work here more often. (It helps that Santa brought me a scanner/printer, which makes it a lot easier to get images in a digital format and uploaded.)

Anyway, here are two pieces I worked on. As you can probably tell, one came developed more successfully than the other.

I worked on the two pieces simultaneously, painting a layer on one image and then working on the other while the paint dried. Media: collage, acrylics, spray inks, and charcoal.

One last update of household items

Okay, so I need to work on my photography of my projects, but this will have to do, as time is running out. I created this page for the July Mixed Media Monthly Challenge, for which we were challenged to use household items.

For this, I used a note I found in our junk drawer and old piano flash cards for the first layer. I also used a jar lid for the circles and sticks from the yard. This proved to be lots of fun to put together, and I promise you it looks much better in the real world.

May we all be brave.

Some other attempts at the household items

Well, I have been busy all month making items for the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge, but apparently lax on the posting, so I have a couple here to add, each in a separate post. This was created in my Dylusions journal using the July prompt of incorporating household items.

This is one I am particularly fond of only because the eagle is made from a homemade stencil. I love it when I can incorporate my own design into . . . well, my design. The household product used was a sewing pattern. Plus, the stencil was made from a plastic file folder.

Journaling reads: The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice; it is conformity. -- Rollo May

May we all be free from the desire to conform.

Upcycled shoe box

I had some fun playing with the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge for July, which was to use household items. For this project, I used a shoe box, old tissue paper, and a corn husk. Yup, you read that right - a corn husk.

I started with an old shoebox that I painted with gesso:

Then I picked some of my favorite colors in Dylusions sprays:

I spritzed spray onto my craft sheet and dabbed the tissue paper into it:

Then I took a corn husk and used the ridges as a texture stamp:

After gluing on layers of the paper torn up, I added the flowers, for which I failed to photograph the process.They were made with acrylic paints and ultra thick embossing powder. Here is a close-up:

And the final product again:

The quote says, "Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement." -- Golda Meir

A Patriotic Birthday Card

My dad's birthday is July 5th, so we usually celebrate on the 4th. Because of that, I often make his birthday card using a patriotic theme.

The below card was inspired by Jennifer McQuire's video on using distress inks with embossing folders. I tried the technique a few times of putting the distress ink directly on the embossing folder, but when the red and blue ran together, they (obviously) made purple, which ruined the patriotic color scheme I was going for. So after some thinking, I just decided to use the distress inks after I embossed. I will use the other embossed pieces for other cards in the future.

And by the way, if you are a card maker, I highly recommend Jennifer McQuire's videos if you haven't already discovered her blog. She is an excellent teacher, and she makes seemingly complicated techniques very accessible.

 

Supplies include Papertrey Ink stamp, Tim Holtz embossing folder, distress inks and Wink of Stella brush pen.

Branching Out

I am participating in the July Mixed Media Monthly Challenge. This month's challenge is to use household found items in a project. For this project, I decided to go a little outside my comfort zone and try a new style. In particular, I was inspired by the layered, multi-media scrapbooking style of Rikka Kovasin.

Here  is my final product, done in my Dylusions book:

 Obviously, I need some practice with the layering of elements and whatnot, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this process.

My first step was to gather potential objects around the house. I grabbed a stray puzzle piece, a notebook of paper, some piano flash cards, a thank you note from a relative, some sticks, some plumbing tape, a couple old keys, and two Air Force kids' tattoos. Not pictured is some cardboard, a starry cellophane bag from a local gift shop, an old map, and bubble wrap. The truth is that once I got working, I kind of forgot about a lot of these elements. I ended up using a sheet of the stationery, some cardboard that came from a recent Amazon shipment, and the map. I loved that cardboard because the top peeled off nicely to reveal the corrugated part.

 

I then decided it would be fun to gather some old scrapbook supplies. Now this is really why I forgot about the cool keys and sticks in the above picture. It was so much fun layering with items I hadn't used in years that I just got rolling with it.

 The next step was to start the layering process. I began with the scraps of paper and some found items.

I then started layering on the scrapbooking items. Although I often profess brown to not be a color I enjoy working with, I kind of liked the way the soft browns and the teal worked together in this collage, of which the color scheme was not at all planned. Nevertheless, I decided to cover it up, using the color combo as inspiration for the next step.

 

 I then covered the items with a watery gesso, Dylusion sprays in teal and yellow, and a Walnut colored-spray ink from Imagine.

I tweaked and tweaked, mostly trying to soften the colors. I decided the page needed a photo, so I sorted through what I had to find something that would work with the soft colors. It needed some layering on top of it, so I gessoed up another butterfly and glued it on the photo.

Here is the final project again:

One thing I learned about this heavy layering style is that you really need to spend time laying things out before gluing them down. I wish I had the photo chosen first because that would have helped me with the overall layout.

Something learned is always a good thing in my book.

I Have Been Busy, Just Not Posting

Hello. I decided to take time off from both blogs so I could live more in the real world. However, prompted by a mixed media challenge, I decided to return and dust off this blog a bit.

So on to the important stuff. I came across The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge. It's a brand new challenge that I discovered while on vacation. I got home last night and decided I wanted to participate in the first challenge, which gave me this morning to get the page completed and put together. No worries. I made a simple page using sprays - the theme for June. (Apologies in advance for the poor-quality photos. Time is not on my side this morning, so these will have to do.)

Here is the finished page:

I started with these Dylusions sprays:

 Then added some visual texture with some stencils, some bubble wrap and these sprays:

To create this background:

I didn't have a lot of time, so I dug out some pre-cut die cuts lying around I had planned on using for cards. These are die cuts of Twinkling H2Os on watercolor paper and then cut using Papertrey Ink butterfly dies and happy die. I inked the edges using a black distress ink pad.

The final step was adding the quote from Thich Nhat Hahn: The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.

Thus, this page was born: