Love Letters

More Sketchbook Project 2012 images...

 

Time is drawing nigh (boy, how often do you get to say "nigh"?!?) for me to put the Sketchbook 2012 project in the mail, in time for it to travel with all the other sketchbooks to various locales around the country.  I thought it might be fun to share some of the layouts with you... I hope you like them. (Keep in mind I may end up adding to some of the pages, tweaking them just a bit.) It has been a departure from my traditional "signature" style of collage, and it's really been fun.  

(BTW, clicking on the images will open them up in a larger window).  

A lot of the cut out images came from paper samples from an xpedx paper show, and were very carefully cut out (note Rocky Racoon's whiskers above left).  

Same with this page spread... the flowers on the left were cut out and applied over a very busy page that I made even busier by writing all over it, and on the page on the right.  How cute are the little bumble bee men on the top of the right hand page?

This spread is a little goofy, but it's meant to be humorous... the bike and the wording "slow your roll" were recycled from a bicycle catalog.  I prefer the spread on the right... I love the ampersand and the pink flower to the left of it.  

In this spread I love the porcupine, and trust me, he took forever to cut out!!!  Those quills are sharp! :D  

I absolutely LOVE paper and the quality of the samples from companies like Finch, Appleton, French and Domtar are superb!  Both the paper quality and the image quality are absolutely first rate in my opinion!

I love this spread... the face on the left is just so cool, with the colorful image of the world superimposed...   The flower on the right side was another of those really labor intensive cutting jobs!  

This is a bit of a silly layout... have you picked up on the repeating stripes that appear on a lot of the pages?  The stripes came from a printed catalogue from UofM's School of Public Health that was really nicely done.

more images placed in no particular place... just for fun!

The cougar images that appear here and there are from Domtar's line of papers called, appropriately so, "Cougar".  It is a gorgeous paper that takes ink just beautifully.

I really like the spread on the right page... the colors work really well together. The spread on the left made me think of the movie Babe, which is one of my all time favorites!  Babe... "a little pig goes a long way".

This is one busy spread... the two little old ladies in the bottom left are my great-grandmother and her sister... they reportedly loved nature so I put them outside! :D

next to last pages...

The back cover is on the left and the front cover is on the right. I think the  front cover in particular needs some love! Perhaps I'll have to make some sort of title for the book that mentions how much I love letters!

I hope if the traveling Sketchbook Project 2012 comes to a city near you that you'll take the time to go see the books!  

Sketchbook Project 2012

 

                                    

Is a really neat way of sharing your artwork with the world... here's some more information on the project, hosted by the  Brookly Art Library:

 

Join the community. The Sketchbook Project is a collaboration that unites a unique community of creative people from across the globe. Exchange tips and techniques, share visual inspiration or just make a new friend.

Share your story. The Sketchbook Project is an opportunity to express yourself to a global audience. Participants can upload a bio and share future projects, personal links and stories with other creative people.

The Digital Library travels far and wide. With hundreds of thousands of visitors and climbing, the Digital Library is an amazing platform to share your work with a wider audience. Choose to have your book professionally digitized and we'll give it a home on the Web.

The Brooklyn Art Library is your home. Our storefront exhibition space will archive your sketchbook and make it available to patrons from all over the world. We're open every day, so please come and visit us soon.

After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view.

                                       

I thought I'd share preliminary pages from my sketchbook, which still needs a lot of work in order to be completed... (The large expanse of orange on the left is the inside of the cover of the journal)...

 

Here's the first page of my sketchbook... if you click on the image, it will open in a larger format...  This is in someways the most random collage work I've ever done... there really is no rhyme or reason for how it's put together or what images I chose to use... I simply used whatever appealed to me at the moment, given what I had on hand...

 Next spread:

This little book needs to be completed by the end of January, if I want it to go on tour with the rest of the journals, so I have to get busy...

I'll keep you informed of the progress...  It's a really neat project and I'm pretty excited to be a part of it... usually I'm scrambling to finish things two days before the deadline, but not this time! 

Now, go make something!

Mixed media journaling

Hey there!!!  My new year's resolution is to post more often!  It's been a crazy couple of years, but I'm done with my degree, I'm healthy again, and it's time to rededicate myself to pursuing my true passion... MAKING ART AND STUFF!!!  So here is a sample of a couple of facing pages from a journal I made using 90# cold press Arches watercolor paper. These are a couple of my favorite pages so far...

The color was put down using Golden liquid Acrylic paints with some Super Loaded Matte Medium added to it, which helps keep the paint from getting sticky, and leaves a great surface on which to write. The word JOY was written with acrylic ink and a folded pen, and the white letters were written with a gel pen.  There's some metallic marks on the page which doesn't scan in well at all, and the little spotted areas were made with a rubber type of shelf lining that leaves that sort of impression.  Pretty nifty, huh?!?

Not all my journal pages are this well put together, if you know what I mean, but I sure would like them to be! And truthfully, I could do more to "dress" this up, but I'm not going to mess with it any further... 

So Happy New Year, friends!  I hope you have set some gentle resolutions for yourself, the kind you can keep with JOY in your heart and the kind that will help you learn new techniques and grow as an artist.