Love Letters

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. 

Christmas envelopes

Just for fun, I thought I'd show you the back of some of the envelopes I've sent out this Christmas.  I like to not only make each card by hand, I also make each envelope to match or coordinate.  And then to give the outside of the envelope a little more character, I add a tiny bit of collage to the back flap of the envelope. 

I like to use elements in green and red and white or cream, that may or may not even have anything at all to do with our typical or expected Christmas images, simply for a little variety and something unexpected. 

On the first envelope, I used a strip from a vintage dictionary, glued down under the hearts, and intentionally chose the words "merry" and "merry making" to use on this Christmas envelope.

 

 If you look closely, the middle envelope has a dark green strip on it that is a scrap left over from some painted tyvek I used for a completely different project.  

 

And on the bottom envelope, I used a scrap of handwriting from a 100+ year old German journal (it's a little bit hard to see, sorry).

 It's not exciting, but it is unique... and in this world of mass produced products it's kind of nice to put your own signature on your own work, no matter how small!

Now, go have yourself a very 

 

 

Are you Pinterested?

Are you familiar with ?

It is my current favorite way to explore the web and find tons of new things to look at and learn about... just what I need, I know... I'm already pretty scattered as far as things I love to do!

This is from my bulletin board "Four-legged friends" and it was originally posted at Gibson King.

How darling is that?!?

This little gem was originally posted at Your Daily Dose.  

Seriously, could this be any cuter?

And this very pretty and unusual advent calendar treatment is from Teresa Collins.

Really nicely done, right?!?

 

So these are just a few of the finds on Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board where you can post or "repin" images you find that you like.  It really is a terrific way to find beautiful images you might not otherwise happen upon, and you know how one thing can lead to another and to another and to another, right?  I just wish I'd been the one to come up with this outstanding idea!  

 

Now, go  something and have fun!

Tribute to summer past...

This little bouquet of flowers came from my garden yesterday where I was working with my husband to do some cleaning up and replanting of potted perennials... it's quite precious to me, especially since it's the last one I'll have from this year's garden.  Pretty much all of July was so blasted hot this year, that I lost enthusiasm and didn't water the garden like I should've, so from then on it's looked kind of dismal.  Perhaps that's why this little bouquet tickled me so!  

I hope your day is wonderful and thank you for stopping by! 

What is it I really want?

The title of this post is a question I ask myself often... and the answer to that question changes fairly frequently... frequently enough that sometimes I get a bit frustrated with myself.  But it's a legitimate question.  I'm not dead yet, and in all likelihood I may need to work for another 15 years or more... so "What is it I really want"... to do with the rest of my life?  

This is a journal page I did a little while back, made up of colored gesso, dress pattern pieces, stenciled images, painted tyvek, and a magazine image. 

So, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?  Do you ask yourself the same kinds of questions? 

It's a question worth asking yourself... the late Steve Jobs expressed it very well when he said:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

 

 

Fun find in downtown Royal Oak...

While walking Bubba the other evening, we spied this darling chalk drawing on the side of our Credit Union...

This is SO charming!  And I have no idea who did the work or why, but I sure do appreciate the talent! These two "bank customers" definitely brightened up my day!

A different take on journal pages...

Good morning!  

After taking an absolutely terrific workshop recently from Jacqueline Sullivan, I've been trying new things in my journal pages, and I thought I'd share the results with you. 

 (This is a photo of Jacqueline, showing some of our backgrounds).

This is the early stages of one of the pages.  The first thing we did was to paint the pages with black gesso and let it dry.  Then we covered that with a layer of diluted Golden Absorbent Ground, and built up layers on top of that, using Golden acrylic paints and various acrylic inks.

 

  

Here is the same page many layers later:

(Honestly, this page is not quite such a shade of baby poop green!)

I can't really say if I'm happy with this page or not, I kind of feel like it's still a work in progress.  But I've enjoyed the process, and I guess that's what is really important.  I've learned some new skills and am trying some new techniques, and most of all, I've had fun doing so.  

 

This is another page that has very little writing on it at this point, and I have absolutely no idea where it will go from here, but this page I'm fairly happy with just like it is.  

(Unfortunately, the color reproduction is not necessarily accurate.  In the steps from scanning the artwork to posting it, and then taking into account different browsers and different monitors, I doubt what you see is exactly what I see; but you get the idea, right?)

So I'd like to encourage you to go get your journals or some watercolor paper, and just play.  Try something new today, and if you don't like it, remember you can cover it up with gesso.  If you still don't like it, add a new layer of paint or pastels, or paper.  

  (And let me know if you've done something you're happy with, ok?!?) 

A Sample of Calligraphy by Massimo Polello

I don't recall how I found this gentleman's video, but I'd like to share it with you.  It is calligraphy as art set to music (that is tolerable), and it is beyond beautiful. I've watched it all the way through at least four times now, and have let it just play as background while I did practice work, ispired by this stunning video.  

Massimo Polello - Latest Works 2010 from Photophilla on Vimeo.

 

Mr. Polello has more of his work on his website, which is stunning.  I hope you'll take a look and enjoy. I can't help but feel inspired after looking at this beautiful work, I hope you will, too.  

 

 Now, GO MAKE SOMETHING!

 

Is handwriting becoming a lost art?

This past Friday, Detroit News columnist, Marney Rich Keenan, wrote in her column that not only do we not send handwritten letters any longer; but now children are not even being taught handwriting in school. Apparently, learning how to print neatly will be enough, and then students will move on to learn keyboarding. Handwriting will be reduced to rudimentary printing, and cursive writing will be a lost art.  

Ms. Keenan's article, Individuality is lost as art of handwriting dies, brings up a lot of hot issues for me, and it is well worth reading. I hope you'll take the time to read it.  As a calligrapher, it makes me even more concerned than I already was, that ours is an art that may be in peril; and how do we bring calligraphy to today's youth? If they don't even know how to write in cursive, will they have any interest in the tedious work of learning to write with a REALLY old fashioned pen that has to be dipped in ink?  It would be infinitely easier to just find a pleasing font, and layout whatever information needs to be conveyed on the computer, but it would no doubt be lifeless and boring (at least in my opinion).

I think like a lot of things, sending and receiving a hand written letter will become even more cherished, because it is so uncommon and so special.  Recall how sociologists worried that the computer would isolate us even more than we already were at the time? (I'm thinking that was around the time of the Y2K scare).  And now, we seem even more connected than ever, through blogs, emails, text messages and the like. Likewise, the DIY movement has been seen as an antidote to sitting and looking at sterile computer screens all day... we like to use our hands to produce things.  We like to make things.  And some of us like making cards.  

So, in an effort to let Ms. Keenan know the art of letter writing is not dead, I made her a card and made the envelope, and did my best to make it pretty.  It went in Saturday's mail and I hope she gets a kick out of receiving not only a handwritten letter, but a handmade one to boot!  

This is a simple watercolor piece I cut up and glued to the front of a 4x6" vellum cardstock. There's a kind of a shadow on the upper left front of the card, which is a stamp image done with Pearl-Ex Interference Gold, so it doesn't show up well on a scanner.  

This is the back of the envelope which is made out of recycled, painted Tyvek paper.

Here's the front of the envelope, done in an informal Uncial hand, with Keenan written with a silver metallic marker.  There are also tiny little silver dots in between the zip code numbers.

If you like making cards and sending letters, take the time to write to someone you've been thinking about lately, and let them know they've been on your mind.  Maybe you'll be lucky enough to receive a handwritten letter in return.  And if you can't think of anyone to write to, email me and we can be pen pals! 

Here are some links to some mail art sites that you might find interesting:

Mail-Art Across the World

Post Secret

Pushing the Envelopes

EMMA 

Digital Mail Art

Mail Me Art 

Now, GO MAKE SOMETHING!!! :D