cardboard crush class (lots of pics!)

As I've mentioned before, I like Roben Marie's style. Her colors, doodles, projects, etc, all appeal to me, so I didn't have to ponder too longer before signing up for her Cardboard Crush class. To watch the promo vid and/or sign up for the class, go to Art to the 5th. The workshops are listed down the right side.

Each instructor makes their own version of this booklet/folder thing. Of course I did Roben Marie's version first. The substrate is just a chunk of corrugated cardboard box. The first 6 pics are process photos, taken as I was making the cover. The rest of the pics have details beneath. I'm using it as a birthday card holder, with little flaps of paper, one for each month, with birthdays written on the back of the appropriate month to remind me, and a pocket to hold cards.

The finished folder. I used an old shank button attached
on the inside thru a smaller button so it won't tear thru
the cardboard with use.

The back.

Partially open, showing the pocket to hold cards.

The inside, with a paper flap for each month with birthdays
written on the back, and a pocket to hold cards.

A better look at the month flaps.

Bottom corner of my pocket. I wanted it to have more depth
than the one in the instructions so winged it by folded up a piece
of gelli printed card stock. Works great.

Wa-la!

dlp2015 week 10

Ten weeks in and I'm still on track. Since it's about the only art I'm doing, I guess I shouldn't be real surprised.

This week is about making marks. My favorite 'mark' is a circle, so I cut a ton of circles (ended up using 97) from a wide assortment of gelli prints, then layered them all over the page. Added some black paint circles with a toilet paper tube and a bottle lid, then small white gel pen dots in 3's here and there and called it done.

dlp2015 week 9

Ok, after last week's debacle, I paid attn and pulled off week 9 without a hitch. I followed right on Roben-Marie's heels on this one, doing pretty much each step she did but in my own style. Whatever the hell that it.

1. Background - Glued down a piece of painty under paper, the lightweight brown paper I cover my work table with.

2. Paper Stack - Made a stack of painted and gellied papers of all sorts. This was my favorite part of the exercise, picking thru my paper box, tearing them into the right sized pieces, stacking and restacking until I liked the arrangement. Made a large one, a small one, and 3 circles. I'll be doing more of these. Sewed it right onto my page so that when I turned it over to journal, I had stitching all over the place and had to write around it. Doh.

3. Painty - Rubbed some heavy bodied white paint here and there to sort of blend in some of the paper edges and scruff up the border. Then some marks with the Stabilo All pencil, maybe my fave art tool next to my gelli plate. Wet the marks with a brush so they dribbled all over. #ilovegrunge

4. Stamping - Stamped black circles here and there with various things - empty tape centers (double rings at bottom left), empty adding machine paper centers (small circles on yellow at upper left), and a cardboard tube of unknown origin.

5. Gel Pens - Lots of mark making with black and white gel pens.

um... 5B. - A few words of text from an old book.

dlp2015 weeks 6, 7 & 8

Oy. When the week 7 prompt came along, cover up the good parts, or something like that, I made a background and sat it aside to dry. When I came back to my desk, I mistakenly picked up week 6 and covered it all up with dress pattern tissue and used tea bags.

Then I saw my real week 7 sitting where I had placed it to dry. Whoops.

So, ok... I just covered up week 6 which I really liked. But that was the whole idea, right? Sorta.

Anyway, I did a bit more stuff on the real week 7, adding more black than I normally would, then ran out of steam cause I was bummed about messing up. But I do like the look of all the tissue and tea bags on week 6.

Week 8 was about repeating and I used squares instead of my default circles, just for something different. The black ovals are a stencil I cut from an old file folder. Spelled out SQUARES across the page and did a bunch of black and white doodling.

Altogether a weird dlp2015 week. Will try to pay more attn for the week 9 prompt which comes out tomorrow.

MMSA 3 item collage swap

When Karen posted some 3 item collage post cards on her personal blog, I thought, huh, those are cool. I also thought it would be a great idea for a swap, and sure enough, Karen announced it a couple weeks ago. I sat down and started paging thru magazines, looking for likely images.

When you have only 3 items, each one is very important. They need to relate somehow, they need to tell at least a bit of a story. I knocked out the chicken in the croc's mouth in ten minutes and then spent the rest of the week coming up with the other two. So hard! I have a whole pile of rejects on my work table that I hope will be useful for something else cause I sure couldn't make them fit into a 3 item collage.

Two of my three have something coming out of - or maybe going into - a mouth. Not sure what's going on there. Prolly just means I'm always thinking about food.

This swap put me strongly in mind of the 6-word short stories. The most famous is probably, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." I find them fascinating. If you're not familiar with them, go take a look. Then try to write one.

Still a week to get yours in the mail if you wanna play.

Yes, I cut around every one of those pointy little teeth.
Took forever.

I was going to trim off the card to clean up the torn left edge
of the elephant but then decided I liked the look.

layers!

I like Roben-Marie Smith's style - her colors, marks, projects all appeal to me. I've bought a couple of her online classes before and been happy with them so when she announced this one - Cardboard Crush - I didn't hesitate for long. You get a LOT for your money with this class. Four artists created projects for this class using cardboard and there are process videos from all four of them. I've only watched Roben-Marie's so far - two over 30 minutes and one about 25 minutes - and am making a project from her vids.

She is the queen of layers in my opinion and as I watched the vid, I jotted down what she did along the way. Then sat down and got to work with the intention of not stopping until I had outdone my previous layeriness. I also had the brains to take process shots along the way! I always love other people's process shots but rarely remember to pick up the damn camera until I'm finished. The last two pics are scans of the finished cover. Will post again when I've got it all done.

dlp2015 week 6

Doesn't seem like 6 weeks since I started DLP but it is. Time is a funny (funny odd, not funny haha) thing.
Here's the challenge for this week.

February Theme:  Layers You Will Love!
Art Challenge:  When Not To Stop
Journal Prompt:  "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough!" 

Layers are good, I like layers, I just tend to stop too soon, so I was determined to put a LOT of layers on this page. I didn't bother keeping track, just kept adding things as they came to mind. Paint, collage, pencil, marker, gel pen, stencil, stamp, gesso, paint on credit card edge, paint on pencil eraser, paint on finger, dots, squiggles, Xs, vines, flowers, triangles, circles, scallops.

A common question is how do you know when a page is done? I did reach a point on this one where I looked at it and felt it had reached its apex and anything more would be too much. So I stopped, and I'm happy with it. Quite happy, actually. Love the colors. Michaels had acrylics on sale so I bought 6 tubes of my faves and used four of them on this page, along with black and white. No words this time, just didn't feel like it needed any.

Double click to see it BIG.

#dlp2015 weeks 3 & 4

Still January so we're still making backgrounds with book text and working on coping with the blank page.

There's a book page background that you pretty much can't see beneath
the gesso layer. Color is all Neocolor II crayons blended with water. I had a plan
when I started but it went by the wayside at some point and I ended up with this.
<sigh> Wasn't much inspired by the quote. Tried to perk things up a bit with the
black and white doodles but not real thrilled with it.

Strips of book text with distress stains rubbed all over, then gesso,
then watery black acrylic paint brushed along the edges. Dribbled
watercolors down the page for some more color. The "words with friends"
theme instantly made me think of all the words I've exchanged with
friends on the backs of the mail art we've sent back and forth. So I chose
a handful of my fave cards, printed them out real small and glued them on.
Black pen scribbled frames, and some writing. The "#mailart" is actually
a weird blue metallic gel pen but it scanned a very odd color. I like this page
a lot, the overall colors appeal to me.

published! woo hoo!

Months (and months) ago the Cloth Paper Scissors publication Pages had a call for mini zines, the little folded-from-one-sheet-of-paper booklet things. I'd made a few recently so I sent in pics or a sample or whatever it was they asked for. Never heard a word back, but then a couple weeks ago my San Diego friend Julie emailed me that pics of my work were in a magazine. I couldn't even think what she was talking about, so she emailed a photo and said "the current issue of Pages!".
Well, my work friend Amy had just given me that magazine for Christmas and it was sitting right next to me on the coffee table as I was looking at the pics Julie sent me. What are the odds?
I snatched up the mag, turned to the right page and went WOO HOO!
Too funny that I'd had the magazine for a few days but hadn't paged all the way thru it yet.
I was never contacted that my submission was accepted, and maybe that's how they do it, but seems like it'd be cool to let you know, ya know?
Anyway, here I am. And I'm including a clean scan of the original file so that you can print it out and fold it up and have your own copy of my published zine. My little gift to the cosmos, or at least to that part of it who read this blog. Print at full bleed onto 8.5x11 paper. Fold and cut as per here or here. Fold so that the cover "Life in" is at the front. Ta-da. Go forth and make your own. Fun to do with kids too.

Mine is the bottom photo here and the left hand one below.

postcard re-do post

As I suspected, the photos I snapped with the tablet camera were pretty bad so here are the postcards again but scanned this time, the only way to go with flat items, IMHO.

And since I'm sitting at a regular computer with a normal keyboard, I'll even do some commentary.

These are all available so if you like one, shoot me an email or leave a comment and I'll send it off to you. Don't be shy - I made them to send, so claim one if it grabs you.

These 3 elements were all random things that I kinda liked
but couldn't figure out exactly what to do with. Then I came across the
"growing old gracefully" in my words box and the three stages
of a woman's life zipped thru my mind - child, woman, old and gray.
The dog seemed fitting as stage 3 since it's
what I see in the mirror some mornings lol.

The school girls shot was from a calendar and the silly knocked-kneed
lady is from a park brochure my traveling friend Julie-in-SD gave
me a while back. Whistler Canada, maybe? Julie, are you reading this?
I liked the images together and found some words that fit.

These two odd images of men kept turning up as I sifted thru
the box looking for things to use. Normally I like things in
threes - the golden rule of thirds - but I had nothing else that
went with these so did them like this and ended up liking
it well enough. Bizarre words to go with them and
played with drawing frames.

This woman is actually hanging from gymnastic still rings.
It was an add for something or other, no idea now, and I just
liked the long image. Added some color to perk it up
and an enigmatic question.

There was a series in a magazine of this man making various faces.
They all looked about like these and I've used a couple of them
on cards months ago. The newspaper phrase seemed perfect.

Post cards

I've been tearing out images that grab me for years and filling boxes and file folders with them. What I haven't been doing with them is using them for anything, so this weekend I zipped thru a box, used some and threw the rest away. Felt good. I may work my way thru a few more boxes.
Meanwhile here are the cards I made. They're all on cardboard cut from a shoebox I was about to throw away.
I'm doing this post on my tablet using photos I took with the tablet camera, which I think might not be all that hot, so if the whole thing sucks when I look at it on my puter later, my apologies and I'll redo it.

posted from Bloggeroid

just one

Last nite, while flipping thru an old LIFE mag I bought at the library book sale (more on that later) I spotted this opera singer with her mouth open wide. She was just begging to be on a postcard so that's what I did. One of my gelli print backgrounds, some old book text, and 'look out' from my little box of fun words. The great splat is from a bingo marker, banged down hard on the card.

MMSA mixed media ATCs

The ATCs mentioned in the previous post. These already had background on them, so I worked on adding at least two more techniques and creating some sort of interesting collage. I haven't made ATCs in a while and was struck again, as I always am, at what a perfect art form they are. Compact, doable in a short amount of time, just enough space to tell a little story.

collaged postcards

Made a batch of cards to replenish my stash. If you haven't gotten a card from me in a while, maybe one of these will show up in your mailbox!