Sunday studio shots

More interesting ones this time, I hope.

A small table just inside the door is covered with an old dresser scarf and holds a couple (empty) boxes I like and some nature stuff from walks with the dog.

Dried leaves, flowers, berries, a twisted bit of vine. Nothing special about any of them, I just like the look of them laying there. My mom did stuff like this all the time, so I come by it honestly.

The little drawer holds part of my button stash. And for as many buttons as are in that drawer, occasionally I still can't find exactly the color I need.

The straight-on view of my craft desk. I work on a pile of single sheets of newspaper so I can just throw the top one away when it gets too grungy. Same with the pile on the right. It's scrap paper from work, and I do my glue-sticking there. I always run over the edges of the piece I'm gluing, so I work from top left to bottom right, kind of in rows, then fold the paper in half and keep gluing. Then it goes in the trash and I move on to the next sheet. When I'm elsewhere than my desk, I use an old Pennysaver or other trash mail magazines that I can just flip to a new page as needed. 

The little drawers ad the V8 box at top right hold my rubber stamps. You can see where I was testing stamps earlier today. Metallic and other various markers are in the mug-in-the-box at far top right. 

Paints at back left and front center. Pearl-x powders at front left. ATC blanks and ATCs in progress behind. Various bottled inks at top right. Misc tools and knives in the back right boxes.

Crayons, chalk pastels, watercolor pencils.  

This is the shelf above the previous pic. Colored pencils, crazy quilt pincushion, sequin waste, misc junk, all of it very important lol.

Immediately to the left so that I can swivel to it - cutting mat, rulers and roller blade on a rolling cart. I have no idea what the files hold, haven't looked in them in months. Misc strips of paper for edges, borders, etc on the little shelf below along with some pretty post-its and paper tapes. 

And that's it for today. I might have works in progress tomorrow...

my Teesha Moore-inspired art

Teesha Moore is a wildly creative artist whose style I really like, altho it's way outside my usual comfort (and imagination) zone. Here are a bunch of her journal pages. Crazy, colorful, very inventive. In that ongoing effort to loosen up that I mentioned a few posts back, I watched all her technique videos and then went to work. Thanks, Teesha, for all the help!

She does her pieces in steps - all the painting in one session, then the borders, then middles, the shadowing, etc - so I did the same. I prepped a bunch of watercolor paper, then painted backgrounds with various paints. When they were dry, I chose three and sat myself down at the kitchen table to create! On previous evenings, I'd sat thru DH's incredibly bad how can he watch that stuff? sci-fi shows with scissors and magazines, clipping out all sorts of things - faces, bits of color or pattern that grabbed me, assorted legs - so I went thru that several times, snipping pieces and gluing them down for the borders.

Then I found started building the creatures - the term 'zetti' has been coined for this style - the word was coined by Teesha Moore to describe a new genre, a blend of the ordinary and the fantastic - cutting bodies from whatever looked like fun, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. I don't own the pan pastels that she uses for the shadowing so I faked it with water soluble oil pastels and it worked ok except they're hard to write over afterward. Might try ink pad ink next time. Then I doodled on and off for days until I was happy with the busy-ness of them. They're all 4.5"x6".

<drumroll> Heeeere they are...

This one is obviously a cat's head, women's legs and misc other stuff. That might be a Henry James quote, I forget now. Shoulda wrote it down...

This was the head of an egg person in a food ad and his body is an upside down waffle cone. See the running-uphill mint chocolate chip drip? More ladies' legs. Another quote by another person I neglected to note. I have the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that I page thru when in need of inspiration or a one-liner. 

The girl was pretty before I added weird hair, someone else's eyes, and a blue tongue. Her dress was a purse, her legs from a bathing suit ad. The blue tongue is from a Kool-Aid ad with a bunch of kids sticking their tongues out to show the flavor they'd been drinking. I can see many more zettis with different colored tongues in my future. I love this one.

This 4th one was done a couple weeks after the first three and is the first page in a small journal I made and began working in last week.

This guy was a gorgeous model. He was beautiful enough to be a bit feminine despite the beard, and as soon as I added women's eyes to him, he took on this man/woman feel for me so I put him in a dress with striped tights, a classic zetti feature. 

This quote is all me. I'm plain-featured, with smallish eyes and gray hair, nothing special about my looks at all. Sometimes I just want to be exotic and wear outlandish clothes and lots of jewelry, but only in my mind, I guess, because as soon as I start to actually do something like that, it feels so non-me that I stop. I'm really just the button-down shirt type after all, which is fine. I'll just have to be exotic in my art now and then. 

now that's orange

Just a quickie today. I was dropping packages at the Fed-X Kinkos place yesterday and as I was pulling out of the lot, these beds of flowers caught my eye. The sun was full on them and they just glowed. I pulled in next to them, hauled out my camera and squatted in the flowers to get some real closeups. These are the best of the lot. Stunning color, isn't it? And I don't even like orange...

Sunday studio shots & the dog

Cleaned up a bit from last week. Boxes of books line the back of my car, headed for the library book sale after the members of my Thursday book club paw thru them.

These are pretty boring, huh? I'll have to show my works-in-progress next time or something. But I did mend the pillow case and put the fleece jacket away since I now don't need it until next winter...

Sleeping with her butt pushed up on DH's leg.

All legs.

The cat down the street. They're in love. 

Snoozing on the old quilt on the guest room bed. 

More legs. For a small dog, she takes up a lot of room.

She lived by the heater all winter. The closer, the better. She'd edge you out if you got too close to it. We were worried she'd singe herself, but no.

wind makes you crazy

In an ongoing effort to free my inner... whatever, I'm running amok in the pages of an art journal. And even more strangely, I'm going to share the pages with the world.

It was really windy the other day, which drives me bonkers, so I came home and got it all out of my system on this journal spread. I'd done the background a few weeks ago when I was playing with paints. It looked like gusty wind to me, so I used it.

I did some writing in gold gel pen at an angle on the right page - you can sorta see it. I talked about how I could totally understand the poor housewives of the newly settled plains states going slowly insane from the unrelenting wind. Not that I have the urge to butcher my neighbors with an ax, but I can appreciate the basic instinct that drove them to such horrific acts.

You can barely see him, but there's an unshaven, going-bald man up in the upper right hand corner, blowing as hard as he can. 

Self-portrait, when the wind is shrieking across the parking lot at work, blowing away tumbleweeds, trash, and my mental health. My husband took one look at this and asked me if I needed therapy. I told him no, I'll be fine - I have an art journal. 

Sunday studio shots

Except today they're mostly just around the house and in no particular order.

My grocery store tulips. They were lovely on the table when we had friends over for Easter breakfast. Then we got invited next door for dinner and I took them as a hostess gift, so I got to enjoy them for only a few hours, Might stop and see if they have any more on the way to work tomorrow...

My various tote bags hanging in the hall with some berry garland that I leave out year-round just cause I like the way it looks. The two crazy quilt items on the left will be going on eBay soon.

Some of DH's exotic wood standing in a crate. Every time he looks askance at my growing pile of art supplies, I glance at the door to the garage which houses tens of thousands of dollars in wood and tools and machines. 'Nuff said.

The gopher snake found by the girl next door. It was swimming in their pool, by accident, I imagine. She turned it loose in the big drainage culvert behind our back fence. Snakes are very cool.

Me in front of a crazy quilt underwater scene in the downstairs bath. 

The enchiladas we made. They were amazing. I could eat Mex once a day for the rest of my life. 

The first piece of Teesha Moore inspired art I made. What crazy fun these are. I'll do a whole post on them soon. So different from my quilting years where every point had to match and everything had to be squared up. These goofy pages are a total 180.

And last but not least, the studio in all its messy glory. Boxes and boxes of stuff for eBay and Goodwill. The fleece jacket and pillow case that need mending are still hanging over the back of the far chair on the right...

my day job

I'm having a good day - got enough sleep (thank you, Ambien), the line at the bank was short, and I had a yummy lunch (peanut butter and Nutella sandwich with pretzels and cold water). My day job is Admin of Fixed Operations for a group of five motorcycle stores and here's a look at my chunk of space.

This is looking left from my chair - a big white bookcase filled with all sorts of stuff. Food, assorted papers for the printer, the daily cash recons, phone books, fruit, The New Yorker cartoon daily calendar (not as fun as I thought it would be), box of various OTC drugs (allergy, headache, upset tummy), my beat up taped together back and forth to work box that I haul all sorts of things around in. Way easier for me than a briefcase.

This is one turn to the right of the bookcase. My messy desk. Birthday poster on the wall, my own tape gun because everyone else ruins them and I wanted MY OWN, the ever-present bottle of h2o, a pile of keys that I need to figure out what they go to, signs I'm in the process of making (but I'm blogging instead), markers and hi-liters cause I like color in my day. The two white pieces of foam by the keys are something I found in the trash on my way to the ladies room a while ago. Looks like they might make neat stamp imprints so I grabbed them.

Once more click to the right. More signs, lots of scrap paper cause I write a lot of notes, phone with shoulder cradle cause of my car wreck neck, my outdated roller ball mouse that I love, blogger screen ready to start this post. I sit at the back of a long skinny room and have kind of this wall between me and everything else. I can duck down behind the monitor and stay below the radar when I need to surf eBay or something. Also have a window behind me so lots of natural light, which I really enjoy. 

And that's about all that's interesting.