dlp2015 weeks 11 & 12

I see that March 13 was my last post. I do so much on Instagram now - which also loads to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr (which I don't even know how to log into anymore but still collecting followers lol), and Flickr - that coming over here to write about it feels like a bit of an afterthought. But I'm not ready to quit blogging yet, so I'll do some catching up.

I'm still on track with doing the pages each week, just behind in blogging about them. I love that DLP2015 is completely free and has a lot of fun vids. While they are not step by step tutorials, it's always neat to watch someone else use the same supplies you have sitting around, and I often come away with something new to try or a reminder of a technique I'd forgotten about. So, thanks! Roben Marie and Art to the 5th ladies!!

There are sorts of interpretations of "borders" but, as usual,
I chose the most literal and made borders around my page.
I think I had visions of quilt-type borders, but alas,
I ended up with this, my least fave page so far. gack

On to "focus". I wanted a main element on the page that would
be the focal point. Doodling doesn't come naturally to me
but I worked at it and wound up with this. Like the colors
and I guess I like the page well enough. 

tastes great

Just a postcard, done in the 3 elements style of some previous ones, but with doodles this time. The black splat is a bingo marker banged down hard. Gelli print background.

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.

blooming fruit trees

Spring has at least partially sprung here in my part of N California. My fruit trees are in various stages of bloom, including the totally non-producing-two-years-a-row plum tree. So glad we planted a few fruit trees when we moved in here. I've never had fruit trees before and it's so cool to walk out in the morning and pick a sun-warm nectarine to cut up on my cereal.
Not shown, the peach tree. It's in bloom but I couldn't get a decent angle on a single flower without getting in my own light, etc.

Baby apricot, about an inch long.
Looks like it's gonna be another record year for apricots.
Sure wish my nectarine produced like this.

Nectarine blossom, a lovely pink. This tree is just gorgeous
right now. Hope it goes crazy with fruit.

Plum blossom. This silly tree didn't do *anything* the first year.
No blossoms, no fruit. Second year it had a few blossoms but
no fruit. This year - ba-boom! Lots of blossoms which hopefully
translates into lots of plums!

Just a cluster of plum blossoms cause I'm so impressed with
this tree this year.

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.