LL201 lesson 4

omg... what a train wreck.

Not the whole thing. It started out pretty good. I had a plan to work from Z to A and it went just fine. Letters penciled in, then markered in - so far so good. (they're supposed to look like they're disappearing down the center. yes? no?)

The wheels started to come off when I got out the paints. Actually the Inktense pencils. And actually, that part mostly went ok.

Until I added a gray and a red to the lovely mix of greens and blues I already had going. Should have stepped away from the table right there. But I didn't, of course. I added more color to the bad parts, then a little more.

Still bad. Maybe worse.

Got out my little Windsor & Newton watercolor set and proceded to really mess things up. Oy.

But then I got kind of into playing with the watercolors and quit worrying so much about the actual assignment.

So... think the next class I sign up for should prolly be painting, except I've tried that and I just don't have the gene. On to lesson 5.

LL201 lesson 3

Knocked this one out during the Oscars. Are they weird this year or is it just me?

Tasteless jokes - "we saw your boobs" set to music? Reeeee-lly? Did you see the look on whatshername's face when they flashed to her? She was disgusted. I got no problem with the word 'boobs', and I guess if you showed 'em to the world on the big screen, maybe you shouldn't be offended by a song about it, but... really?

Flat repartee between the presenters. A couple of them were so stilted that I kept waiting for someone to pop in and say 'hahaha, just a joke, here's the real thing', but they never did.

The musical numbers are great, but the rest of it just seems strange.

Loved the big Les Miserables singfest. I've never seen Les Mis in any form but I'm going to see this one. Anne Hathaway... looks like she deserved that Oscar.

Anyway, back to the real topic of this post. The drill here was to make a bunch of alphabets, vertically, on a two page spread. I lined it out and went to work (after perusing dafont.com for ideas).

Nothing real original here but the exercise definitely makes you think about it. Fat, thin... square, round... straight, curly.

Sub-par pictures courtesy of crummy evening lamp light. Sorry.

Charlize Theron is gorgeous. Just sayin'.

LL 201 lesson 2

This was a fun one. Took me a week of working on the couch in the evenings while DH watched bad sci fi. 

Joanne supplied a whole list of words and phrases, but I had to go my own way, as usual. There are a few of hers, plus movie quotes, song lyrics, favorite foods, phrases I liked from a book - all sorts of stuff.

Dug out my huge box of assorted markers, used some gel pens, some Copics, a white Signo pen.

I quite like it and will do another one of these at some point with a more focused batch of phrases and quotes.

Learning to spell is next on my list...

I wish I had...

That's the Roc prompt for Feb.

I wish I had...

Wow. Where to start?

Grace Kelly's looks, Warren Buffett's money, Steven Spielberg's creativity?  Yeah, that'd work.

However, I hadn't thought of those things when I did my spread, so there are different wishes on the page - some real, some silly.

Used my cost-a-lot-of-money-had-to-have-them-don't-use-them-nearly-enough Copic markers and had fun blending the various color families. It's not a sun or a flower. It's just a many-armed design element. Black marker, pencil for shading, gel pens. 

It was fun and I like how light it feels with so much of the background showing. Also like the black/white dashes around the center. 

Practiced my lettering by trying to make each one different, a la Joanne Sharpe's Letter Love 201 class I'm taking. 

Added little drawings or words to some wishes. (the 'more time to art' comment is 'picasso... monet... leslie...' hahaha) 

Just for the heck of it I added a little spider and web like I used to do on all my crazy quilts. 

Another case of it didn't quite fit on the scanner, so I pasted the 2 halves together in PSE 11 for the top pic.

Feb followers giveaways

A small thing that bugs me sometimes is when a giveaway consists of lots of cool stuff and it all goes to one person. I prefer the kind where more people win. 

In that spirit, I'll draw 3 names from my followers on Feb 28th and they'll each get one of the pictured postcard made by me, plus a gelli postcard that hasn't been embellished yet that they can do themselves.

The images are all from a 1946 The American Home magazine that I picked up someplace or other.

It certainly depicts a simpler time. And lots of household appliance ads - vaccuum cleaners, stoves, automatic coffee makers! 

Lots of booklets you could send away for, most of which cost only a dine or a quarter. 

The magazine itself - all 12"x15"  and 136 pages of it - cost only 15 cents. Crazy.

stencil alert

Hot stencil tip - Home Depot. 

I was in there this morning for a caulking gun and silicone for our new composter, and while I was wandering the aisles, I spotted stencils. 

Inexpensive stencils, to boot. Only $2.98 each. 

I bought the one pictured here as it was the only over-all pattern. There were 4 total, a couple of which are shown on the back of the packaging. It's nice plastic, would work great with paint, sprays, gelli printing, etc.

It's 8.5x11" so it will cover the medium 8x10 gelli perfectly. Hope to print a few with it over the weekend, so will update then.

Also have the Feb giveaways made, will post about those tonite hopefully...

Letter Love 201 - lettering as art

After seeing my mail art friend Jewels' post on Joanne Sharpe's lettering class, I watched the promo vid, then signed up. 

I suspect my art friend Rhonda is going to be right on my heels at the ticket booth cause she watched the vid yesterday while here playing in the studio. 

Jewels, you should ask for a commission...

Watched the first lesson and made my 'cover', altho it's just  a page in my 9x12 Canson all-media journal. The big black letters were done with a Coptic marker and didn't bleed thru the 90lb paper. Yay.

I blew some of the paint puddles around with a straw but for the heck of it.

The bad part about working this large is that the blasted thing doesn't fit on my scanner bed so the bottom got whacked off in the top shot, but the colors are most true there. The other pics were taken at my work desk with my Canon SD1400. 


Love the places where the watercolors feather into each other. 

And I like the class so far, even after just one lesson. She's not preachy or goofy or any of the other things that sometimes annoy me about video classes.

I'm happy with this page and hope that the rest of them come out as well.