Tangy Zoodle #68

Tangy Zoodle #68

Tangy Zoodle #67

Tangy Zoodle #67

Tangy Zoodle #66

Tangy Zoodle #66

Tangy Zoodle #65

Tangy Zoodle #65

Special Birthday Card

I just had to share the special birthday card I made for my little brother for his birthday last week. I remember clearly the day he was born and how excited I was to have a little brother. Little did I know then just how exasperating little brothers could be! Oh, but did he ever create memories that we all laugh hysterically over today!

Happy Birthday, little brother, with much love!

Pink

Exploring the concept of digital art journaling. I'm part of an art journaling group on Facebook and I'm learning all kinds of things from this group. It has been such an inspiration to me.

Printable Artwork

Learn more by going to this link.

Always, always I'm in search for new ways to sell my creations. And I want to find a way for people to be able to afford my artwork as well. In this pursuit, I'm giving the notion of "print it yourself" artwork a try. Currently I have a limited number of prints available on Etsy. For the low, low price of $7.00, you pay to get the high resolution file of the artwork which you can print out yourself, or take to a local printer or office supply store to print out for you. I'm also using standard sizes so the prints are easy to mat and frame.

As always, I'm interested in my readers' feedback on new ideas; well, and old ideas, too! I love feedback!

Thanks!

Learn more by going to this link.

Fabulous Crabulous $15 Sale On Etsy!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FABULOUS CRABULOUS $15 SALE GOING ON NOW!

For a limited time only I'm offering 16 small mixed media collages for only $15 + shipping. Please check out the link!

Rocking M Ranch

I enjoyed another great outing with the girls of the Photoholics Anonymous. Well, maybe not quite so anonymous, but we certainly are photoholics and we love getting together to photograph interesting places and faces and share a few tips and tricks with each other.

This week we visited the Rocking M Ranch; a nearby and well kept secret. What I think I loved best about this little horse ranch is the fact that so many of the horses are rescued geriatrics who have found a gentle, loving place to spend the rest of their lives and they each have their job to do and are given purpose. 

The following are my photos of the morning. I hope you enjoy my photos as much as I enjoyed the outing. :D

Tangy Zoodle #64

Tangy Zoodle #63

Tangy Zoodle #62

Tangy Zoodle #61

Aha! Finally found some Sakura Gelly Roll pens!!! (Michael's has them in their scrapbooking section, next to the Microns.) They are the only gel pens that I know of that work so brilliantly on black paper. I LOVE them. I had a really good time with them over the weekend as you'll see in the next few days. I MUST go back and pick up more colors. :D

A Legacy Of Color And Design Part II

A Legacy Of Color And Design

When my youngest son was in art school, he told me about an interesting discussion that was held in one of his classes about a person's personal aesthetic. The question arose, is it learned or inherited? I don't know if anyone determined the answer to that question. I have one artist friend in particular who laments her own lack of color sense. She frequently asks me about color and how I learned what I know. I find that I'm stupefied to answer. Yes, I know all the theory behind color, but learning it only served to validate what I already felt I instinctively knew. But then, you could not possibly grow up in my mother's house without learning about color just because we were surrounded by it. 

I consider my mother to be a self-taught interior designer. Although she's been given the opportunity to express her talents on a professional level, she has always chosen not to do so. But, I have been the happy, lifelong beneficiary of her particular abilities to combine color and create design in every room of all the homes she's ever lived in (and that's been quite a few). So, I'm sharing some "vignettes" of Chloe's world.

Monsters For Max

Monster M

Monster A

Monster X

Today is Max's first birthday and for his present, I made him a series of monster collages. That is the theme for his birthday party, which is to be this coming Saturday. Above are the finished monster pieces, but below are photographs depicting the process.

Here is the first step; the painted canvases. I chose to go with the three primary colors and make the monsters in the complementary secondary colors. You can see that I have some shapes made with punches. Although I chose to use the star shape, I later sent the puzzle piece shapes to my scrap paper bin. They were just too small for this project.

I glued punched out shapes to the canvases to add interest to the backgrounds. The blue canvas already has a layer of kinwashi glued over it. I got impatient and forgot to take a photo before I moved onto that step.

This is a photo showing kinwashi (Japanese rice paper) covering all three canvases.

Next I covered each canvas with a layer of Japanese ogura lace paper. I had blue for the blue canvas and yellow for the yellow. Unfortunately, I didn't have red lace for the red canvas, so I elected to use natural ogura lace paper instead.

Next I created the three monsters on newsprint using markers. The eyes are not really glued on yet. I just laid them in place to get a feel for the finished creatures.

Before cutting the monsters out with an exacto knife, I coated each with a layer of acrylic varnish. I wasn't sure if the markers would smear when varnish was applied. I was happy to discover that the smearing was very minimal. Here they are, happily at home on their canvases.

From this point, it was just a matter of varnish, gold splattering, glitter glue embellishments and adding the eyes to finish these "monster pieces"!