Sepia and Glitter

Textural Bliss

2011-10-18T22:39:00.001-04:00

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of taking a textured acrylic painting class with the always lovely and gracious Sarah Whitmire and her charming husband Jarred at the Jeanine Taylor Folk Art Gallery in Sanford, FL. I've been dabbling with acrylic paints for years (haven't we all), but never did a lot with texturing mediums as, well, they are rather expensive and who knows what you'll like, and not like, and go "what was I thinking" about. Who knew, they are so cool!!

It was a very full seven hours of class, went by in a flash. We first drew our paintings onto the canvas, then did some vintage paper collaging, then started laying in textures to our heart's content. As you can tell, I went rather Van Gogh inspired (I feel a certain kinship with Vincent, as do so many of us I think. Overwhelmed at times by beauty, struggling with doubt, driven by the need to create) and did a painting of my favorite flowers - the mighty French sunflower. God I love sunflowers, I love their big happy faces and their liveliness.

And of course it had to be rendered with turquoise and teal and robin's egg blue, because I'm all geeky over these colors. I practically hunger for them. Who knows which colors I'll want to taste next year, but for this year, it's all about the warm ocean colors. And then, there's a bird.

Of course there's a bird, (my artwork always has a bird in it somewhere, they represent the muses and guides) and the bird has lots of eggs around the outside of the gallery canvas. Because we mixed media artists have lots of little art eggs all nurturing along in our nests at the same time, don't we?

Anyway, back to the story! We laid in our textures, and then went to lunch (an eminently sensible thing to do with all that creative energy pouring out) at the yummy Gourmet 2 Go restaurant which is one of those restaurants that I wish we had on every corner, as opposed to mediocrity and a guaranteed indifferent chain meal. I love restaurants where the chef is a real chef, he knows his knifework, he selects his own produce, and he's proud of it. In another life, I worked in the high-end catering business for five years, I do appreciate my vittles, no doubt about it. Superb creamy celery soup and a tuna melt with a twist to die for with a nice glass of Chardonnay - I wish my lunches during the week were as good...extra good as I got to eat with good friends and new friends. Why is time spent with the art tribe so magical and so rare? It's like a champagne that should just pour every day.

So Downtown Sanford is one of these wonderful little examples of little Victorian downtown revival - and it has reinvented itself gloriously from derelict buildings and general malaise to a thriving, bohemian, art gallery filled creative space. It has a nice little farmer's market, six or seven art galleries, a paint your own pottery place, a crystals shop, a faerie/eco/hippy clothing shop and a tribal bellydance cafe - all in a couple of blocks. And the truly fab Taylor Folk Art gallery. I wish all galleries were as accessible, as friendly, as welcoming, and as just plain inspiring as this one. I'll post more photos about this soon.

So we get back from lunch, miraculously texture has dried, and if not, it can be helped along with your trusty heat gun. Off to the painting! And the layering of paint after paint, and washes, and just general fun. Sarah really shares her art knowledge with this one, and inspired us all to go outside of our creative boxes and let loose. She manages to pull off grungy yet still cute and attractive as few others can.

Now I'm a big fan of the online class, that's for sure. But once in a while, it's a great thing to be able to take an actual live class with an art tribe. It refills the well. Make a promise to yourself to treat yourself once in a while if at all possible. It's juicy and soul-inspiring.

Weekend checklist

2011-09-05T22:00:00.001-04:00

About this time on Sunday night (in this case, Monday) I tend to have these little mental reviews - did I spend my time meaningfully this weekend? Did I do my chores? Did I do more art than chores?

Washed laundry and put away - check
Listed relics of former hobbies on eBay - check (if you need model horses...i have a few...)
Sketched - yep! Four pages of Dachshunds and one sushi lunch. Waiter asked if I still wanted my soup as I hadn't eaten it....I'm too busy drawing it, you craven vizigoth! I don't care if it's cold, I've watercoloring to do. No sense of the aesthetic here. I'm quite sure in Paris this would not happen.
Did my Mom's banking (Mom has Alzheimers, so I get to deal with dreaded math a few times a month, always depressing)
Worked in my travel journals - painted backgrounds, printed out some photos, wrote some things in support of my Nick Bantock Spain journal. For some reason, this book intimidates me a bit. How do you capture one of the most amazing experiences of your life in a little book. With mere photos. Guess that's why it's taken me a year and a half to get started. Not sure if it will in any way represent, but it certainly won't if I don't do anything it all. Feeling slightly emboldened. Slightly.
Knitting - knitted three rows! Wooo hoo! Mastery of the needles is surely obvious.
Swept house - dirt, begone! Take that, sand...
Long artsy discussion with husband the musician - I may be creating the artwork for his band's album. Or whatever they call it now. They have albums still? I guess so.

On balance, an adequate mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. It was a success.

A further foray into watercolors

2011-08-28T17:45:00.000-04:00

So I've really been getting into trying to stretch my drawing talents a bit further, and well, what's the fun in not adding some color to them? It is probably stretching it a bit to try to learn two skills at once, but you can't really do much watercolor without drawing. And at least the sketching end of drawing looks a bit empty without watercolors, so there we are.

I thought I'd share with you the drawings I did this week - I'm really pleased with how they are coming out. No, I didn't happen to find myself in Brugge (or Bruges, all the same place) this week. More is the pity, as it's no doubt much more fabulous than the hot, rainy, drearyness of late summer in Florida. Next time I go, I'm so bringing my watercolors. I wasn't 'into that' when I was there two years ago. The photo this drawing was taken from was taken by me though.

I saw this little guy at work on Friday. We have woods right near my office building, and I was getting in my car to go home for the day and saw this lovely buck sitting in a patch of sunshine, ruminating on the world. One of the things that really appeals to me about art is that it makes you very observant. And appreciative of the world around us. All these other people were heading to their cars, on their phones, I don't think a one of them even noticed this guy. I'm sure he didn't mind flying under the radar either.

This one I drew this morning; and this may be my favorite. Nothing like post-breakfast sleepy hound in your lap to inspire a bit of drawing. She was all curled up and cuddly....

Watercolors with Jane LaFazio

2011-08-21T20:50:00.000-04:00

Oh, it's been ages, just ages since I posted last! I've been up to lots of things....I do need to go back and finish up those Artfest 2011 posts, though with some irony since Teesha Moore is now getting ready to take registrations for Artfest 2012....hah.

Isn't that always the way though - when you are busy with lots of things, it's hard to find time to post. After Artfest, I went the very next month up to Prince Edward Island, Canada to do a workshop with Sabrina Ward Harrison. Which was just amazing! That's another whole post in and of itself, and needs to be revisited. And journaled about. I did write a 'words only' journal a few days after I got back at least. The art journal part of it though? Well I do have the book actually bound (yes, hand bound) and all ready to start getting filled to the brim with Sabina-inspired mixed media goodness.

Carolina Wild Daylily

One month later, I went up to North Carolina to take a class with Jane LaFazio at Random Arts, in Saluda. My third visit to Random Arts, and always a genuine joy. Probably my 10th at least visit to North Carolina. I can't quite decide if my spiritual home is in the lush green mountains and rushing streams of western North Carolina, or the land of the tall trees and the powerful oceans of western Washington. One or both I think.

Little plump dove, blind contour sketch

Anyway, I wanted to share with you the results of my watercolor sketching class that I took with Jane. What an amazing lady! A very kind and generous teacher, and so full of encouragement and sparkle. I really felt very inspired and confident that I want to pursue the fine art of sketching more after this class. Class works scattered throughout the post.

Still life Study

And when I got back to the cabin that we stay at whenever we are in WNC, aka - my "pretend home" up there ("oh, yeah, our cabin is in Fruitland...it's near Hendersonville. Oh you don't know Hendersonville? Well it's about 45 minutes south of Asheville." sounds like I own it, no?) I don't, but the very nice Landen and Benny do, and for very reasonable rates, they let us think we own it for the week. I sat out on the back porch one fine and sunny morning, surrounded by the tall, tall trees and the wonderful sound of nothing but birdsong and silence, and painted what I saw. And here that is...

Artfest Forever! Day One

2011-04-13T23:48:00.000-04:00

I'm just back from a crazy busy week at Artfest in Port Townsend, Washington. What an incredible event
- I am already counting the days till I can return to my own version of heaven. Just a few quick snippets of day one here. The above picture is on the Bainbridge Island ferry, on our way to the Fort - really quite pretty weather, and that was a preview of the glorious days of sunshine to come. I was very lucky to carpool with some wonderful new friends to the event - you meet just the nicest people at Teesha and Tracy's events.

Two hours of ferry riding and navigating later - here's the Fort Worden Commons! Time to get checked in and pick up our adorable goodie bags - these were very useful tote bags (for your grocery shopping) and water mugs that were incredibly handy for making sure you remembered to hydrate with all the swirl of gypsy art madness going on.

Ok, there was one hitch in the proceedings. The US postal service apparently sat on my box of paints that I shipped - with an explosion of gesso as a result. Yes, that was me cleaning gesso of of EVERYTHING in the bathroom of dorm 225 for an hour or so. I did have lots of tea and sympathy from my fellow artists though, and the use of a scrubby sponge. Everything pretty much got cleaned up, and I learned a valuable lesson about the powers of ziplock bags. Lesson: use bags for paint! And, Akamai Art Supply to the rescue - one tub o' gesso later, I was all set again. Yay Akamai!

After the opening meeting, I went for a quick walk on the beach - this is what the real Twilight in Washington State looks like. Nary a vampire in sight... More of the story soon!

Artfest Trades!

2011-04-04T18:05:00.000-04:00

I'm getting ready to attend my first Artfest! I have been to Journalfest before, so I can't wait to get back to the magical Fort Worden, now packed with 500 of my fellow mixed media artists. I'm told Artfest is like a really amped up version of Journalfest - I think my muse is going to be spinning about a hundred miles a minute....

So one of the big events from what I've read on the Yahoo group is trades - and these are the ones I'm bringing. They are hand made, hand painted, enameled pendants with handmade 'yarnpeltery' tassels (that's what I call my collage knitting and fiber endeavors). Some of them even have Swarovski crystals on them, others have moonstone and amethyst beads - I'm so looking forward to sharing them!

I'm also including my artwork on Moo Cards with the pendants, (see below) I think this will be awesomely fun.

Really looking forward to meeting my fellow Artfesters and trading with you all! (as a journalism major a few moons ago, I think all these apostrophe marks would probably get me in trouble with my old professors, but hey - it's a goddess tribe gathering!)

Beautiful backgrounds for you to enjoy

2011-01-15T21:27:00.000-05:00

Sunshine warmed my toes on my back porch this afternoon - it was a beautiful day for getting outside and throwing some paint around...and after I threw, here's what I got back from the paint goddesses...

There are just one layer - the beginning layer of my new art project - I asked the universe what my guiding word for this year is - and what I got back was focus.

I'm thinking every day on this word...I suspect it means more than it seems. It turns and swirls every day, bringing me more things to consider, more joys to revel in.

I think focus means to choose what art project I most enjoy, and to pursue it with relish and abandon to its richest conclusion. Not let myself get sidetracked, sideswiped, sidelined. See what mysteries will be unfolded to my newly opened eyes. These paintings, just the first layer, are part of that focus.

Practicing yoga, freedom, self acceptance, non-judgment, honesty, contentment, peace. And layers that will continue to unfold throughout the year.

Please feel free to download the backgrounds in this post for your own creative endeavors! Just leave me a comment and let me know what wonders your new art year is unfolding. Sharing is caring!

The muses are swirling around....

2011-01-10T21:44:00.003-05:00

I firmly believe we can achieve world peace through art journaling, universal health care, and subsidized massage therapy for all. Tell me we would not all be better off with these things? In the meantime until all this becomes reality, I listened to the summons from my internet friend Samantha Kira Harding, and I wrote up a brave, crazy thing today. I wrote a plan for my art journals, for making things to actually sell (so I can prove to myself in some concrete fashion that somebody else is listening - Capricorn, we are tangible affluence kinds of folks). I wrote to myself the who/what/where/when/whys to try to explain to myself why I want to teach and to share the wonder, frustration, obsession, life affirming things that the mixed media collage art world has brought me.

That's me in the left corner of the picture - soaking in the pearlescent sky and swirling mists that rose from the earth as I drove home from work - the muse was letting me know she was listening to my dreams, and she was believing. This will all become reality. I know it.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T14:24:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, we did a spontaneous trip to New York City to celebrate mine and my husband's birthdays - as a good friend of mine says, "Wow, when you get spontaneous, you go to New York City. When we get spontaneous, we go to Cold Stone Creamery..." I can't believe I've gotten to this mid-life age, and never been to New York before! This will be remedied in the future. I thought I'd share a few shots with you of the city in winter.

Macy's - and I never made it past the first floor. I definitely didn't get to Santaland, (and if you have never read "The SantaLand Diaries" by David Sedaris, do yourself a favor and do do. It is everything you love and hate about Christmas in a nutshell. Extra points to you if you have ever worked in customer service, as you, dear readers will especially appreciate this one!)

Ice skaters in front to Rockfeller Center.

The famous Rockerfeller Center tree; it was so amazing to see this many people all going to visit an evergreen.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

The old dairy next to the sheep meadow, Central Park.

Merry Christmas, Blessed Solstice, and brightest blessings for your New Year. I hope all your artistic dreams come true. Seasonal hugs, Jane

Why I don't like iTunes, but won't trade my iPhone for anything...a non-rant

2010-12-03T18:22:00.011-05:00

I don't like iTunes. Everyone else seems to think it's so intuitive - no, I cannot concur. I find it entirely counterintuitive, and irritating. But, lest you suspect a rant coming on - this is not in fact a rant. It's a....not sure what opposite of rant is - er, praise? Can one have "a praise?" Well, I will proceed to do so anyway.

This is a praise of the iPhone, despite the perfidy of its operating system, because for photography apps, it just can't be beat. My favorite of all? Hipstamatic. It enables one to take those artsy sort of photos that one admires in the journals of people like Sabrina Ward Harrison and so forth. Folks that just ooze artsy and effortless in making crap photos look so intentional and good, but yet so carelessly tossed off the lens as to be barely worth a mention. You know what I mean - some people just make you think "artist" with everything they do, and they usually take craptastic photos. With apologies to Sabrina of course, because she probably doesn't have to resort to trickery, or even Lomography. And she's totally amazing. Shanti, shanti, shanti... But I digress...

So the truly artsy types have had a bit of help over the years - they started using Lomo cameras before the rest of us. The Holga, the Diana - such plastic bodied, light-filtering in, exposed film decadence! But those still require that you actually develop the (long outdated) film. The Hipstamatic for iPhone requires no more than a quick download off the camera..

All that fussing with using manual SLR's back in my college days. No, I don't regret taking proper photography - I learned how a real camera, and developing film, and printing in a darkroom actually properly works. It was my favorite class I ever took along with archery (except when I shot myself in my own arm. The teacher said in 20 years of teaching, she'd never seen anything like it. I was sidelined until a spot in badminton opened up. Best weeks of PE ever.) Oh, and "lifetime crafts" - how cool is that? I learned how to cut linoleum blocks to make stamps for printing. This would turn out much more useful in later life. I do love liberal arts colleges.

But the Hipstamatic app for iPhone is so much MORE FUN! Even better, you get multiple "lenses" that produce all sorts of truly magical effects. These photos were taken with the Dali lens package. More surrealism than a mere phone ever had daydreams of. Can you believe it's really just a phone? This still amazes me.

So are you making handmade Christmas gifts for all your relatives and friends? I'm sure hoping that mine appreciate my slightly off the wall photography - coz they're gettin' it in some form or another! You saw a sneaky peek. Shhh....it's our secret.

Finds, loot, stash...from the Fancy Flea

2010-11-27T16:12:00.000-05:00

From my last post, I had mentioned that I'd show you my snazzy finds from the Flea - so here they are...a lovely little chest of drawers in miniature size (it's probably 18 inches tall, with little drawers). All handpainted - you can see it on the left behind the blue candle. Then, from the same artist, a handpainted candle holder to go with it all. That's the one with the yellow circle with the dots on it. So fab in the studio!

Here we have a bumper set of chandelier crystals - just waiting to be transformed into some jewelry. Or some "faux chandelier" treatments of my own. See, I'd love to own a chandelier and decorate the studio with it, all Parisian attelier inspired and generally decadent. But I live in a climate that only resembles Paris on the hottest days of summer - the Parisians install a "tropical beach" called the Paris Plage by the banks of the Seine in August just to try to make it bearable. If you could get out of town, you would....and it's like that much of the year here. So, practicality wins out, and a ceiling fan wins. Doesn't have to look like an ordinary fan though. And so hence, faux chandeliering - I'm slowly but surely adding bits of crystal on where I can and stringing it from other beads, and fishing line if that's what it takes. Its as faux French as my command of the French language is...

Now isn't he just looking all mysterious and evocative sitting on the top of the painted chest?

and here it is, the piece de resistance...direct from the Fancy Flea...the typewriter. You remember I said I was going to take a chance on buying it, because I wasn't really all that sure if it was going to work. So last weekend, I took it out of its case (the original) and gave it a good once over with the eyeballs. Well, pretty soon I could tell that a key seemed to be stuck in the operative position. One that was not about to allow any other keys to do what keys were meant to do (i.e. strike paper.) Other than this, however, it seemed to be in pretty good shape. A couple of hours of typewriter research go by.

Who knew that there was a market for vintage typewriters in this age of technology? Not I. But, "Each man has his peculiar interests" to quote Lincoln, and so it goes with musty old office equipment also. I found a place that repairs them about two hours from where I live. Not really fancying the drive, but what can a seeker of art supplies (oh yes, that's why I wanted this baby to work, so I can use it for making vintage looking text to add to mixed media work) do?

Well, one invites one's handy husband to take a look at one's "new" typewriter. So get this! My husband - who took apart many of his family's appliances as a child and apparently reassembled most of them - fixed up the vintage typewriter for me! He whisked it off to the garage, and emerged with it cleaned, oiled, and running beautifully. I couldn't believe it. I ordered it new ribbons this week - and it should be in pretty good shape at that point. Particularly for a 75 year old machine. Did you know there is a typewriter database? Oui. Mine is a 1936 Royal Model 0 standard portable typewriter; I'm very pleased with it.

The Fancy Flea

2010-11-14T21:55:00.001-05:00

My new friend Kim, (who I just met this week - this very week! how fortunate am I?! ) is featured in the bible of artsy style Where Women Create magazine. Because of her wonderful art blog Dear Daisy Cottage, I found out about a lovely, French-style flea market right in my hometown - Lakeland, Florida.

This pinnacle of gorgeous baubles and hip rediscovered treasures is called "The Fancy Flea" and what an apt name it is. It's just like a flea market except much, much better because its filled with all the things that an artsy wacky chick such as myself needs. Handpainted furniture, vintage chandelier drops, fashions from the early 60's, homegrown plants, handmade jewelry in unexpected jingles and luscious drops.

When I saw Kim's posts on previous Fancy Flea events, I thought, "well that must be in some wonderfully hip and totally artsy place, like Portland, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or anywhere that's at least a thousand miles from where I live. Le sigh." Turns out that sometimes artsy and fabulous can be just an hour down the road!

Isn't it interesting how you can let go of your convictions that nowhere near you can possibly be fun, when you just look around a little bit with fresh eyes?

Yes, the sky was really this blue, and these birdhouses really looked like they were about ready for me to take up residence.

So many yummy flowers and vegetable plants for sale - even European olive trees! How I'd get one of those back in my rather tiny car, I'm not sure, so I settled for treasures from the market that were a little more portable. Specifically a portable Royal typewriter from the mid 1930's! Now I just have to find somewhere to clean and oil it, and replace its ribbon. I'm told it works fine otherwise...I took a leap of faith on this one. It was just that kind of day.

I've been totally in an orange frame of mind for a while - which is funny because it's not a color I wear or anything, but somehow its snuck all over my studio at home too. Which is probably why I got a super fab nested box of drawers painted all pink and yellow and orange and teal at the Flea. Did I mention it was handpainted? Did I mention it was $15?! I do love it a lot. I'll show you a photo of my flea market finds soon...

And if I hadn't already spent a bit more than I intended...and wouldn't you with all this luscious temptation....I sure would have loved one of these juicy ripe purple goodies. Intense, non?

I bet you're making mental plans for their next Fancy Flea event in your mind, aren't you? I am! I'm not sure exactly when the one one is yet myself, but I think it will be in the spring. Yes, we have beautiful weather here in the spring too. Summer is another matter, but we have gorgeous Novembers, and simply lovely Aprils.

Is there somewhere near you that is unexpectedly artsy and cool, and you just never realized it? Maybe there is, and it's just waiting for you to discover, or re-discover. Thank you again Kim - you're a treasure! If you'd like to see more photos of this beautiful event, please stop by Kim's blog (this is the post where she talks about her visit to the Fancy Flea) - I guarantee you will be as charmed by her as I was, and her photos are much better than mine - simply to die for!

Dancing with late summer

2010-11-06T11:28:00.004-04:00

In the part of the country where I live, autumn meanders slowly into our lives. It teases us with the occasional day of weather in the 70's, then unerringly shoots back up to sticky before you know it. This dance of climate uncertainty straggles through October, leaves still mostly green, grass baked from a long summer, stillness daring the cooler nip of fall to just try and intrude.

I wait for the spell to pass, as do we all. I begin to doubt that the heat will ever break. I swear that it has never been this hot, for this long, in any other year ever. Despite global warming, the weatherman assures us that this is not a record.

Due to a love of ritual raindancing I decide that surely a change in the season could be prompted by my dusting off the lovely copper and plum jackets in my wardrobe. Perhaps an attempt to don wool (and get strange looks for my trouble.) Perhaps the conjuring works, as eventually we do (shhhh! don't scare them off!) get a few cooler days, to reassure us that the autumn change will finally arrive.

On one of those days, when you feel that you can safely leave your air conditioned home to go about touring, you might take the time to seek out the few corners that still exist in my overdeveloped state (you have to look hard) where time doesn't change any faster than the weather does.

Where the occasional sigh of Spanish moss as it drops from the live oak branches high overhead is about as clear a sign as you'll get that autumn winds will truly arrive. Well, maybe.

Oh, I do envy the people that have four seasons. My heart practically aches when I see pictures of fall colors on the mountains of the Blue Ridge. The misty otherness of Halloween celebrations on the Oregon coast, or my own memory of the bright dance of trees in Washington state. But for now, this is where I am, and it does have its own peculiar charm. The wood creaks just a little more as the summer dampness dries, the cicadas stop their chirps, perhaps they share more certainty that autumn will finally arrive.

PS - A special note of thanks to all of you that are following my blog - I do appreciate it! I don't post very often, not for lack of intent, but keeping up a blog is rather time consuming and if its an art blog, like this one, then even more so because, well, all those pictures! I do wish Blogger was a little less clunky in formatting and easier to stick the pictures where you want, and the size you want, etc. It's hard to retain a steady readership when you don't post often, and so then one doesn't get much commentary and traffic, so (confessional) it's less motivating to post to begin with. I do it too - stop following blogs that don't update often. I'm guilty as much as the next. Anyway, thank you all for sticking with me even though I'm your friend you don't hear from too often.

The Camera in Your Pocket

2010-08-22T10:31:00.000-04:00

Oh, so much to talk about....it's been ages since I have posted here, but I assure you dear readers, I've not been idle in the art world! Oh no, not at all. I think I have the opposite of a creative block going on - more of a creative bottleneck.

I was truly blessed to have a the art trip of a lifetime this past May when I got to go to Spain and study collage with Nick Bantock for a week! That's Nick in the picture, along with some of the other folks in the group having one of our many wonderful dinners by candlelight in the cool Spanish evening air. Just the food and wine and company were heaven itself.

Yes, it was as incredible as you would think it would be. We went to Ronda (setting for Nick's book "The Forgetting Room") - those are wild poppies growing on the hills that you see in the photo below. Such a beautiful town and so wonderful to go there with other artists. To see it with the eyes of an artist and have the time to just wander the back streets with a camera and capture all the richness. Nobody saying, "come on, Jane...do you HAVE to photograph every light post and door hinge..."

Then on to the Alhambra in Granada.

Cordoba during the Festival of Flowers.

This is the Mosquita - amazing..

Oh, we saw flamenco, we danced, we sung, we painted, we drank LOTS of wine. Oh my.....so, more posts to come on this one.
When I got back, I started taking LK Ludwig's The Camera in your Pocket iPhone photography course - and that has been totally fun and really got me back into photography again. It reminds me of when I was in college oh so many years ago and was taking photography and had all these photo assignments to do - ah, so much easier now in the world of digital!

And now, a couple of weeks ago, I started Mary Ann Moss's "Remains of the Day" class - which is a shabby journal of scraps. Now, I've been having a few technical hitches with my sewing machine to say the least, but overall this is a brilliant course, and I've been very glad I've been taking it. More pictures to come on this.

So....lots and lots of material for upcoming blog posts to share with you. So stay tuned!

Walking around and looking artfully at the world

2010-05-02T20:28:00.002-04:00

So one of my favorite things about making art a part (p-ART! hah, I amuse myself) of your life is that I think you notice things more. Appreciate the effort that others make, or that just seredipitously happens, to make the world just cooler. I also really enjoy the Toy Camera iPhone app - you can get artsy on the go. That's what these photos were taken on. Note the faux-Lomo camera effects. Badly taken shots turn artsy! Except much cheaper, as you aren't dealing with real film and real developing and prints as you do with a Lomo camera. Do I want a Lomo camera? Of course I do. I'm also a bit cheap.

Speaking of prints, I do wish, however, that iPhone would make an agreement with the Pogo Printer from Polaroid. Have you seen these things? It's a little tiny mini printer that hooks up to your camera and prints out pictures directly from it. As stickers, no less. I was fortunate enough to see one in Art Journaling action at Journalfest last October, and I think it's going to add bells and stars and twinkles to journaling on the go.

Now for my other exciting bit of news - I'm going on a trip to Spain in a few weeks!!! As you can imagine, I'm planning on using my Pogo Printer for all my art journaling while I'm there. Delivered by Accident in Twilight - The Art of Collage with Nick Bantock. Now doesn't that sound like something you just HAVE to know more about? It hasn't really even sunk in that that's actually me, and actually me in Spain, with the grand master of the collage world. It's on the verge of intimidating.

In the meantime, until the way exciting tour de Spain, here were a few sightings from my local Thai restaurant. Just flowers, and wall hangings, and rugs, but don't they conjure up images of exotic, lush art filled rooms? The food was great too.

A few experiments with paper cloth

2010-04-25T08:58:00.000-04:00

I've been a little bit..uninspired...by ordinary old paper lately, and I've been taking an interest in cloth instead. To this end, I've taken a few basic sewing and quilting classes - not with the idea that I'm going to become a real quilter (not sure that I have that kind of patience - I think quilter would turn into quitter fairly soon.) Not really with the idea that I'll become a real seamstress either - I am perfectly fine with purchasing my clothes. There is no such thing as anything being "sew easy!"

I never learned to sew at my mother's knee (I can't recall her ever sewing other than when she complained about having to sew my brownie patches onto the uniform). So to make up for this lack of prior training, I've been taking classes at my local Joann's Fabric with the patient Miss Brenda. Me and the other eight year olds that can outsew me any day. I'm still pretty intimidated by the women at the fabric counter, the bobbin on my machine still makes me feel a bit uncertain, but I'm slowly learning the nomenclature and thinking of small (very small) things to make. My goal is to make an art quilt - something nicely impractical. What's the difference between art and craft - how useful it is! Well, no, that's not really my definition, but it's funny. In the case of an art quilt, however, by the time you've got all that stuft stuck on there, it would cower in front of a washing machine.

Anyway, to that end I've been reading the book Stitch Alchemy and have found some inspiration in the idea of making "paper cloth" which is basically muslin or similar cheapie fabric saturated in gluey water and then covered in paper strips. You let the stuff dry overnight, and then collage and embellish - just like regular paper. This I can deal with. You can see a couple of examples of what I've been up to with this in the pictures. I think this has distinct possibilities!

I'm a little concerned that this is definitely in the impractical for regular use category, as I think the dye/ink/paint will most likely run right off the second its exposed to water, but I'm going to experiment with covering it with spray-on sealant, and with sticking gel medium on it, and maybe decoupage medium. See what sticks, so to speak. It's some fun, very non-intimidating to make stuff though. And it's almost like paper - paper I can deal with!

Nesting and stitching

2010-04-11T22:23:00.001-04:00

Nesting and stitching

Swimming through the sea of reeds and murk

Watching and waiting

Listening in limbo

Wondering if the sleeper is going to awaken

Hello friends - apologies that I haven't posted to this blog in months. I really am here; I've just been on sort of an art hiatus. Its not to say that I haven't been doing a few things in the background here, I redecorated my studio, made the 12 days of jewelry at Christmas (guess what were given as gifts this past year?), danced around the edges of art, was fortunate to spend an art playdate in January with my good friend Sarah Whitmire . Heck, i even made a creation for submission to Somerset Studio for an Impressionists challenge....no idea if it will be accepted, but at least I submitted, right? The issue comes out next month; haven't heard anything, but I'm viewing it as no news is good news, right?

As a note, still waiting for "Queen Isabella at the Frost Fair" to appear, this was a piece I submitted probably two years ago for Black and White challenge. I was very excited to have my first published piece of artwork in SS, but due to outside factors beyond anyone's control, (the economy) it's publication was put on semi-forever hold. It is supposed to be appearing in this Summer's upcoming Somerset Gallery, so hopefully it will and then will wend it's way home. I'll be happy to see it again!

But all that being said, I haven't been feeling inspired to jump back in to art for me for months.

I do experience these creative recessions every so often; my muse just goes into sort of a long winter's nap. She and I normally have a very cool and groovy relationship, in which she spins and dances and keeps me up at night. But, sometimes she just needs to be the introvert like me too. The bigger me (that's the one the rest of the world sees - has been feeling pretty introverted too.) I have a long list of correspondence that I need to return letters to, a long list of to-do's that I need to accomplish so I'm less of a feral friend to the folks that send me letters and attempt to keep up with me. Lord love em!

I feel a bit (a lot) guilty for not making art, but then there's other things that I also really enjoy, like genealogy, and bicycling, and gardening, and so for a while now, I've just done those instead. And then of course, there's all that boring "real life" stuff like holidays and Christmas cards, and post-holiday hangover (not a real hangover, but I swear I don't recover from December until the end of January) and family matters and a six-week stretch of cleaning out our entire house of nicknacks and junk that have been a bit time and energy consuming. A dear lady on one of the bulletin boards that I read described this sort of thing as "nesting" rather than flying, and that made me feel a bit better about the whole thing. The guilt and so forth. Made it seem less lazy, and more necessary. The creative flow stopping to pick up sticks so to speak.

But as the months have gone on, I have been waiting and wondering and listening to see if the muse is done with her nap. Beginning to wonder if this hibernation is going on a little too long. I listened to the very inspiring podcast by Rice Freeman Zachery (notes from the voodoo lounge) on "10 Ways to Jumpstart Inspiration" and followed her suggestion of "try something completely new" so I did a few quilting and sewing classes - way the heck out of my comfort zone. I'm a paper artist, darn it!. Overall I quite enjoyed them (though very stressful! Argh! So much math in sewing!) and I do want to get a bit more into art quilts, definitely, but I'm not sure that they are the whole answer either. I redecorated, and I sewed a sofa cover (not artsy, in fact of all things, it's beige, but my dogs seem to love it.)

Which all brings up to today; I was out for a bike ride with my beloved, and we were talking about the-rest-of-our-lives (hey, we're middle aged, the span of time suddenly seems a little less elastic) and he suggested I really do need to get on with this art teaching and getting my art business going. And with the conviction that spring and sunshine and birds and orange blossoms bring, it suddenly seemed like an awfully good idea. Ideas are beginning to churn around

Am I over the long winter's nap yet? Jury is still out, but I'm feeling a bit of creative fluttering. I hope so.

Do you have any muse nap wake-her-uppers? Any suggestions for your fellow artist(s)? Bring em on!

Art cottages by the sea

2009-11-24T20:00:00.002-05:00

My art cottage that you see is from a collage (if wishes could make it real!) it represents my ideal life. You know about that one...the one where we live in a fabulous art community of kindred spirits, and we eat lots of delicious food and don't gain weight, and our dogs come to "work" with us every day, because our work is art and we do this in an adorable cottage by the sea with the smell of roses and lavender wafts through the windows, and we can wear our gypsy clothes....

I am at least lucky to have a room of my own in my ordinary suburban house for my art studio (and that's a pretty cool thing too) and I've been a bit fired up this week to paint the boring white bookshelves in it into glorious hot pink, and mango orange, and Indian Yellow Hue gold (well, that's what Golden paints calls it) and maybe some sage green. I got a couple of guest chairs for my room this weekend at an antiques market (nice word for maybe-I'll-find-something junk rummage) and they're already painted in adorable stripes and spots and so forth, but I think they need a little more tweaking...

Good thing it's a four day weekend, huh! Hope you spend yours the way you want to - with family, or friends, or solitude (and that's a GREAT thing too) and pets and art and your muse!

Beeswax collage with Claudine

2009-11-19T20:54:00.009-05:00

Parisian Collage - with photos taken by me this summer in the city of light...

Flower fairies dancing in my autumn garden...

And see that they have a queen! She loves pink flowers and rainbows, notice how her throne is crowned in them...

How fortunate I feel that I had the opportunity, on top of all the other artistic wonder that I've had the pleasure of experiencing this most artful of years, to attend a beeswax collage class with Claudine Hellmuth this past weekend at the Art League of Daytona Beach.

A nice small class, lots of one-on-one guidance and inspiration from Claudine herself - I felt like this class was such a revelation! I've had all the supplies for about four years, but never really quite had the confidence to step much into the world of beeswax collage. Now I'm very glad I did! This was the second class I've taken with the glamourous and gracious Claudine - and I just adore her. She is such a sweetie! She really keeps things upbeat and positive, but always with a wry sense of humor and a lot of patience with demonstrating and explaining things.

The thing with beeswax is that it basically renders everything with a filmy, gauzy haze of dreams - and it makes the divisions between the layers disappear. It's like working in collage heaven, all your images seem to blend and become transparent. Like Photoshop for the fingers. Ok, maybe not quite, because Photoshop has never actually burned my finger and I did manage to touch a hot iron with my thumb! Claudine observed that "I don't usually get injuries in my class..." Well, I also managed to shoot myself with my own arrow in a college archery class, so clearly when the right brain takes over from the left. Uh huh, I need supervision. But, it's a clear sign that the muse is dancing and gallivanting, and she was certainly out for a spin with the wax. I can't wait to try some more of this technique!

Pictures above are of a cigar box that I collaged the top of (I think it will be the holder for my Art Journal that I did of my summer trip to Europe) and the front of a vintage photo album that'll eventually become another art journal. The flower is just...well...a flower. But it was "rescued" from the "distressed plants" section at Lowes and I figured it might light a moment in the blog spotlight.
Wheeeeee!!

A little bit of Inspanahatation

2009-11-12T21:10:00.004-05:00

Thank you so much to everyone who has been kind enough to visit my blog and even more thanks to the lovely folks who have left lovely comments :-)

Heartsfire asked if I could post a few samples of work from Anahata's class - I'm happy to (thanks for asking ;-) Here's a few bits and pieces of widsom in my "class notes" (a bit stream-of-conscious but there it is) that I took to remember all the outpouring of wisdom pure creative juju that was zooming and flowering in that quiet and sunlit room where some swore that they saw a blue aura around our Queen Anahata...

The journal is not a finished product, it's not perfect, it's not "precious" -during the first 20 - 30 minutes of working on the page, expect a lot of mental chatter. Don't feed that cookie monster, art friends! Banishing the blank page with some pencil marks, some pen marks, some scraps of paper - whatever you can dish out to start pushing that blank page monster away. Start to create an environment on your page - your ingredients are a character, a background where your character lives, and then play paperdolls with whatever accessories the character needs to tell the story. Keep the "sweet spot" in one area of the page (the sweet spot is where you have whatever coolness is emerging) and try to resist the urge to do that same cool effect everywhere else too. If you start to delay and question what to do next, you aren't moving fast enough, and you're thinking too much. Let your impulse rein. Do what is unexpected - if you think you are supposed to put on another layer of paint, then resist that urge. Splatter on some random ink lines instead. Dark colors push objects into the background, light colors bring the object out. So, use this theory to make the parts of your picture disappear where you don't want to see them, and make the parts you want to highlight pop.

Oh, I wish I'd had a tape recorder, or maybe it wouldn't have made a difference - maybe it was just the juicy inspirational flowers that were seemingly placed in our heads. I do know that we all created work that we had probably never done anything like before or since, and there definitely was a sense of building techniques from the first illustration (the rose one) to the second (the white background one). I had a harder time with the white background, as when in doubt, I tend to stick on more color. Even with this, I probably cheated and gave my girl red and purple dreadlocks, hey, go as the spirit moves you!

Journalfest collage and a list...

2009-11-07T14:50:00.002-05:00

What I loved about Journalfest:

all the glorious true art sisters in my classes, dorm, and everywhere...

the food - delish, fresh, creative, great quality

walks with my companion the sea at daybreak from zen calm...

...to free, wild chop

the rainbows in the sky (I don't have a picture of them but this airplane window image will have to fill in as "nearest-to-rainbow"...they were there though)

the rich and juicy creative flow with so much inspiration everywhere

the gold and orange trees (no fall colors where I live, and much the pity for it)

the way-cool trades that everyone made, being surrounded by that much creativity was an unearthly boost!

my cozy "artist's garret" room where one could have company when one desired and solitude for introspection

wonderful, insightful classes with such lovely teachers who were so accessible and engaged

feeling like part of the "Teesha and Tracy family" with the super helpers (Ben and co.) who seemed to be at all the right places at all the right times - so organized that it made the whole event seem effortless (now that's organized!) No problem seemed like a problem at all in their capable hands

the down-to-earth atmosphere and real-ness of it all

Saturday night's party with the perfectly right grooves of Surrealized and the generous wine bar!

the stop-you-in-your-tracks and abandon your luggage Sunday a.m. sunrise - almost surreal in its orange-pink glory outlining the mountains beyond the bay in a jagged purple that felt like you could touch them. (I'm sure nature and the Moores conspired for this)

(Photo above in the banner - it was bannerworthy!)

and finally, Mt. Ranier (at times a bit shy - like for a week last summer when I was in Olympia and didn't get to see it once) even poked its head out from the clouds for the girls on the shuttle bus to see on the way back to the airport

I'm still coming back to earth from all that floating in the creative stratosphere..... and I'm journaling just about every day now!

I learned so much,

I felt so much

I'll hold it in my heart for a long time.

Back from Journalfest!

2009-10-28T21:42:00.005-04:00

Hello readers, and once again, apologies for the long absence. Guess I'd better get one of those "blogging without obligation" badges that Tiffini Elektra X has to make it seem like it's...uhh...intentional or something ;-)

Anyway, I was lucky enough to attend my second art adventure of the year - Journalfest - hosted by the wonderful and gracious Teesha and Tracy Moore. What an experience of a lifetime! The energy of three days of classes - each so different and special - with Anataha Katkin, Traci Bunkers, and Ingrid Djikers. Daybreak walks on the beach, followed by art making, followed by delicious lunch, more art making, afternoon strolls down the beach (oh! the photos) with a glass of local wine in hand, more awesome food, and then parties! The closing night band - Surrealized - were incredible and created such a rich energy and mood. The Moore's festival angels - Ben, this means you - were everywhere at just the right time, and nothing seemed to be too much trouble for them. Plus, the artists at the fest themselves - the "big names" and the students - we all mixed together in a democratic, equal, kinship of spirit. And then, just when you think it can't get better, it started with a rainbow that reached into the sea right over Ft. Worden, and it ended with the pinkest, orangest, purplest sunrise that literally stopped you in your tracks. I also loved that after all the fun, I had the peace and quiet of your own cozy little "artist's garret" room to journal introspectively into the wee hours. Oh yeah, and then do it all over again!

It was incredibly awesome, and I hope to put some pictures in here sometime soon. I think it's the pictures that keep me from posting as often as I'd like to - something about having to go into photoshop and resize the pictures to make them low resolution just keeps me from doing it. I'm an analogue girl in a digital world, I'm afraid. Of course, as this is an art blog, it kind of helps to have pictures. Will have to get this dichotomy sorted in my head.

Anyway, the pictures (for lack of actually having pictures of the event downloaded from the camera yet) what the confirmation packet looked like anyway. It took me three days just to find the right, special-ist time to even open it, and it didn't disappoint. The packet was so full of well thought-out goodness, so much journaling material. So much caring and thought went into it. Plus, a journal for you to get started on as a prelude to the event. When I got it, I knew that this event was going to be special, and it certainly was everything I had hoped for. I carried my Journalfest journal around with me everywhere - I didn't dare go without it! It is now a treasured souvenir of such a special, intense, introspective, rich, colorful, lush week.

A shot of old fashioned Dutch coziness

2009-08-22T20:49:00.012-04:00

Hello friends!

I haven't updated the blog in quite a while, as I'm sure you noticed, but fear not! I have not been idle on the artistic front during the absence :-) Quite the contrary - I had the extreme good fortune to spend three weeks in July in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and England, and I'd like to share a few souvenirs of my adventures with you...

So, Amsterdam. Depending on your viewpoint, the mention of the word Amsterdam either brings forward mental images of windmills, canals, people wearing wooden shoes, and tulips, or...sodom and gomorrah with canals. Of course, the stereotypes have a bit of basis in reality, but the real deal is far more than any of these things.

Travel is a mind-altering experience any way you look at it. Amsterdam is...cozy, quiet, relaxed, warm, friendly, funky, tolerant, beautiful, zen, juicy. As an artist, you simply must take the opportunity to have your mind altered.....by slowing down and just relaxing, taking photos by the dozen, seeing the art museums.

Listening to jazz drifting in the air as you peruse the colors of Indonesia and the exotic east at the Waterlooplein market.

Pedaling out of town along the Amstel river to visit the windmills. Feeling the quiet settle around you as you whirr past farms with cows and ponies knee deep in the clover and grass.

Sketching the flowers in their planters on the houseboats.

Renting a bike and flying along the moonlit canals with the wind in your hair, floating like a quiet bird.

Laughing, having fun, stopping for some cheese and beer, or a rose and honey flavor liqueur in a 300 year old creaky wooden-floored bar.

Catching the nightly parade of happy families on their boats cruising down the canal.

I'm sure some of the locals must have had cares in this world, but I didn't see them, and so I didn't have them either.

Ah, Amsterdam. Relax and breathe......

July night sky on the Prinsengracht, 10 p.m.

Pedaling along the Amstel on a sunny afternoon

They really do have working windmills! Didn't see any wooden shoes though.

Twilight in the Jordaan District, any second you'll see the boats come out with their Dutch flags flapping in the breeze

A waterfally of color at the Waterlooplein Market

Chapter Three - Happy Technicolor Dream of People to Meet and Things to Buy

2009-07-03T17:35:00.007-04:00

Day Three of Art and Soul - Hampton

Day Three and I'm quite firmly in the routine of this whole art camp thing by now. Up for breakfast, scramble to find whatever corner of my luggage all the items that I need for the day's class have fallen into, chase into class and grab a chair, WHEW...

Vintage Metal Deck with Leighanna Light

Transform ordinary metal into fabulous thick, chunky beautifully embellished decks of cards. Each card will represent a meaningful word or theme which will be explored in text on the back, and upon completion they will be bound together with wire and danglies. Learn several surface altering techniques using patinas, rust, gesso, and wax...(bring Modern Options Patina)

So a few days before I left, I was raiding my local Joann Crafts for Modern Options Patina. I am pretty well versed in the exact placement of every item in every row of their store, so after devoting a good 20 minutes to finding a pile of fake rust and striking out, I knew this was not the place to go. (Must be at other craft store...) This theory was supported by the inquiry of the cash register chick, "Did you find everything you needed?"

Note: if a cashier asks you if you've found everything you need - just tell them yes, it saves 30 seconds of babbling inquiry. They don't really care, and they have no idea how to fix the issue. They are apparently just conditioned into asking you a rhetorical question. If you indicate that you haven't found what you needed, they seem universally confused and unsure as to what action to take next. So, they proceed to ring up your items and say, "Oh, well, sorry about that...Did you look in paint?"

Anyway, I made the mistake (against my better judment) of saying, "Well, no I am looking for Modern Options Patina..." Was greeted by blank stare. (me) "It's a two part surface finisher, makes objects look like rusty metal..." (sales person) "Well, can't you just leave whatever it is in the yard for a couple months?" (me: "That will not produce rust by Wednesday!") But I digress...

Leighanna's class quickly grabbed the metal "decks", sandpaper (the worst part, you have to sand everything to get proper adhesion), and were busily pounding away with hammers and dapping blocks and daubing our patinas in new and excitingly rusty ways. (Michaels Crafts carries it, by the way) Class was a smorgasbord of different techniques to try - venetian plaster, stamping with gesso, alcohol inks, paint, tissue paper, and after about four hours, lovely rust! Even in places I didn't realize could get rusty, such as on the drip paper I put beneath my "rust." Lovely effect, by the way!

I have to admit, by afternoon I was getting a little tired. I'm not sure if everyone experiences this, but the creative muscle was shaking a bit from all this flexing. Our class was really great, and I had wonderful table mates, but I felt the need to eat lunch by myself in the empty class room. Batteries were starting to sputter just a little. Art and Soul learning - don't overschedule yourself. Although the idea of studying with all the Big Names at one time sounds fantastic in your studio at home - I really suggest you don't try to push yourself to day and night activities. It's exhausting! Also, there is so much to take in, so much color and funky stuff, so much total creativity - it just gets physically and emotionally overwhelming after a while. A while, for me, was three days.

I kind of got my second wind after lunch, and I wound up with a good start on the deck, but I must confess it is still a UFO (unfinished object). It's on my list of things to do. Leighanna's sample decks, however are really amazing, and I truly strive to be able to embellish as she does one of these days. Our class had a lot of esprit de corps, and I think we all really enjoyed meeting and supporting each other creatively.

(Tablemate Jill, Leighanna, me, and tablemate Kari)

Skip ahead - early dinner - more drinks at happy hour - to the potential promise of parting with unseemly amounts of cash at Vendor Night. I met up the New Zealand gals and hit the convention center with a hundred bucks to spend. Word to the wise - don't get cash advances on your credit card; turns out your trusty credit card company penalises you to the tune of $10 an advance - damn you, Chase Visa! I was quite determined that I wouldn't spend past my hundred. I have the ability to lie to myself quite convincingly. What a crush of people! All the big names are at their booths, with lovely bounty of their creativity for sale. Oh my - the good news was that the truly important stuff was way beyond my budget, but some of the artists had things in the $30-ish range, and that's about where I am. So, one Jane Ann Wynn necklace, a Kerin Gale pendant, a Sally Jean Alexander soldered goodie, and some lovely bits of old sari fabric strips, paint, bits and bobs later - I managed to make it out with only minor credit card damage and quite a few new trinkets to finger covetously. I managed to avoid buying a mini-theater, and my friend from NZ bought the vintage mortician's document box so I didn't have to. We get buy with a little help from our friends.

Me with Sally Jean, the Soldering Queen

Day Four - Paint, paint, paint....

The toughest class yet (though still much better than being at work) that I'd scheduled myself. Adventures in Color, with Claudine Hellmuth. This was a "real art school" type class, in which we mixed colors of paint, mastered the color wheel, and tossed around words like "value", "tone" and "hue" with impunity. Sure enough, within a couple of hours, we were mixing up various shades of red, and green, and getting to match fairly close to the color chips we were given, and starting to branch out on our own with selecting colors and duplicating them. As Claudine put it, "paint matching for the recession!" You too only need red, blue, and yellow paint to make pretty much any color, and I definitely want to practice this new skill some more - I'll put it on the to do list, right after that UFO from the previous day. She definitely made it a lot more fun than my dreaded junior high school art teacher, and I felt like I got at least a glimpse into why people could get into heated arguments of which is a bluer blue, technically speaking.

Me with the spectacularly glam Claudine Hellmuth

By now, though, my energy level was really flagging, and no reflection on Claudine (who is a sweetie!) but I was ready to be done and outta there by the last hour of class. I spent my lunch outside the convention center lying in the sun next to a fountain and not speaking to anyone. I think my nerves had been though every emotion that it's about possible to feel - I was so happy, but so wrung out that I remember bursting in tears at some point and thinking, "But I'm happy!!!" What can I say, it's a life experience. Next time, though, I'm going to take it a lot more easy.

After class I went for a swim in the Embassy Suites pool, fortified myself with one more glass of wine for the road, and went to my last class, Fab Art Boxes with my my roommate - Traci Bunkers. By now, I think most of the conference attendees were about where I was. Creatively satiated and perhaps ready to sit back and put it all into perspective. I had a sense of "I'm ready for this to be done, but at the same time, I'm already missing it and all my new friends..." I decided to just take it very easy and just do whatever with my box in the class and if I didn't finish, if I didn't do a great project, well, hell with it.

May I say I got so much technique tips from this class! Traci is a very laid back, quiet teacher and I think was the perfect person to end the week with. This was not a hard, intellectual stretch - we just started painting and texturing our cigar boxes, and laying on layer after layer of papers and stamps and paint - I felt like I was back home in my studio except with a great art journaler by my side to help and advise. I sat with one of my New Zealand buddies and we just relaxed and did whatever, and it was really great. We went to the hotel lobby and had the last huzzah of the event - just curled up in the big armchairs and drinking gin and tonic and just laughing and relaxing and realizing that it was all over. Other attendees came over and joined us, and it was a laid back, comfortable old velvet kind of party in the lobby. The richness of the time we had all shared, the laughter, the feeling of sisterhood and of finding your tribe. We all reflected on it, and we knew that it was time to transition back to the "real world" but we didn't quite want to let it all go, now that it was done. Not yet....

Two months later - Fab Art box is still not finished, in fact, it contains the bits and pieces from all my other UFO projects from Art and Soul, but one of these days I'm going to finish it. Friends and I went our separate ways, some I've been in contact with since, life has gone back to normal. Most of the attendees have told me they haven't really done too much creatively since, but they're just getting ready to....and that's why I think in the end that I enjoy this so much. It's all part of a bigger circle of life and art and love and there are no time limits on that. It's not about the hours, it's about the moments of transcendent happiness and quiet satisfaction that comes from expressing your art, and by extension your soul.

Thank you all Art and Soul sisters, tribe members, gentle readers - I've enjoyed getting to share my tale with you, and I strongly encourage you to go if you at all can. Invest in yourself, and take your art seriously but lightly. And bring an apron - you never know how many places gesso can get to if shaken without the cap on...

Slight delay on Chapter Three of Art and Soul saga

2009-06-14T22:09:00.002-04:00

Dearest readers -apologies, but I spent the afternoon with my fellow Altered Artist of Central Florida, my friend Cindy, painting instead of writing my blog. We were supposed to be making Creativity Cards following one of the exercises in LK Ludwig's True Vision journaling book. What I wound up making is the new banner that you see at the top of this blog. Cindy's work is still in progress as my husband "borrowed" her to practice singing with him. (He's in a band). So, I promise to try and work on the rest of the story this week - please stay tuned and my apologies again that I am a little unprepared to tell...the rest of the story...

Thank you everyone that has sent me wonderful e-mails and comments, I truly appreciate your support and enjoyment of my little story. :-)

Percolating post-Art and Soul - Chapter Two - "Drawing it Out"

2009-06-06T10:33:00.015-04:00

NOTE: Please see chapter one, "J'arrive" in the previous post for the beginning of the saga. Well, if you want to...

I am registered. I am really here at Art and Soul. I am really hungry, it's 7 p.m. on night one....

My stomach is pretty disciplined around a lack of food, but not a lack of drink. Thus a visit to the Hampton Inn Manager's Happy Hour was clearly in order. I don't know who this manager is, but I wish I'd been more like him back in the days when I was in management! Free drinks and nutritively suspicious chips for everyone! I didn't have a lot of time, so I grabbed a gin and tonic (the first of many over the course of the next few days until I was actually tired of them and switched to the more artistic merlot), and saw Juliana Coles (my heretofore unmet roommate, and teacher of my first class) in the drinks line.

Juliana is the creator of Extreme Visual Journalism, which is her form of art journaling with an emphasis on raw inner work. She's a bit of a force of nature, and one of those women that just exudes "artist" with her awesome energy and soul and wacky chick vibe. (I mean that in the best way!) Relocating a glass of wine from the hotel to her class, she was quickly emoting in a throaty voice that we should "bear down harder! Ooooohh yeah, harder! Harder!" with our pencils! I'm drawn to gorgeously eccentric like a moth to flame, so obviously an evening with Juliana is far better than the normal dozing in front of "Good Eats with Alton Brown."

First she had us introduce ourselves, then select five magazine images. As you can imagine, everyone thought they were going to express their artistry, their aesthetic values, their ability to select things they might be able to actually draw. When Juliana said, "Now give your pictures to the person sitting next to you, " the lady sitting next to me looked like she was going to have heart failure! To be honest, I wasn't inspired by lovely images of cats (dachshunds all the way for me), nor was she best pleased with my kabuki dude and African women in beads and not-much-else. (actually, the horrified reactions to this exercise was my favorite moment in the whole class.) I think we were practicing letting go. I hope the lady next to me emotionally recovered.

I don't want to give away Juliana's trade secrets, but we did a rather neat and unexpected thing with carbon paper and our journals, and there was no shading of boxes. We then made backgrounds with tape, lots of wild lines on pages (harder! more graphite!), and did some visual note taking of stuff around us. I can't say that I made a gray convention center partition wall look any more interesting than it was, but I did get the idea that really, it's not about the object. It's not about the drawing either. It's about the documentation of your life. You need to practice it. You need to lose your judgments of it, and just get it onto paper. Even if it's harder than it looks. Really enjoyed spending some time with Juliana, and even though it wasn't one of her deep inner work classes, I think I got at least a flavor of why her fans love her.

Yes, I gave the unused kitty images back to my neighbor, my karma is intact.

9 p.m. - still hungry - hadn't eaten since 7 a.m. Is this what they mean by starving artist? I sat in the hotel dining room by myself, and before I knew it I heard a "Yoo hoo! Come sit with us!" from one of my classmates, the estimable Pinky La Rouge. Pinky, another force of nature, is a member of the Bretheren from Juliana's Key West retreat in January. I'd been rather curious to meet her as I've enjoyed her energetic blog posts on Juliana's Extreme Journaling Yahoo group. I visualized her as swathed in a hot pink feather boa, spectacular earrings, and a big saucy grin more or less permanently in place. I'm so glad to not be mistaken! She was exactly who I thought she'd be and was much amused by the Edward Cullen action figure fondling that took place. So, suddenly I was enjoying my solitary shrimp and grits and wine with Pinky, Sandy, Pinky's son and girlfriend, and Juliana.

A note for those of you who have never attended Art and Soul (for those of you who have, you already know this) it is the friendliest, most outgoing group of like-minded ladies imaginable. It's a technicolor swirl of scintillating real women who talk like there's no tomorrow, and who want to enfold newbies and oldbies and anyone passing by into their chat. It's like a United Nations of Paint. If you don't know anyone, you will by the time it'll take you to read this sentence. A simple, "So, what classes have you taken/are you taking?" will occasion at least 20 minutes of gab, an exchange of emails, quite possibly a handover of cool ephemera, and the knowledge that you've found your tribe. And (as I keep insisting) I'm an introvert!

Day Two - Friday - 8 a.m.

I wake up from a dream that Traci Bunkers has told me that I shouldn't put off doing art just because I'm convinced that I need to clean up an entire stable full of manure first. I heard many reports of people having the oddest, most colorful dreams over the next couple of days. Not sure if anyone else dreamed that their roommate told them to not clean up crap, because art is more important. Yes, I got the hidden inner message.

Breakfast and lunch (yay, I'm eating!) with Sophie - wow, what a talented and fantastic person. I really wish that I'd got to spend more time with her; she is just one of those people that I instantly connected with. As mentioned in my previous post, you meet soul sisters at this event that you just know you were supposed to meet in your life, even if just briefly. That's why it's called "Art and Soul" I think. I wear the beautiful crystal necklace that she gave me often, (always to rave comments) and reflect on how lucky I am.

Today was Altered Curiosities - The Illuminated Shrine with Jane Wynn- and it was amazing! Jane is an incredibly generous, kind teacher and gives so much encouragement that before you know it, otherwise well groomed and normal women are getting busy with a drill press. And a butane torch, and a copper pipe cutter. Oh my! What I truly loved about this class, from the pretty bags of mystery objects that we were greeted with to the photo session six hours (felt like six minutes) later was how everyone's individual creativity was so encouraged and supported. We all started with photo frames from Michael's Crafts, and we ended up with fifteen or so completely different illuminated (beyond cool when something is lit up from within!) jewelboxes of ideas. I had no idea what I was going to emerge with - my finished project turned out to be Mata Hari dancing on a glittering stage complete with footlights and a crystal chandelier. My table mates created a winter woodland scene with stars, and a cute little girl with birds. Others created beautiful miniature worlds under the sea, in an English telephone box, and with a glitter queen. For the trimphant class show-and-tell, look at the hyperlink above, my project below (as photographed by Jane Wynn herself.) Just a really inspirational creative class, I highly recommend.

6 p.m. - it's happy hour again! My, that is one generous Manager.

I waded with a "I hope I'll see that person I know in a minute..." look through the crowd, (actually, it was a ruse, I was hoping someone would ask me to sit with them). Sure enough, within seconds I was asked to sit with Jo, Jeane, and Dale. Dale is a patroness of the arts, and the hippest 80-something chick ever. I enjoyed several breakfasts and dinner drinks with her over the weekend, and she is truly inspirational. Jo and Jeane, the Girls from New Zealand, became my new BFF's (best friends forever!) and my great companions over the days ahead. We talked and talked, and closed down happy hour, and kept on talking and drinking over at Harpoon Larry's - and eating some awesome scallops too. By now I'd eaten plateloads of seafood, which just kept getting better and better. We just clicked like friends who had known each other since always, and I laughed harder and more that evening than I have in months. Also, the added amusement value of zooming around the New Zealand Embassy Squad Car to the local WalMart in search of 2 part epoxy at 11 p.m. on a Friday night just can't be beat.

Tune in to this blog for the next chapter - coming in the next few days.

"Chapter Three - Happy Technicolor Dream of People to Meet and Things to Buy!"

(Sneak preview, from "Vintage Metal Deck - Leighanna Light")

We transform ordinary metal into a fabulous thick, chunky, beautifully embellished deck of cards. Each card represents a meaningful word or theme which is further explored in text. Learn several surface techniques using patinas, rust, gesso, and wax.

Patinas! Rust! I'm there...

Percolating post-Art and Soul - Chapter One "J'arrive"

2009-05-31T10:02:00.009-04:00

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I confess I have not blogged since before Art and Soul (late April).

Right, got that out of the way!

My nature is completely against all the rules of successful blogging (rule #1 - post often, #3 be timely, #2 be succinct) and journalism (rule #1 about journalism, be timely). I should know this; my (unused) BA is in journalism. But, I may as well just accept it as "normal" for me. What is this mea culpa about, anyway?

I have to percolate after big events.

Like the Art and Soul retreat, holidays in Europe, and to the mountains, that sort of thing. Not just get my stuff unpacked, catch up on sleep, realize just how messy my house actually is when I don't see it everyday -and can ignore the commode that needs a good dose of SnoBol - kind of stuff. (Isn't it funny how you don't notice the toothpaste collection at the bottom of your sink every time you brush your teeth when you see it several times a day? But it reaches out and smacks you in the guilt when you're away from it for a week...)

No, I mean I have to let all the sights and emotions and thoughts and creative pepper just settle and melange together into a rather rich - ok, congealed - stew before I'm ready to start talking about them. Before I'm ready to start creating again after all the firestorm of inspiration that these types of lifehappenings invoke for me. I even dreamed about it last night - and the word "fungestation" actually was said to me in my dream. I looked it up this morning on Google, and I didn't like the rather distasteful implications that this word apparently has in the internet world - but I think I'll keep that word in my personal lexicon anyway and just have my own meaning.

Fungestation - nurturing happy and art-filled ideas and feelings until they have stewed richly enough that they are ready to be brought into the world. Fungestation is synonymous with "percolation."

Percolation (fungestation) time varies depending on the impact of said event. If I had to estimate it though, I'd say the congealed cassoulet that is my mind after a big creative fandango is ready to serve about four weeks later.

So, I'm thinking I'm about ready to discuss Art and Soul Virginia - which I attended at the end of April, and here we are, May 31. I think I experienced about every emotion that could possibly run through my soul in the course of four days - I was overwhelmed on an hourly basis. I met so many wonderful ladies that I just know I'd be art-sisters with if we didn't live hours, days, continents away from in real life. I had the privilege of studying with gifted and generous teachers. I was the recipient of so much kindness and generosity. I was living in a happy, peaceful, glittering, colorful, all-is-right-in-the-world art village with happy hour and room service.

Oh, and just so you know, I'm a newbie to this, and this was a spur of the moment decision to attend at all kind of trip. Although I've been happily enveloped in the world of mixed media art for about four years, up till this point I had only dreamed of attending one of the big retreats. The idea of taking classes with people who you've only met through their books! Talking with other people who understand the many properties of gesso! Who have as many adhesives as I do! I decided the week before the trip to attend. Dare to dream...

Chapter One - J'arrive

I arrived (already tired from getting up waywayway early to get to the airport for a 7 a.m. flight) in Hampton, VA - beautiful large, dense walls of trees, cool, cloudy skies, and the smell of wildflowers and clover and the sea in the air. So emotionally soothing. Anyway, check in to the Embassy Suites (they have the softest towels!) and who should I see emerging from the elevator - LK Ludwig! Incarnate! I felt a bit gobsmacked at this sighting of Altered Art celebrity (aka - BNA (big name artist) stardusting), and I'd only been at the convention about two minutes. I knew, as though I hadn't known already, that the next few days were going to bring out the embarrasing fangirl in my otherwise sensible 40-something self.

Up to my room, I open the door, and there was my never-before-met (and completely last minute got-lucky-to-get-roomates with) roommate for the next four days - Traci Bunkers (and Juliana Coles, but I didn't meet her till later). Celebrity roommates! (I try to stem verbal diarrhea of babbling on how much I admire Traci's multi-layered paint washes, and instead get my rolling tote of art supplies in the door without stubbing toe on wheels again.)

Right - must act like an adult and put clothes away. Yes, very sensible thing to avoid wrinkles. Clothes go in closet...clothes go on hangers...aw hell, I want to go to the convention NOW!

20 minutes later - off to the Art and Soul check-in. Meet the unflappable Glenny Densem-Moir (who should be nominated for sainthood). Glenny is the memorizer of faces, organizer of the schedules, smoother out of issues, and general chatelaine of the event. As I'd only registered a week before the event, I got my welcome packet upon arrival, and was expecting a few photocopied sheets of instructions and a map of the convention center.

What I got was a lovely (deeply practical!) totebag/backpack in hot pink with Art and Soul emblazoned on it, a beautiful keepsake souvenir book with a 45 record and little "faux records" with all my classes and instructors in the record sleeves, a sheet of Claudine's sticky backed canvas, a tube of Golden brand paint, and some other assorted insundry stuff. Off to make a matchbox shrine (see above) at the Make'n'Take, and a souvenir make-your-own commemorative necklace, and general ogling of the many fine items at the Collage store. The real "Collage" store is in Portland, OR, but they apparenly pack up the magical caravan and bring it to the A&S events. They had stuff that even I didn't recognize. I have an entire drawer of adhesives for every need, that they had stuff I hadn't heard of amazed me.

Chapter Two - Drawing it Out

(sneak preview) - "We all can draw. though we may not expect it, or how we think it should look. We can't draw even a straight line. Well, it's time I show you otherwise, because drawing a straight line has nothing to do with expression. We will not be drawing crumpled bags, shading a box, or any other mechanical drawing exercises taught in art school. You will learn to make your marks in your own strange and beautiful hand. Your drawings will not look like mine, they will look like your own..." (from Juliana Coles' Drawing it Out: An Intro to Expressive Drawing)

As the last time I took a drawing class was in Junior High school, with an art teacher who was either only accepting of the fine arts, or more interested in the cuter girls than me. I never really did get my cones and boxes to look all shaded like boxes are supposed to look.

But really, who wants to draw boxes??

Until next post....

Some art journal pages, and Art and Soul!

2009-04-25T13:18:00.010-04:00

It's been a very busy few weeks in my corner of the world - I've been taking Sarah Whitmire's Advanced Soul Journaling online course, which was a delight, and I highly recommend it. As part of the course, you get weekly 18 - 25 page fully illustrated sets of instruction, learning multiple new techniques. They are all very do-able, and really don't require any odd or funky materials, so no need to run off to your nearest art supply store. Of course, you know you'll want to ;-). Sarah also has a Yahoo group especially for the class that runs from a few weeks before, until three weeks after the five-week class finishes, and there are weekly online chats on Sunday nights where you can interact with the other class members, talk to Sarah, and just enjoy a sense of community.

Here are a few pages from the early parts of the lessons. I note this because, well, I'm rather behind. I actually considered that I was doing fairly well with attending most of the online chats , but I am definitely rather a late finisher (actually, nowhere near finished) on the class instructions! Ah well, art is not a race to the finish. I am going to finish up the project upon my return from Art and Soul Virginia - which is (yikes!!) starting four days from now.

Art and Soul has been one of my "must-see's" for a few years now, but I didn't really have any plans to attend. Then, I sort of got a wild hair, realized (no doubt due to the economy) that there were still lots of classes available even two weeks before the event, and just decided to jump in with both feet and go. I'm not attending the entire event, just three days, should be more than enough art to keep me inspired for months to come. I'm very excited to be taking classes on drawing, color theory and mixing, assemblage with lighting, and metal patina work. These are all areas that I definitely can use some expert advice in, and with Claudine, Jane Wynn, Leighana Light, and Juliana Coles at the helm, I think I'm going to learn a LOT!

Wishing you an artful spring weekend!

GPP Crusade #29 - Brush Effects

2009-03-30T22:29:00.005-04:00

Michelle's Crusade #29 was all about the use of "painterly effects" to make lovely backgrounds for your journal pages - or use them around your altered photos - or use them on top of your journaling - or as well, anything you want really. I had a lot of fun with this, and definitely want to use these techniques again. I used my trusty Golden brand Quin Magenta, my cheapie JoAnn's teal and leaf green, made stencils, a bit of my hand carved stamps. Now I just need to art journal on top of it! Do I dare? Not sure....hmmm....

Mandalas - Soul Journal #21

2009-03-22T19:13:00.005-04:00

Mandala is Sanskrit for essence, and for containing - they come from Buddhist and Hindu spiritual practices and operate as a spiritual teaching tool inducing a trance state. In the modern world they were also studied by Carl Jung as a means for creating a window into the inner dialogue of the soul.

This all makes mandalas sound rather hard and unreachable, but in fact anyone can make them, and after practicing with a few, I think perhaps everyone should. Wouldn't we be happier at work if we spent a few minutes each day drawing these wonderful shapes and then just coloring them in? If I ever run the world, that's just what we'll be doing!

Mandalas are also the feature of this month's Soul Journaling prompt - so I thought I'd show you a couple of mine, and then encourage you to visit the Soul Journaling homepage, maybe even join the group - and start this addicting and enlightening art form for yourself.

I think that mine both have an "under the sea" sort of theme, which is not surprising as (and I wouldn't have ever noticed this before keeping all my art in the same journal) I have a water theme going on in pretty much all my art. I think it's because my moon sign is Scorpio (the crazy water sign!) which is representative of your inner self - the one you don't reveal to the outer world.

What does your art reveal about your inner world? I find it to be a dialogue with the page, and the muse to reveal things that are sometimes even hidden in your conscious mind. I'd love to be an art therapist one day.

The long promised Nick Bantock story

2009-03-08T18:44:00.009-04:00

I've mentioned a couple of times in my blog that I would tell the story of how I met my artistic inspiration - Nick Bantock - but never quite got around to it. So six months have gone by, in some ways feels like longer as my life has been very busy with my paying job these days and all, but here you go. Yes, it's a bit of a long story, nothing goes boom, no dreadfully exciting payoff - no impossibly cute vampires named Edward, despite Pacific Northwest setting of story...

I was on vacation in Washington state last August for a wedding. We spent a few days in Vancouver, BC, Canada and then took the ferry to Victoria which is on Vancouver Island. Now anyone who has visited Vancouver Island will ask, "Did you see Butchart Gardens?" (It's kind of the main attraction to see.) Answer is, well, no. I really do like gardens, but we only had a day, and about three miles from Vancouver Island is Salt Spring Island - where, you guessed it, Nick's studio "The Forgetting Room" is located. Well this just seemed to be too good to miss, so after having arrived at expensive B&B in Victoria, I promptly asked the husband if we could maybe not spend the next day in Victoria at all, but instead could we rent a car ($50+fuel), buy ferry tickets ($60), get up early to get on the ferry (vacation?) and spend the entire day trying to find an artist's studio? If we got done early enough, perhaps we could see the gardens...

Happily I am married to a very supportive husband; besides, he's had to trek across muddy and cow-pat laden fields all over southern England for me to see some prehistoric rock or another before, so he's used to these things. This was comparatively mild by comparison. So, he rents the car, we get up early, we drive 25 miles to the ferry terminal, and find out we JUST missed the ferry. Next one didn't leave for another 2 hours. So much for up early. Not wanting to waste vacation time (when time truly does equal money) we visited the quaint little town of Sidney, whose motto could probably be "We're here when you miss the ferry..." A pleasant tea and croissant sitting in the sunshine watching people walk their dogs isn't a bad way to spend a morning either. As a bonus, I found the Saltspring Lavender store and we had a lovely and purpley-scented visit (even though I grow lavender myself, I always want more). The store owner suggested we should really come back that night for the summer festival and street faire. I'm not one to let a street faire or farmers market go unvisited, so events were entirely conspiring at this point to never allow me to see the Butchart gardens.

Back to the ferry terminal. I really enjoyed the car ferry, as you can stand out on the deck and watch all these gorgeous islands pop up out of the blue green sparkly sea, plus work on your tan. (Over the course of several ferry rides during the week, my arm hairs bleached blonde! I'm viewing this as practically a BOGO - buy one car transport, get blond hair free. My head remained brown however).

We pull into the tiny town of Ganges - only town on the whole island - and pull out trusty GPS to find the studio. A few wonderful winding miles through tall trees with occasional glimpses of the sparkling sea later, yep, there it was! Just off the road in a little community of artist's cottages. I was so excited I was photographing the door, the window, the "closed for lunch" sign.
Well, nothing for it but back to town, and a bit of lunch ourselves. But first, a visit to Sabine's Bookstore and the Nick Bantock room! Yes, my first glimpse of a real NB painting, in the flesh (well, paint) and first editions of his books, and editions in Japanese, and signed copies, oh my! More money flies out window. I feel at this point that if I actually did get to meet him it would be practically a bonus, and really, what would I say anyway that wouldn't totally embarrass me in a fangirl sort of way. Lunch was delicious - local crab and white wine on the shaded patio of a cafe next to the town yoga studio, with a view of the marina. You can do worse.

Back in the car, winding roads, tall trees, yep, there it is again. And the door was open! In we stepped, to be greeted by a very friendly British woman "Hi, I'm Joyce" (much later turns out she's Nick's wife), who encourages us to look around and make ourselves at home. We chatted for a while, me babbling no doubt incoherently about how much I love the great man's work. She then says, "Do you think you can stick around for a little while? What's your name?" Me, "Oh yes" She then picks up the phone and calls him! Apparently he was off that afternoon with his son visiting from college, but not 10 minutes later this red Mini Cooper pulls up in front of the studio and out pops, well....Nick Bantock! He comes in, all smiles, and says, "Hi, you must be Jane!" to which I can think of nothing else than "You must be Nick?!" Son parked out on the back porch, he then spent the next hour walking my husband and I around the studio telling us about all the paintings, asking me about my art, just really took a lot of personal interest and time. It was like something out of a dream. To top it all off, he even gave me a set of his personal Griffin and Sabine faux poste artistamps and autographed them for me! I couldn't believe it. It's not so often you get to meet your heroes. Much less get to just hang out with them. Such a nice, funny, charming guy. Even my non-art husband was discussing art with him, and told him about how now that he had seen Nick's work, he sees the inspiration in mine and proceeded to inform Nick about my art! (blushing fiercely magenta here - but he got MASSIVE husband points for all this).

After we left, me dancing on cloud nine, we drove back to the ferry, crossed back to Vancouver Island, went to a gorgeous beach and sat on the rocks with our feet in the water, then went to Sidney's street faire, and finally got back to Victoria in time for a late dinner. It was truly one of the best days of my life.

If you're still awake by now, thank you for reading my story and clicking the links (you know you were tempted just to see what they were) :-)

Completely self-indulgent ramble on how I got started in art

2009-02-22T19:03:00.003-05:00

I intended this post to tell you all about how I met Nick Bantock (my personal artistic hero - nay, deity, though he would no doubt be very amused to be deified) but I decided that first I'd have a self-indulgent ramble about me and art and how I wound up with the most absorbing and second-most expensive hobby (after horses but really, who has time or money for that in middle age with a full time job) of my life. If you're reading this, you're probably a like minded sort of person...and I love hearing how people found their art niche, or if they haven't trying to talk them into mine, so here goes. Sort of setting the stage as it were...

I'm a kid - I draw everything, all the time. I love drawing and coloring. Whether drawn well or poorly I don't know, but my cousin (a real professional artist) encourages me with very fancy Caran D'Ache art supplies, my grandmother's next door neighbor gives me her set of antique Reeves watercolors that she took with her to Egypt in the 1920's....I draw horses in the margins of my textbooks.

I get to junior high - I am convinced I'll be either an artist, and archaeologist, or a flight attendant when I grow up. (Stewardesses were much more glam back in the 1960's and 70's when I was young). I take art class. I am completely shattered as I don't really draw apples and their shading very well. The art teacher pays no attention to me whatsoever. I give up.

I take a crafts class in college - yes, as a liberal arts major I really did take Basketweaving. I loved it. I learned how to carve stamps from linoleum and make monoprints, but somehow didn't really pick things back up. Do suspect that there may be a bigger world than fine arts.

1991 - start to hear about a literary phenomenon. See a cool book at a little independent bookstore in town (no longer around, sigh) and lo and behold - it's this phenomenon book. Griffin and Sabine - it's an artful correspondence between two people separated by space, and depending on your theory (it's rather a mysterious story) time. Or maybe they aren't really two people at all (Sabine may just live in Griffin's mind) but they have an enigmatic correspondence in postcards and letters. Their story unfolds via one of the most intriguing ways - opening their letters (incredibly artful and highly illustrated) and reading their mail. It's like spying on someone else's life, and trying to decipher their art along the way. It's just surreal and mysterious and romantic and it totally captured my imagination. It was like the view from the inside of my head had been mapped out, not the one that was there formerly, but the one that wanted to be and the one that felt completely right.

Skip forward through the 1990's and I would occasionally see books and cards and random things whose artwork and sensibilities just drew me in and fired my imagination. Merchant of Marvels, and Paris Out of Hand, and random stuff that just appeared in offbeat gift shops and would call out to me (it called "buy!" incase you're wondering). I didn't know why I liked this strange and exotic look with a dash of humor - sort of a combo of Monty Python cartoons and sensibility, 17th century woodcuts, North African dancers, and the curtains of Marie Antoinette's salon in a kaleidoscopic haze of color. I just knew it when I saw it and wanted more.

Forward again to Spring 2003 - I see Legacy magazine at my local Borders and am intrigued. I saw all these amazing art projects that seemed somehow do-able, had no idea how to do them though. I am fascinated, and at this point....I still had money ;-)

Summer 2005 - after a few forays into jewelry making, the purchase of an occasional rubber stamp at Joann's (no real idea what to do with it though) I happen upon an entire rubber stamp show - I go thinking I'll spend an hour or so. Two hundred dollars and the rest of the day later - I'm hooked. And Nick Bantock appears in my world again (bet you wondered when I was getting back to him) - as one of the many tools in his art arsenal is - yep, mundane rubber stamps. (Sadly, Limited Edition Rubber Stamps who sold his personal line of stamps is no longer in business) Not cutesy bears that say "I heart you beary much" and remind you of the sappy stuff people wrote in your high school yearbook "2 sweet 2 B 4 gotten" etc. No, there were art stamps out there - Stamp Camp, and Lost Coast and Stampers Anonymous and well, a lot of other cool and surreal stuff that would probably scare your grandma. Not mine, she was rather progressive, but somebody's grandma.

I was off and reading every book and magazine I could get my hands on on this wonderful world of mixed media art - with its rabbit holes of all sorts of stuff to do - paper and paint, assemblage, rusty metal, fairy dolls, postage stamps on top of old photos of silly Victorians in paper hats, polymer clay and those stamps - well, it's all a bit endless and if you want to see more - try Somerset Studio magazine...expensive, but worth it.

And I kept buying art technique books, and going to classes and educating myself - and learning to solder, and carve, and emboss, and paint, and journal - and well, as you read in my last post, I'm getting some art published in the aforementioned magazine. Forty years, and I'm finally feeling like an artist. And all because I found out there was a wide world of art out there that didn't rely on being able to draw a good apple. And if I hadn't seen that book, all those years back, by Nick Bantock, then I wonder if I would have discovered this world at all.

So, what's your story? Who is your inspiration? and incase you're wondering - did you ever get to meet yours? Well, that's a story for next week (yes, I know I told you that last August, but didn't somehow get to writing it. Sometimes it takes a while...)Wishing you artful dreams...

Somerset Studio is going to publish my art!

2009-02-09T08:23:00.009-05:00

Hear ye, hear ye! Queen Isabella of Dachsonia has made a rare visit to the frost fair on the frozen Thames river in London. As you may know, London has received more snow this year than it usually does, and the good citizens of that city have decided to raise spirits and glasses by holding a frost fair! Queen Isabella has caused a royal pavilion to be established and is currently dancing and enjoying the plays of the great playwrite William Shakesdachshund. The Queen's much younger sister, Lili the Infanta, has been indulging in throwing snowballs behind the tent and inquiring about frozen lizard pops...

In rather wonderful news, Somerset Studio, the journal of the world of mixed media art, is actually going to be featuring this momentous occasion in their upcoming (Nov. 09) special magazine "Somerset Black and White."

And now a note from the scribe of Dachsonia: I'm so excited about this! I've never submitted any of my art to Somerset Studio before, much less actually get published. As you can imagine, my mind is quite filled with all sorts of other pieces that I could make.... Truly, publication in Somerset Studio is one of my artistic dreams come true. Between this and meeting Nick Bantock last summer, I feel very blessed to have found a hobby that continues to inspire and intrigue. Now I think I had better start to dream a little more, maybe a whole article next? I hope this inspires you, fellow artists and readers, to try sending in something - you never know!!

PS - can't wait to see how they photograph it also - this isn't the greatest photo as there is a lot more detail to be seen.

Repurposed ink and paint holders, or how to make ugly household items quite fun

2009-01-17T15:07:00.005-05:00

These are actually some projects I did last year ("That is sooooo 2008...") but since I never did get around to posting it here, I'm going to claim it's part of my "simplify" campaign of 2009. Self-deception is getting me everywhere - tee hee!

I had been coveting our wall-mounted spice rack for ages and ages (at least six months) because I'd realized it would the perfect thing for keeping all my cheapie acrylic paints where I can see them. And presumably, use them. I have my Golden paints (hardly cheapies) in there as well, for a bit of class, but as you can see, it's mostly the 50c jars from JoAnn's. I love em actually. Being a visual person (and what artist isn't) it definitely helps to have your stuff out where you can remember you have it. It took a bit of convincing the husband that I could put the spice rack to better use than he could, and the purchase of an expensive new spice rack (they don't make this design anymore that I could find, which is sad. Now you have to go much more expensive.) When he finally relented and said I could have it, I whipped it off the wall in the kitchen (there are still bare nail holes) and screwed it into place (it's a bit heavy) before he changed his mind. He marvelled that I had actually hung it myself. I marvelled that I had hung it straight.

Along the same lines I also went to a local thrift store (now sadly going out of business - not sure what it says for the economy when even the grungiest thrift store is closing - does that mean nobody's buying cheap? or that nobody's even spending for junk?) to find the above item. What is it, you say? I can't take credit for this idea, but I had read a few years ago that a great way to store your inkpads (for rubber stamping) is to keep them in an old cassette tape holder. A few of you may remember these ;-) They're generally made from pressboard, you probably threw yours out in a "simplify" campaign of your own at least a decade ago. I did - which is why I had to go to a thrift store to buy another one! Thankfully I found one, classed it up with my favorite Basic Grey Motifica paper and some artful applications of "aging" dark brown chalk ink and paint. Et voila - an inkpad holder!

The paintbrush holder is the bottom of a cannister that held a whisky bottle - sawed in half, covered in paper, rubber stamped on (stamp is fro m Stampers Anonymous Michael de Meng collection), painted on, doodled on. I am quite fond of it!

So, we're reusing, reducing, recycling and simplifying here. Now if only I could think of something to hold all my little tiny "cats eye" shaped inkpads...the quest continues.

Weaving our Dreams

2009-01-10T10:29:00.004-05:00

Dreamweaver...la da da...something..morning liiihhhtt...
Well, actually this post has nothing to do with a song from the 70's that I can only remember part of the chorus of (it just amused me) - it has instead to do with this week's exercise from the Soul Journal group on weaving our dreams.

Rather than intentions, and resolutions, and all that stuff that falls by the wayside two weeks after new year, this is about focusing on our dreams. Maybe they'll happen, maybe they won't, maybe you wouldn't really want to do them but the idea is lovely. This little project gives all of them a place of honor.

Also, I felt this went well with the "use what you got" part of the whole simplify thing - my word for the new year. So, I cut 16 strips of paper (you can make yours whatever size and however many strips of paper you want) from my scrapbook paper stash, my leftover bits of art journal backgrounds, etc then wrote some dreams of mine on them. The writing uses my almost-never-used group of letter rubber stamps (oh goodie-using my stuff!) , different colors of ink, and some are just handwritten.

My favorite strip of paper is the green and orange one (my own handmade background - it's cool) - it says "Study art with Nick Bantock", and then there's "Go to Art and Soul retreat" and "Raise lavender on a herb farm in North Carolina" and "Travel to Turkey, Morocco, Thailand, and Indonesia..." - actually I have no idea where Indonesia came from...I want to see the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, not Indonesia. Huh..what am I supposed to see in Indonesia?

Oh yeah, then there's the big one - be an artist!

What are your dreams, maybe for this year, maybe for sometime, maybe just for silly but fun? Write them down!

Soul Journaling homepage art!

2009-01-06T19:43:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post to say thank you to Christy and my Soul Journaling companions for selecting the posting below (the picture with the lavender in gesso) for the group's homepage! I am very thrilled to be a part of this fine group, and I thank you all very sincerely for the honor :-)

I am also truly touched to be the recipient of a remarkable piece of assemblage art (and a Teesha Moore print) from the inspired and genius hands of my friend the truly talented BNA (big name artist) Cindy. Seriously readers, you need to go look at her blog and see this awesome piece! Go check it out :-) You'll want to have one yourself, I promise. She is now accepting commisions...

Soul Journal #13 - Textured Background

2009-01-04T12:41:00.005-05:00

I live in a place that hasn't received snow since 1977, which of course renders the idea of snow in a romantic, peaceful, and worth-a-12-hour-drive to experience it kind of way.

My Soul Journaling sisters had a prompt on textured backgrounds I decided to stay with the theme and keep mine in the winter whites. The idea is to use gesso to coat and glue down items on your journal page. This creates textures that appear almost fossil-like in the background of your page. The plaster element of gesso kind of binds it all together, and it actually comes out quite beautiful.

The picture below is of my grandmother taken back in the early 1980's, with lavender from last summer now encased in a blanket of snow and ice (courtesy of gesso). In my grandmother's letters, she would always enclose a few sprigs of lavender from her garden and smell being what it is, it would transport me back to the summer before. When I was drying the gesso, the heat tool brought up the sweet and slightly spicy smell of the lavender as though it had time travelled me back 30 years...

I hope that you have an art-filled New Year full of possibilities and joyous flights of delicious fancy!

Gesso Resist Challenge #25 - GPP Street Team

2009-01-02T14:31:00.007-05:00

I completely missed the deadline for posting to Michelle Ward's Green Pepper Press Street Team - November challenge (11/30/08) but it's never too late to show your results - definitely some interesting backgrounds that are great for my favorite artistic endeavor - visual journaling! For instructions on how these were made (if you're interested) please click the hyperlink above and look for "Crusade 25."

The point of the exercise was to use gesso (normally used to prep paper and canvas to hold paint) for "resists" meaning that you create a background with gesso, then paint over it. The gesso remains somewhat visible in the background and creates special effects. This is definitely a mixed media approach - I don't think that a classical painter would ever quite venture that far out of the box with gesso.

This page was done by stamping with black gesso (not the usual color, but Golden paints makes it) on the left onto pages torn from an old book, and using the same stamp, with white gesso. I then used cheapie acrylics over the gesso, and made all the blue swirlies by painting with blue interference paint (Lumiere HiLite Blue) over the stamped lines. I sat with this page for weeks until I needed something to journal on, and well, this page came in handy. After all, backgrounds are just that - backgrounds.

You can also use gesso on rubber stamps as I used above (note: wash the gesso off the rubber quickly, or the plaster that is part of the gesso's makeup will stick like glue. I wish some of my glues held this well.)

The best example of the resist with gesso is now my new banner for my blog (see above.) Cool, huh? I definitely got some Teesha Moore inspiration on that one too.

My favorite use for gesso though is still for clearing my mind and warming up for art. I love to just paint a coat of it on everything I do from canvas to paper to assemblage. I'd say thats what I use it for most. Just slapping it on paper and clearing my head.

Thank you Michelle for another inspirational crusade - sorry I missed it!

After an almost two month hiatus, Sepia and Glitter is back

2008-12-28T21:34:00.002-05:00

Hello readers,
I've been a crap blogger. It's true. I was fortunate enough to win an award, and I haven't posted anything since then. I have been creating some artwork, not enough, but I've just been so busy with "real life" that I haven't been keeping up much with actually documenting it (i.e. here.)

I had one of those waking up things that you get at 4:30 in the morning the other night - the kind where you wake up obsessed with some idea, and it just won't let you get back to sleep until you've processed it. The word "Simplify." I'm not sure what this means (in relationship to me, I mean), and what I'm supposed to do with it. Was it about my art? My life? My ongoing addiction to buying every mixed media book that's printed (am running out of shelf space)? Maybe I'm supposed to use my wads of expensive scrapbooking paper (not used, but impeccably sorted.) My bead stash (not used, but also impeccably sorted.) Maybe I'm supposed to concentrate on one type of media at a time and learn more about it instead of making things harder on myself by dabbling in so many art forms. I don't know.

Or maybe it just means "post to your blog more often, they don't have to be highly complex posts with eight hours of art behind each of them...."

I'll be the first to let you know when I do...

Arte Y Pico blog award!

2008-11-01T11:15:00.007-04:00

Wow - I have won a blog award! I am really excited that people actually read my stuff and are kind enough to comment, but I'm especially thrilled to actually receive an award, so sincerest thanks to Mary at http://maryshunt.blogspot.com/ for passing along the love.

A little info about this for you: "Arte y Pico" is phrase that roughly translates in English to: "The Maximum. Wow! The best art. Over the top."

Although the words "over the top" have been applied to me before, I'm not sure it is entirely always intended with the kindness that Mary has given...;-)

Anyway, the "rules" for the Arte y Pico award are:
1. If you are an award winner, show the award, the name of the person who gave it to you, and link back to his or her blog.
2. Pick 5 blogs you think deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and for contributing to the blogging community.
3. List the author's name and link to his or her blog.
4. Leave a message on the blogs of those you've selected.
5. Link back to the original Arte y Pico blog, so all will know the origin of the award.

Park your broomsticks - welcome to the party!

2008-10-26T16:20:00.010-04:00

My sincerest apologies for the slight....unpleasantness....with the punch. The pixies have been sorted out, and it's time to come in! Welcome, welcome...please park your brooms by the rusty gate and help yourself to a velvet robe, a cauldron of the newly magical punch, and a wafer of moonbeams. I'm very glad to see you here!

Don't forget - if you'd like to see any of the pictures more closely, just click on the picture and it'll magically get larger!

Now that you're here, why don't meet some of our guests? Please come right this way. We'll be going through the magical gardens to reach the party. Be careful of the fountain, he doesn't bite of course, but sometimes he's been known to climb down and splash rather a lot of magic water onto our friends. You know why it's magic water, don't you? Because it disappears whenever you sit down in a puddle of it!

Aren't the gardens lovely at this time of year? If you look closely, you'll see the rare Peacock Bats rising next to the bench - they like to come over and nestle on your shoulders, so I hope you don't mind them. They're very gentle and I assure you they don't bite.

No time to smell the moonbeams and lavender - walk over the blue bridge where the urns are now, the rest of the party is dying to meet you! I have it on very reliable account that a contingent of Steampunks has made an appearance. Their locomotive is hovering somewhere near the horse-drawn hearses, so I sincerely hope their steam doesn't make everyone dewy.

Oh yes, there they are, over on the left. They're behaving themselves, guess they're not feeling quite punkish. In fact, ah, I see they're watching our Gypsy Dancer! Madame Zaza has appeared, clearly the Gypsy King doesn't know what he's missing out on....I see some Victorian Explorers are searching for the source of the Nile - no no, I assure you it's not in the fountain. Looook out! Ah, splash......I knew it. Never mind, they seem quite envigorated from their magic water dousing. Where is our Enchantress when we need her? Oh, really? She's off to sort out the Pixies again...yes, there she is walking out of the picture on the right.

I must say, things are going swimmingly at the First Annual Soul Journalers Halloween Bash!

Now what are you costumed as? I like the Faerie wings - they are fairie wings aren't they? No, they're part of your Renaissance attire. I must say, I didn't think that Queen Elizabeth generally wore wings, but right you are ma'am - and a lovely interpretation it is! Do enjoy mingling with our other guests now....I have to see about the broomsticks.

A busy hostess is never done - just as I thought, the Steampunkers Locomotive seems to have gone off on a ramble over the nearby fields, so I must fly myself. Please do enjoy the refreshments, and I'll see you all very soon in the Land of Blog Comments. After I catch that runaway locomotive, I think I'll stop by the other blog parties going on tonight - I hear there are some beautiful and festive parties to attend! Thank you Kathryn Antyr and the Soul Journalers group for sponsoring this fabulous event!

Thank you so much for joining me! I'll see you at your house!

One moment please :-) We're almost ready!

2008-10-26T09:14:00.002-04:00

Slight delay in the party plans - yes, party will definitely be here in a very few minutes, but there is a slight....incident with the punch.....a couple of pixies spiked it! So if you can just circle around the block on your broomstick a couple more times, then come back to my door, we'll be ready to greet you. Can't wait to see your costumes!

What are you going to be for Halloween?

2008-10-19T16:11:00.002-04:00

Are you a pirate - swept along by the tides of fortune from the blazing cannons of the Spanish Main to the secret blue grottoes filled with treasure on uncharted Caribbean islands? Does the moon ride the dark seas as a galleon with you at the helm?

Or perhaps you're an enchantress, mixing herbs and magical potions kept in your Book of Secrets - lavender, moondust, mist from an enchanted pond caught in the light of the stars?

An explorer? Seeking the lost tribes of the Amazonian basin, rafting up crocodile infested waters in search of the source of the Nile somewhere in the Mountains of the Moon?

A gypsy Queen, silk veils dance before your dark eyes in the fires of the camp. You feel the earth's pulse through your bare feet as you perform the ancient dance to capture the heart of the King of the Gypsies?

Well, whoever you are (not your mundane self, your true self, the gypsy, the mystic, the dancer) come one, come all to the Soul Journal Blog Party - one of your stops is here! On October 26, by the light of the waning moon, visit my blog and see what my art journal has unearthed.

As you can see, I've decorated spookily, uh, I mean, specially for the event.

Remember, my blog, Oct. 26 - we're dying to meet you.

Soul Journaling - Doodles

2008-10-12T22:59:00.006-04:00

I should have spent more time today working on art, but I'm exhausted from working in the garden all weekend, and have got "weekend warrior" syndrome (strained lower back from planting about 20 plants including some large palm trees, bug bites, and a lovely bruise where I took on the edge of the barbecue grille one too many times) Add to my excuse list that a friend sent me one of those "why don't you join Facebook" notes, and although I've always maintained that social networking websites are for kids...well, I have spent far too much time today messing around with it.

Anyway, Kathryn's prompt for the Soul Journaling group was to create doodles and put in your journaling somewhere in your doodled lines. I kind of took it to the next level.....see above. I have to admit, I LOVE this page! It's all about my fantasies of exotic foreign travel, including India. Unfortunately my husband has beyond no interest in visiting there (although he's a great and patient travel companion in all other respects) so this may have to continue to live in the realms of my fertile imagination. Perhaps for the best, I'm sure it doesn't really have spice-laden breezes wafting in from the swaying palms of the Indian ocean....

I've been tagged!

2008-10-06T22:19:00.004-04:00

So my friend Kathryn Antyr tagged me - I've never been tagged before but feel as though I've landed in the land of the popular kids - wow, if only they'd had this when I was in Junior High school and was officially the second least popular kid in the seventh grade!

Anyway, here is Kathryn's website, so stop by and visit her (she's a really wonderful person) :-) http://www.collagediva.com/Site/Kathryns_Blog

So, six random facts about me:

#1 - I collect ghost stories. No, I'm not a Halloween junkie, I just like going on ghost tours, and consider books of regional ghost stories to be a great vacation souvenir. I do believe in ghosts. I also collect books on outhouses and bathrooms. I believe in those too.

#2 - I held a lion cub when I was 9 years old. There's a picture and everything. He was fuzzy with a little pink belly - I was living in South Africa at the time, and we were visiting a safari park. I am not likely to pick up random lions.

#3 - I have rarely failed in getting knots and snarls pulled out of necklace chains. It's a zen thing.

#4 - I'm afraid to the point of phobia of the following things: parrots, helium balloons, hard taco shells, heights, confined spaces, and lightning. If you wanted to get rid of me, make me hold a parrot while eating a hard taco in a room where a balloon is being inflated, or just handled. Really.

#5 - There's few things better than velvet. Particularly the silk kind that practically glows and costs $75+ per yard. Now if I could only sew.

#6 - I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark at least 100 times. I think I know every sound effect, line of dialogue and frame of film by heart. I haven't seen Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at all. Perfection is best left to stand alone.

Here's the tagging rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Write six random things about yourself.

4. Tag six people at the end of your post.

5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

6. Let the tagger know your entry is up.

Now, I'm tagging.....

Cindy - http://cskawins.blogspot.com/
Shelly - http://shellystick.blogspot.com/
Sarah - http://sarahwhitmire.blogspot.com/
EB - http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com/be_dream_play/
Karen - http://karensaltereddreamz.blogspot.com/
Pattie - http://www.writingaffirmations.blogspot.com/

Go forth and tag, my friends!
Soul hugs,
Jane

29 Gifts

2008-10-05T12:37:00.003-04:00

My Soul Journaling friend Kathryn sent a link to the Soul Journaling group about a website called 29 Gifts.org - the idea is to give away something - an item, your time, a smile - for the next 29 days, and observe how your life changes inwardly as you give away items outwardly. It's a rather Buddhist concept, which I love, and I've signed up to participate. Here's a video all about it - perhaps you'll be interested too:

Find more videos like this on 29-Day Giving Challenge

Paddling Upstream, a new Soul Journaling page

2008-09-07T16:24:00.006-04:00

The soul journaling process up till now has ended, and the new era with the Soul Journaling group has begun. One of the moderators - I greatly appreciate all three moderators volunteering their time to keep a good thing going - created the group's first prompt - the Instant Gratification exercise. Clip out a picture from a magazine, then paint around it and draw concentric rings around the picture with journaling. I went to town and went a bit beyond the idea of "instant journal." As you can see, I got so busy with layering that the rings of journaling kind of disappeared, but that's what so great about visual journaling. It brings you in touch with symbolism, and the subconsious, and often what you don't say winds up revealing itself by what you paint. I truly love it.

One of the things I LOVE about this process is that you are perpetually surprised about where the art leads you - and I wound up doing a page about "paddling upstream." I've taken on quite a few new challenges in my professional life lately, that are making me really have to work on balance. Sometimes achieving it seems a bit impossible, other times I know it will all be ok, I just have to hold a steady course. I'm sure this is one of those lessons that I'm supposed to be figuring out. As my friend Alice says, "It's a buddha that's been put in your way to teach you something."

It's been interesting to see how my art style and colors have changed and grown so much in the three or so years that I've been doing it. I see a lot more confidence and honesty with it. I no longer concern myself with whether it is pretty, or makes sense to anyone else, I just know I'm happy with it and I feel like I'm really doing the stuff I want to be doing. In the end, that's what it is all about. I truly feel that it helps me stay sane!

Soul Journaling - Day Twenty Two, the end and the beginning

2008-09-01T11:07:00.004-04:00

Finally we come to the end of this first round of soul journaling, thank you again so much Sarah my soul friend for the inspiration and the good solid techniques that have given me so much confidence. I really like this way of working, and synchronicity being what it is - when I was ready, a teacher appeared. I hope you, dear reader, will find your own synchronicities with your art. Remember, there are so many people out there who will help you - you just have to have a curious mind and take a look!

If you would like to do Sarah's soul journaling method - just click on the link for Caspiana on my blog roll.

The final assignment was a self portrait using only your fingers for paintbrushes. Yep, that's right. Only your fingers, even to mix paints, and nothing else. Oh my. The cave paintings of Lascaux it isn't, but I think the figure looks at least passingly like me. It gives one all new respect for our ancestors who did paint those masterpieces in caves so many millenia ago.

Thank you for following with me on this journey. Now it's my turn to take up the journaling challenge on my own - so a beginning again.

Soul Journaling - Day Twenty One

2008-09-01T10:52:00.003-04:00

Today's exercise was about misfits - make a random doodle, see what shapes emerge (I love how this process is both therapeutic, exploratory, and a darn fun way to learn new techniques), and create a figure from them that represents when you felt like a misfit. Of course, my squiggle looked like nothing until I turned it upside down, and lo an behold, it was a person's face! Of course my misfit was only revealed upside down. That's why it's a misfit, right?

I decided the image must be related to my being the runner up misfit (the second most unpopular person of my seventh grade class). If you had a good middle school/junior high experience, then congratulations - you must be the only one! I'd love to tell you that I grew to accept myself as I am and was no longer concerned with fitting in, blah blah blah. Not true. I grew acutely conscious of exactly how to fit in, and I became quite good at it by high school. Not that I was "A-list" popular, but I actually really enjoyed high school and am still friends with my best friends from then to this day.

However, I don't think I really got to be totally cool with who I am - and believe me, I still am a misfit in lots of ways, but I actually enjoy them now - until my 30's. I would be bored and disappointed with myself if I wasn't who I am now, but it took a long time to get there. So, here's to misfits - enjoy your eccentricities for without them, you'd be just like the rest. And who wants that?? Seriously.

Soul Journaling - Day Twenty

2008-09-01T10:04:00.004-04:00

All the way up to day 20 - only three more to go - I find myself missing the process already. But, it's also great to actually take a project to it's conclusion, and very satisfying. Of course, the point is not the destination but the journey, and in the case of art journaling that IS the point.

This page was good fun, I didn't think it would work out well at first (I never do) but of course it did. Sarah's guidance is never wrong! This was a collage of three previous soul journal pages put together by tearing papers into strips and putting the images together in new combinations. It is tied together with a wash of paint. This is really, in my mind, what collage mixed media art is all about - combining existing images in new ways so that they appear as though they always went together, they should always be together, and they create a new statement or idea in doing so.

I actually think this is my favorite page. I'm definitely going to do this technique again.

Soul Journaling - Day Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen

2008-08-31T19:45:00.006-04:00

Our soul journaling assignments for these three days were a wonderful challenge - select items from a list of "to do"s (use a fork to paint with, moosh paint between the pages and see what comes out, add some metal to your page, write what you did today) the only caveat being that you can't put the items in the order they're given. Note: for those new to the blog, I've been following Sarah Whitmire's soul journaling project for the last month - some of the posts here are the results. http://sarahwhitmire.blogspot.com

I highly recommend visiting her blog and checking it out - I'm sure you'll get interested in visual journaling/art journaling/soul journaling (whatever you want to call it) too. Here are the results of the three "potpouri" days:

Day 16 - magazine stencil and words (mostly)

Day 17 - Rorschach-esque paint blobs, imprints of your hands

Day 18

I really liked looking for hidden symbolism in the images - there were things that didn't even occur to me until after I had scanned the pictures to upload here. I see a swimmer in the picture above - swimming through weeds. In the red painting, for one thing, I realized I use a lot of hot pinky/red (nothing that would have occured to me, I'm known for brown!) in my paintings. The color of intensity and passion! That teal blue is so nicely a butterfly. The yoga girl picture (I wish I was) didn't strike me any particular way until my husband said it reminded him of a jungle, like in southeast Asia. I realized that I have been thinking a lot about my waterfall/zen garden that I'm planning on putting on my back porch (woot - we're getting a screened in porch built on our house!) and what a great area it would be for exercising in a peaceful manner. None of this go-for-the-burn stuff for me, thank you.

I'm almost near the end of the journal project - and looking forward to doing more of my own pages. Thank you Sarah for giving me the guidance to go so far with this project, and keep going in the future.

Sights from Olympia

2008-08-31T16:02:00.008-04:00

Where I spent my summer holidays.....

I spent my summer sleeping in a terrarium with a view of the stars and moon, spent my days on the ocean sailing past fjords and stepping over old lava floes in the cold waters of the northern Pacific.

Ok, so I didn't spend my whole summer doing that. But I did spend a week doing precisely these things - does that count? Of course it does!

We went to Olympia, Washington on August 8 for my sister-in-law Jodi's wedding as well as to pay a long overdue visit to my sister Kay, whose been inviting me to see that part of the world for the last 30+ years. I would have gone a lot sooner if I'd known just how special it really is! I truly felt at home here - I joked that given another 36 hours in Olympia, I would have opened a dog/human yoga and art studio in downtown and started serving berry cobbler from organically grown vintage raspberry bushes.

I met so many wonderful people, ate some of the best food (always a big vacation make or break area for me - I LOVE food), drank some good beer, and just relaxed in nature. I've been wanting to go to the ocean for a while, but it's not really something you want to do here in Florida during the summer - too hot. I loved that the ocean is just a normal part of people's lives up there, you take a ferry as a viable mode of transportation. You can see the ocean, and the mountains, and the tall trees around every turn. It's also a very environmentally and politically conscious place - when you go to a wedding where everyone brings their dogs, there are people of many races, ages, and circumstances and they're just people together without judgement, and there are readings from Native American, Buddhist, Christian, and Sufi philosophy as well as a sing-along in Sanskrit, well, I've found my people.

But enough words, this is an art blog, so I know you want to see pictures. The picture you see at the top of the post is the view from the guest room (aka the terrarium) at my sister's house. I'm calling it the terrarium because the bed is built into a window that juts out from the house into the forest that is her backyard. At the foot of the hill is a small lake that we went kayaking on after a breakfast of the shiniest plumpest Ranier cherries, organic cheeses, and fresh baked pastries from the local farmer's market.

Speaking of farmer's market! Olympia is reckoned to have the "second best farmers market in the state" - presumably after the rather better known Pike's Market in Seattle. I've been to both, and I have to say, I liked the Olympia one better. Beautiful produce and flowers, handmade clothes, soaps, organic everything, a jazz band, it was awesome. Here are some local blueberries - don't you just want to grab a handful?

We also went to visit my sister's property out on the south Puget Sound - next time we visit they'll have built their weekend beach house out there - clean rain-swept wind, ocean mists and wildflowers...
Here's a few images from my sister-in-law's wedding - it was a very informal relaxed wedding by the shores of Capitol Lake in downtown Olympia, followed by a reception at their friend Tibor's farm (two pastures over from their house). They live in a small house in a wooded valley with a little stream rushing past the farm and fields that eventually ran to the Puget Sound.

Jodi and Doug had a beautiful day - it was rainy in the morning, but right on schedule at 4 p.m., the heavens cleared, the sun shone, and Jodi was married under a canopy of silk banners and hand-painted batik windsocks with a carpet of wildflowers and lillies at her feet.

Enough for now - got to work on my art journal - in the next post, I'll continue with my adventures in the Pacific Northwest with our visit to Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and Saltspring Island, plus my visit with Nick Bantock.

Bella

2008-08-31T14:31:00.010-04:00

After a three week absence, I'm back to my studio to work on some art. Largely my hiatus was due to my wonderful vacation to the pacific northwest - pictures to follow in next post - but since I've been back I've had a hard time getting back into the swing of things. Somewhat I think due to having too much to say - where to begin? I had some amazing experiences on vacation, and took some lovely pictures that I know will be fun to work with. However, life itself I think has also contributed to where I'm sitting at the moment. Foremost, my sweet Bella passed away - Bella (seen above) was our 13 year old dachshund who had been suffering from Cushings disease, a brain tumor that caused seizures, high blood pressure, an enlarged liver and a compressed disc in her spine. I can't say that her passing away came as a surprise, and at least she isn't suffering anymore. The loss of one of a loved member of the family, no matter how much experience you get with it (and I've had my fair share) still affects you in ways that you don't even realize right away. Bella's passing also hit our Lili very hard. Lili is our dachshund puppy (seen in the picture on the right of this blog in her alter ego The Infanta); she has never been without another dog in her life from when she was born, so this has been an adjustment for her as well. She got very ill - most likely as a result of stress from Bella passing away and from being boarded for a week while we were away - and got stress-related colitis. I'm happy to report that she is fully back to health now and is snuggled on my lap as I write this, but this has surely been the hardest on her. Work, also, has been rather intense of late (lot of long hours, tenseness, etc) but I won't go into that because it's just not very interesting to write or read about!

Here is Bella and Lili together in happier times:

I know that in order to recover from this emotional flat place, I need to start working and playing on my art again. To that end, I started up with my soul journal this morning. I'll be posting the remaining day's exercises shortly. Also, as promised in previous post, I'll tell you all about my trip and visit with the man who, in my opinion, is the father of the modern collage/altered/mail art movement. More to come.

I'm back from vacation!

2008-08-19T20:09:00.002-04:00

Hello blog friends! My apologies that I haven't posted in a while - I have been really busy at work, and I was on vacation for 8 days in the beautiful Pacific Northwest - Olympia, WA, Vancouver, Victoria, Saltspring Island, and Seattle. I have SO much to tell you about all my adventures, photos to share - and collaging sweat with a BNA (yes, deliberately obscure, it's supposed to pique your interest....) :-) More details to follow very soon, I promise. At the moment, I'm working on a scrapbook for my boss at work - but as soon as I get done with this project I'll be back to fill you all in on all the cool stuff that has happened recently. Hope you are all having an artful summer. Jane

Soul Journaling - Day Nine to Twelve

2008-07-27T17:20:00.006-04:00

The soul journaling journey continues...today we revisited the past - the immediate past (went back to the pages from day five) and way back into the past (the home where you felt happiest).

I was actually pretty pleased with the clipped out from magazine pages (see previous posts), I didn't really think of doing anything else with them, but Sarah suggested we add some painterly effects to them that I have to say, definitely render them a lot more funky!

Our next assignment was to draw - in our most symbolic, representational style - the house were we felt the most secure and happiest. I love my home that I live in today, and I love my life and my family, but if I could, I'd step through a portal into my childhood home in a heartbeat. We traveled a lot when I was a kid, but there was one constant in my life, which was my Nan's house in Enfield, Middlesex, (a borough of north London). We spent most summers there when I was a kid, and I always remember the sun shining (yes, in England, no doubt memory plays a few tricks) and having all the time in the world to play, sleep, read, paint, and come home when the sun set (about 9 p.m. in the English summer) and have supper of cheese and toast. I'd drag up the stairs to bed, worn out from playing, and remember that even in the summer, it was cold when you'd walk across the hall landing! I knew the next day would be the same, and the one after that. I could walk anywhere in our little town, no fear of anything happening, it was a beautiful time, and I'm glad I can at least revisit my childhood if only in my mind and in the pages of my Soul Journal. Here's my rendering - not the most artistically skilled for sure, but I greatly enjoyed making it!

The bulgy look of the house is because there's a pocket in the page. Not sure what's going in it yet (I don't dare look ahead because I don't want to influence my thinking - aaahhh! Can't wait to be up with the rest of the group so I can really see everyone else's take on our daily lessons!)

Thank you, my blog friends, for being so kind to follow me on this journey! EB, Sarah, Cindy, Lynn, and all my newest e-friends in Soul Journaling - from the bottom of my heart, I'm so glad you're here!

Soul Hugs, Jane

Soul Journaling - Day Seven to Eight

2008-07-26T21:25:00.007-04:00

Today I wrote - I wrote about things that you shouldn't say, and things that I can't say, things that should have been said and weren't. I wrote about things that I have needed to say for 30-ish years, and things that are weighing me down right now. I wrote and it didn't feel dizzying or anything, but I think it's another step towards making my art real to me. And then I covered it all up. Yep, that's what we were supposed to do. I covered it with tape (raided the husband's garage) and made a rather Le Corbusier-esque page:

That was Day 7. Since I'm doing this as I can, I moved straight into Day Eight's project, and I covered it some more. This time with sandpaper, and paint, and gesso, and more paint. It transformed from plain ball point words, to minimalist art, to full on, balls-to-the-wall Lynne Perella style! Not that one generally associates the gracious Lynne with the word "balls", but I mean her no insult. I wasn't trying to make my background look like hers at all, but all of a sudden, I saw something even vaguely approaching the backgrounds painted by an artist that I admire, and it made me feel more confident, like "wow, I'm getting a glimpse of how the BNA's (big name artists) might do this stuff!" More paint, more tape....

I have to say, it's so gorgeously multilayered and textural! I know that my friend Cindy, whose doing Soul Journaling also, and is probably getting near this phase of her project, is probably sitting at her art studio right now looking at her journal and saying - "AAAHH, it's too pretty! I can't cover it up!"

Somehow, I get the feeling that we're getting ready to do a bit more exposing and covering, and thus feeling safe about exposing a bit more....

Soul Journaling - Day Four to Six

2008-07-26T19:33:00.005-04:00

As with much of the rest of my life, I got annoyingly, frustratingly behind this week with my soul journaling. I really am a "enjoy the process" kind of person, but my "I haven't missed a deadline in eight years, I'm not going to start now" personality kicked in, so I'm going to give it my best shot to get caught up this weekend. Not at the expense of the mental wandering and playing with ideas that needs to happen, but I need to feel like just ONE thing in my life is actually under control and going as I'd like it too. I've been very stressed due to work lately; I'm built for dreaming, not for very fast paced project management. My inner bohemian (the one that gets to come out an play in my art) is feeling squeezed and pressured about now. I think the only cure is to make some art. I honestly don't know what I'd do without my art time on the weekends - it's what gets me through my week. Better than therapy.

Anyway, here are my pages from Sarah Whitmire's Soul Journaling Exercises (see the "Caspiana" blog) in my blog list on the right side of the page, and previous blog for more info on this wonderful process! Sarah, are you going to write a book? I sure hope so - the world needs you....

The exercises you see in the pages are representing:
Day Four - paint your backgrounds
Day Five - gather images (such as "something you have", "something you want", "something beautiful", "something exotic", "something comfortable")
Day Six - cut them into one-inch squares and arrange them as you wish across your pages. I wound up needing two pages, because I wanted to keep all my images as a collection!

What we're going to do next with them, I don't know.....I can't wait to find out what the significance will be!

Soul Journaling - Day One to Three

2008-07-20T11:11:00.005-04:00

Here's the results of my working with Sarah's Soul Journaling. Please see the previous post for more "deep thoughts", and information all about this exciting process! The picture above is from Day One (background), Day Two (claim it) and Day Three (protection) of the process.

The object of this particular page is to identify the journal as part of me (hence my name in the middle of it), and to charge it (so to speak) with a suit of armor against inner and outer criticism of my (and everyone's) art.

The figure is Joan of Arc, who felt right to me as a symbol of perseverance against inner turmoil and outer critics and following your feelings. If you follow the Myers Briggs assessment profile, I'm an INFJ, so it's all about the intuition for everything.

I'm very happy I'm (hopefully) very unlikely to be burnt at the stake, certainly not likely to be canonized. But I am really looking forward to seeing what spills forth from my mind into the pages of my journal next.

A new look, a new path on the journey

2008-07-20T10:24:00.004-04:00

I felt like my blog needed a new look - something that reflects where I feel like my art journey has led up to this moment. Blogs are wonderful in their facility for change. As we learn new things, what we need to surround ourselves with changes. With a few clicks of the mouse, your blog can change too. Sometimes it needs to. You can tell a lot about a person from their art, and by extension, their blog. It's a picture to the outside world of what's going on in your mind and your soul. As you gain new insights, you feel differently about how you want to show yourself to the world. Maybe more honestly, or maybe just more openly. I have been thinking a lot about how art is truly a journey, not a destination. My blog has become very important to me as a touchstone of this journey. In the few short months since I've been keeping this space, it has morphed how I make art and how I share it.

The newest winding path (or rabbit hole!) is something I've wanted to do for a long time but....not sure why.....just resisted it somehow. I have felt for some time that I was tired of just making pretty things. I wanted to make things that tell a story, that mean something to me, that are more deeply felt. I want to portray emotion and what's inside rather than just make my art look pleasing to someone else. I don't want to make pictures of people I don't know looking cute following some formula that's "accepted" and thus safe. Everyone else is doing xyz, and look, they're accepted! If it's really going to be art that I care about, then it has to have personal meaning whether or not it looks like art to someone else.

I really like the words of Juliana Coles in her pamphlet on Extreme Visual Journalism where she says, "We are not concerned with making art. We are not concerned with a product or a pretty picture." I think that's where I am in my art making right now - I want to really do this for me, and in the end I think it will make my overall art more confident and a reflection of my own voice. As I mentioned last week, I've thus become rather fascinated with art journaling/visual journaling - the idea of getting emotion, images, metaphor, and journaling together.

I've believed the zen thought for a long time that when you seek a teacher, one will appear. Last week I posted a page from my new visual journal, and (I couldn't believe it!) one of the total art goddesses - Elizabeth Bunsen - actually stopped by my humble blog and commented some beautiful and encouraging thoughts on my page. Totally made my day!

Then, I discovered someone else (through the Altered Books yahoo group) who believes this is important work for herself and she is encouraging this work in others. Sarah Whitmire is doing a new process called Soul Journaling on her blog - Caspiana - and she's invited us to join her. In addition to my own visual journaling pages, I'm also following Sarah's teachings in my art and I'm having a great time! She presents a new set of instructions/prompts/thoughts every day and it's not too late to join the party. So, check out her blog, as well as Elizabeth Bunsen's blog - Be Dream Play - (links are in my list of blogs that I read to the right side of your screen) and come along for the journey!

Art Journaling has begun

2008-07-13T20:50:00.003-04:00

I get these little....interests....crushes....(obsessions) pretty frequently. I hope that doesn't make me a dilettante, I prefer to think of it as "renaissance mind" (is that pompous?) I've been fascinated by art journals for a little while now. The extension of that is visual journaling - to me these are two separate things. The art journal is strictly about art - a place to try out new techniques, keep track of the things your doing. The visual journal is a lot closer to written journal - except instead of just writing words on a page with lines, you illustrate your thoughts and feelings and you can write in them, or not.

This visual journaling thing must have been invented for visual type people (yes, I'm one of those) because it seems to be opening up a whole new way of thinking in my mind. I've been working on mine all weekend (in addition to creating some ATC's for the innaugural meeting of the Altered Artists of Central Florida this coming week - whee!). Here's the thing, though...I can't really show it to you. Ok, the picture above is one of the pages - I can't talk about something on here and NOT show it to you. That's not fair. But you'll probably hear more about it than see it. I have to keep some stuff for me :-)

The visual journal isn't about art - it's about getting whats inside out, with the idea that it's as personal as a written journal is. Nobody has to see it, it's like your own little treehouse in your mind that nobody else but you gets to go in. I love the idea of having my own little secret lair that I can escape to. It happens to be in the person of a handmade journal from Thailand that somebody gave me a few years ago. I was using it for keeping track of my unmounted rubber stamp images (what a mundane use for such a thing) but I finally decided (after much deliberating "is this right?" should I bind it with wire? should I use a new blank book? should I use what I got? what size is right? what paper is right?) to use it.

Well, right up there with my thoughts last week on "use what you got" instead of going out and buying new, I decided to re-purpose my stamping index journal. Somehow the idea that the pages are already all inky and used makes me feel comfortable about redecorating my lair. I had the same experience when I was making my entry for Somerset Studio magazine (mailed this week - with much feeling of anxiety that I was letting my little art brain child loose into the world where I couldn't take care of it.) I repurposed it out of a previous art piece that I'd made too. I think I'm going to explore this idea of not feeling comfortable about working in something that hasn't already been used before. I'm not sure what it means, but you know where to find me working it all out.......

By the way, I tried out a few new ideas when I was painting the pages - and I LOVE them. I actually think it is some of my more interesting work - probably because I can be free to experiment without judgment - even if all that judgment is all sitting right in my own mind. Odd, huh?

Return to my Roots

2008-07-06T11:23:00.007-04:00

Although I've always been interested in artsy things, I consider that I started into my current arts and crafts path about six or seven years ago when my friend Missy decided that we needed to have custom jewelry. We went to The Bead Bar - a local bead shop - and I was overwhelmed with all the colors and choices. I pottered around for about two hours of anxious "I have no idea what to do - this is WAY over my head-ness" and finally picked a few beads and had the girls at the shop make my earrings. I loved the ideas, but I was just overwhelmed like water gorging up over a dam that was too full as to what to do with it all.

Somehow I got talked into going back and taking a class on wire wrap (it would have been easier to start with stringing, but we didn't know that) and after an hour or so, it all began to make sense. I still picked beads that I didn't realize until too late had holes that totally didn't work for my designs, and I became obsessed with getting the perfect wire wrap. I became hooked and started going to bead shows, and moved up from buying single beads to buying strings of them. All the colors and sparkly things! Then moved from buying inexpensive glass to more expensive natural stones (less sparkly, more substantial).

Somehow, though, it just wasn't enough....it seemed like there was something missing from this creative endeavor. Yes, it was creative, but it wasn't completely fulfilling and so I kept searching. When I started I didn't even know I needed a creative outlet. Now, all these years later, I wouldn't be able to live without it. My art is that important to me - frustrations, occasional heavy doses of self-criticism, and then triumphant "damn, I'm good!" moments and all. So, I cast my net wider and roved on into other worlds of stamping, altered books, etc but once in a while, I still go back to my roots. Mostly when I get a new outfit, or I realize that my current jewelry just doesn't quite go with an outfit, or when I get tired of the jewelry I've got.

Understand, I work in a very gray and dull corporate office, in a very detail oriented, here's the rules profession (tech writing) - I have to get my Stevie Nicks-in-her-Jack Daniels-phase inner bohemian out somehow (thanks Gary Gilbert for that entirely appropros description!). I do it by my highly theatrical and costumey clothing. I dress as I do to entertain myself (and puzzle my more straight-laced fellow cube rats) I must confess, the inner 16-year old in my 41 year old self thoroughly enjoys it....it delights my soul.

Back to today's topic though - I get the urge once or twice a year to create jewelry (it isn't the all of me, but there's a bit of it that I do enjoy if I don't have to do it too often), and here's this weekend's work!

The beads are handmade from rolled up paper, painted, then dipped in UTEE (ultra thick embossing enamel) and with overlays of glitter, mica powders, fibers, and whatever else amused me. The beading is from my still gigantic bead stash, the wire wrap is in my "casual" style - yes, I can wire wrap perfectly. No, it doesn't amuse me so I prefer the casual approach; I think it conveys my ideas much better. One of my treasured beads from my trip to Venice appears in there (the glowey coppery gold one in the above picture). There's even a dangle on the end (sorry, not visible in the pictures apparently) of Vintaj filigree that I had in the "expensive stuff" stash. I love this because it doesn't match the copper at all (it's bronze with a washed-down-a-drainpipe-for-three years patina). My homage to the chatelaine - a medieval belts with keys and other useful household requisites on the ends.

Hope you enjoy the piece, dear readers!

Gift Wrapped

2008-07-05T12:09:00.008-04:00

I hate gift wrapping - I'll do about anything to get somebody else to gift wrap things for me - pay money, call in favors, rely on charm. This occasionally works, but inevitably, I still have to rely on my own wayward wrapping skills. I generally feel like I'm the only grown adult with the wrapping skills of a four year old.

If you've gotten a gift from me, then you've probably met these fine examples of my "skills":

Undercut paper with odd scraps of (hopefully similar) paper taped over the ill-fitting bits to disguise the jaunty flashes of cardboard box underneath.
Overly generous application of large amounts of paper to small boxes resulting in saggy protrusions of wasted wrapping.
Ripped paper with odd holes around box edges.
Bulgy sacks of paper when I can't be bothered to find a box.
Gift bags with unattractive wisps of undermatched (generally torn, certainly recycled) tissue paper leaking out from the top.

This past week was my friend Cindy's birthday. As one of the few painty-fingered members (we'd really like some more members!) of the Altered ARTists of Central Florida, I figured she'd appreciate some altered gift wrapping to go with her birthday gifts. Problem is, I hate gift wrapping. Sigh....what's an altered artist to do?

Uh....get out the paint and old useless stuff!

I LOVED this gift wrapping! I made packages from scrapbook paper (hey, it's not like I actually USE it, I just collect it so it may as well go to good use...), papers torn from an altered book and collaged, an old wooden thread bobbin, I punched holes, I sewed, I painted, I glazed, I stamped - I actually found that giving was beating receiving....huh.

What did I learn from this experience?

Well, I gotta be me. Apparently the following are not me:

measurement (involves numbers.....bad)
crisply trimmed and mitered edges
slick and glossy bags from Hallmark
perfect froths of hard shiny ribbon
using scrapbook paper for its duly appointed use

The following ....are me:

Hand-dyed paper from Thailand
My own "calligraphy"
Paint glazes on top of old crumbly book pages
Eyeballing my hole punching (not measured at all)
A vast grab bag of luscious furry ribbons

In the future, I'm wrapping everything this way - and I don't think I'm going to care whether people think it's "cool!" or "ummmm...interesting..." If they don't "get it", then they probably don't get me. That's ok too, but I wonder why I'm giving them a gift.....

It's amazing how much more comfortable something (formerly hated) feels when you quit trying to be somebody else, and start being you.

Thank you Gadgetgirl, and Happy 26th Cindy

2008-06-29T22:19:00.003-04:00

"One of the strangest things about aging is that your personal history becomes costume."

I freakin' love this quote. Forty one years of life, and I finally find a quote that pretty much sums it up. Thank you gadgetgirl, whoever you are.

I think it may even be better than the Jungle Cruiser-ism (and Buckaroo Banzai quote - now there's a film that no amount of mind-altering substances can assist you in making sense of) from my misspent 1980's Disnoid youth (believe it or not, for those who know me, there was one):

"Wherever you're go, there you are."

Oh yeah, happy 26th birthday Cindy - time's run out on doing something exquisitely, pointlessly stupid. After all, people can't really say, "Well, she's very young...." anymore.

Love ya!

Crusade 21 - Irresistable Wax Rubbings

2008-06-27T08:47:00.010-04:00

This month's Green Pepper Press crusade was yet another wonderful use for your rubber stamps, stencils, lace, paper doilies, carved wood, and any other textured surface that you may find around your cottage. I say "cottage" because it's a lot like the process of making brass rubbings that you can make of the brass gravestones in ancient churches in England. You rub a crayon over a textured surface, then paint over it with acrylics. Sounds easy, it is easy!

It's also fun and really brought out my creativity - just like all Michelle Ward's projects. It has been about the only fun in my life this week as I've had a bit of a low patch due to several different health issues that have been very painful and also scary. (Different issues, different pains and scary things) So God Bless Michelle Ward for reminding me that when the "ol' black dog" starts creeping a bit too close, the best thing to do is break out your art supplies.

Here are some of my wax resist samples:

The one on the left was supposed to be a rubber stamp casting - didn't come out well of the stamp, but I loved it anyway. The one on the right is sequin waste - came out perfectly!

The one on the left is a doily rubbing (those paper lacey things that they use as decorative mats in restaurants) and the one on the right is a stencil rubbing. So beautiful - I wish you could see it in real life. It is all gold shimmers and bright teal.

Then, the next question, what to do with them that will honor the process and make them useful? One of my favorite things about altered art is its ability to make beautiful things useful in your life. I've been intending to do "something more interesting" with the cups that hold my paintbrushes for ages. Well, finally I had an idea. See below:

Yes, that's a cup! And yes, that's a wax resist - not one of the ones I showed you, but it's a lace doily impression with a Michael DeMeng Stampers Anonymous stamp over it, and then my doodling and more painting on top of that. Around the back of the cup is a wrap of more of the wax resists. I love this piece! The picture below shows the wrap around the back. It's actually the first rubbing picture that I showed you (the one that didn't come out well, but I liked it anyway).

Here's the almost finished product - I also added a bit of recycled sari ribbon around the top for a finishing touch not seen in this picture.

Oh, one other thing.....in my last post I mentioned that I was thinking about starting up a meetup group for altered artists in the Central Florida area. Having gone into it a bit further, apparently it's quite expensive to start a group through meetup.com. So, (as a starving artist, well, not really, but I just don't have $200 to put towards meetup.com's advertising...) I decided to make my Altered ARTists of Central Florida a Yahoo group, with the hopes that we can find other people obsessed with altered art in the area, and hopefully they'd like to make some art with us (or at least discuss the wondrous properties of Golden Gel Mediums...) To advertise, Cindy and I are wearing shirts to the Stampfest convention this weekend. We'd really like to meet any other altered/collage/assemblage etc. artists in the Central Florida area - surely we can't be the only two in Orlando? So if you're reading this, and you're going to the Stampfest Orlando convention, we'll be there...with shirts on. Well, of course we'll have shirts on, but I mean shirts that say "Altered ARTists of Central Florida".....

Alterered ARTists of Central Fla has three current members - me, my friend Cindy (http://cskawins.blogspot.com), and......MICHAEL DE MENG! This was the only other part of my week that was good, really. Read the previous post's (the one about the Seven Bags of Craft Supplies...) comments and you'll see one from him saying he'd like to be an honorary member!

Also, Michelle - would you like to be an honorary member of our group too?? If you're ever in central Florida, we'd LOVE to see you and make some art. (shameless begging going on here...)

Thank you as always Michelle for your inspiration....

Seven bags of craft supplies just landed in my studio

2008-06-15T21:49:00.003-04:00

My mother-in-law decided to clean out her sewing/craft room, and (I think luckily for me) she decided to give her stash to me. Although there's a lot of "junque" in there, I think there might be some definite possibilities. I wish I was one of those folks who is so creative they can think of Somerset Studio-worthy things to do with a piece of rick-rack, a bobbin, and two pipe cleaners. I'm not that person, but it should be interesting just figuring out what to do with the new bounty. Or where to keep it, for that matter. I'm sure I'll probably give a lot of it away to art/craft minded friends. Let's hope, because I can't close the closet door in here as it is.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a submission for Somerset Studio's black and white challenge - I got some great work done on it today and I think it's close to being ready. Very exciting! Even if they don't like it, I do, and in about 8 - 9 months, they'll send it back I think, one way or the other. I don't want to post a picture here just yet, but the piece involves travel, history, and one of my Dachshunds. I'm also recycling an old piece of art in it (thanks Michael for inspiring me) and one of the paper castings from Michelle's challenge last month (see previous posts.) I'm on a big "use what you already have" kick at the moment. Probably due to putting myself on a financial diet with regards to art and craft supplies. Some of it is because, well, I need to in order to do bigger and better art things, and part of it is to prove to myself that I'm not a shop-aholic. I don't necessarily have an addictive personality, but I'm a little too hooked on the fix of buying yet another supply and/or book of inspiration. I LOVE the excitement of new ideas being presented, but it gets expensive, and I haven't made one 20th of the stuff I have magazines and books of inspiration on. So, make what you've got is the new mantra around here.

I'm also thinking about starting an Altered Art group here in Central Florida - big step, as I'm actually kind of shy (I have learned to fake extroversion quite well, but still...) The potential group currently has two corporeal members (me, my friend Cindy), one possible member who doesn't know about it yet, and several honorary members (Claudine, Michael de Meng, Michelle Ward, Lynne Perella, Traci Bautista) who also don't know about it, and probably don't get to this part of the world too often....ha ha. Well, a girl can dream! Anyway, will keep you posted if I do decide to act on the idea. There isn't a lot of altered art activity in this corner of the world, but maybe there's more than I know about?

Green Pepper Press - Challenge 20

2008-06-01T10:07:00.013-04:00

This month's challenge was to create paper castings from rubber stamps and found objects - here are the results! (See Michelle Ward's blog on Paper Casting for excellent instructions.)

The first ones I tried were the rubber stamp castings. Overall these went pretty well, I didn't really have any problems with them. I definitely found using a strainer positioned over the blender helped with separating the paper glop from the water. I scooped my glop into the strainer and then pushed the paper with my fingers. This made nice "sheets" of not-so-soupy glop to apply to the stamp surfaces. Who knew there was yet another exciting thing to be done with stamps?

Feeling emboldened, I moved on to casting from molds (not surprisingly, these came out the best) and found objects - in this case, charms. I only had one mold break, and that was my fault because I was trimming the edges with the scissors and put a little too much pressure on the edge of the cast. They are actually pretty solid, so I had to use my Kai rubber cutting scissors to get through them! I really liked the project, and I'm sure I'll use this technique again. Thank you Michelle for giving us such great instructions! Next I'm going to try actually creating my own molds (the last part of the challenge, but that'll have to be on a later day.)

I was not the only one who liked the technique - my baby Lili (aka "Infanta of Dachsonia") also greatly enjoyed paper casting, although for reasons aesthetic or textural (we love toilet paper) I'm not sure. She also enjoys eating paintbrushes, as you can see here.

Fauxnally Rusty

2008-05-26T08:26:00.004-04:00

Since taking the Assemblooks class a few weeks ago (see previous posts) I've been thinking about how to make ordinary items look like they've been sitting in a drainpipe for years. Today's subject of rustination was simple chipboard. Not that chipboard generally regards rustiness as part of its destiny, but mine does.

Experiments and results in the picture above! I started with several types of embossing powders that I had on hand. I'm a bit heavy on the "dirt colored" end of the embossing powder, pigment, paint, etc. end of the color wheel, so I have lots of this stuff on hand. None of them were really satisfactory, as they all came out too shiny looking. These can be seen in the strip of chipboard on the right side of the picture. I tried painting washes on top of them, interesting and I think I'll use this idea again, but not the desired rusty metal effect I was looking for. Best example of this (shiny E.P. and paint wash) is on the bottom corner of the strip on the left.

Then I broke out my Tim Holtz Distressing embossing powder, and things started to happen. It has a matte finish, and looks very granular, so I knew this was the right stuff, just needed to get some refinement. I painted an undercoat of brown paint (try any color of brown to copper that you like) and put the powder on top of it. Then, I sprinkled a little bit of verdigris embossing powder on top of that for some exciting color, and put a wash of paint on top of that, for a more mottled effect, and because Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold is just great stuff. This is the "fauxnally rusty" top part of the strip on the left.

Husband agreed it looked remarkably realistic. Just like the now rusty dies that I "liberated" from his tap and die set (see previous posts).

All Art is Illusion - the Telectroscope

2008-05-25T10:28:00.009-04:00

I was listening to BBC Worldservice on the way to work the other day, and they did a story on this wonderful new art installation currently on display on the South Bank of the Thames in London, and in Brooklyn, NY. It's called a "Telectroscope" - follow or copy/paste into your browser the link below to see for yourself:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/05/22/scope.project/index.html
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/telectroscope/cn/artichoke/index.php
http://blog.telectroscope.org

The concept is that there's a tunnel running from London to New York, and if you look down the tunnel, the people on the other side (3,000 miles away) can see you and you can see them. Apparently the drill bits bored up from the rivers just a few days ago, revealing this Jules Vernian portal with gears and steam and bells and whistles. (Ok, so it's really a type of webcam and a lot of very clever props and decor, but I could care less about the mechanics. "Why....because all art is illusion" quote from Michael de Meng - see previous posts on class with Michael)

This just totally caught my imagination - my Grandmother lived in Enfield (north London) and when I was a child (1970s) , I dreamed of her being talk to her on a picture phone and being able to see her and the house where she lived. My Nan has passed on 21 years ago, but I still miss her very much, wouldn't it have been wonderful if she could have gone to this and waved at me? I know, we have webcams and texting and all sorts of marvels now, but doesn't this just seem more romantic?

In which I learn the Secrets of Rusty Things

2008-05-17T14:35:00.012-04:00

Here's photo proof that I've really met Michael de Meng! Well, like you needed that, but hey, I just wanted to show you.....

In our class, Assemblooks, we learned all about Michael's way of altering books. Now I've done some altered book work before the class following the general ideas presented in Altered Books Workshop by Bev Brazelton (which is a good primer on the subject if you want to know more about altered books in general), but nothing like this!

Basically we took the pages right out of our books, so just had the spine, and then worked with foam core board to sculpt "pages" which we then adhesed together to form essentially a shadow box effect. You could build as much or as little "found objects" as you wanted to into the construction. In this form, the altered book is more like a very elaborate box or even possibly a frame. The great thing about altered books, and altered art in general, is that there isn't any one way of doing anything, it's whatever you want it to be.

Michael is an Assemblage artist (which is pronounced to rhyme with "collage" not "fridge") He started the class by talking about his ideas about art, and encouraged us to rummage through a box of "rusty things" that he'd brought with him for our inspiration!

He then gave us a primer on using power tools (scary but intriguing; he was happy to use them for the people that weren't comfortable about this part of the class), alternative adhesives and texturing materials (Dap Tub and Tile Caulk, Liquid Nails, and a few others), and later on, paint. Oh my! Michael is the king of basically what amounts to faux finish paint effects. Now, I don't want to give away any of his trade secrets, so I'll just say he taught us how to create "uszhh" (that olivey color that appears on almost all of his work), and it's near cousins "warm uszhh", "not so uszhh", and various washes that simulate the look of slate, water, verdigris, antiquing new metal, and faux burned paper (according to Michael, faux burned paper takes three times as long as just burning the paper, but is much less likely to go awry, so it has its positives!)

In between giving us information, he walked around and helped people with whatever they personally needed (technique, information, suggestions). I was so impressed with how generous and individualized the attention was. He also has a great sense of humor and is VERY approachable. He sat with the students at lunch and talked about travel, art, and mowing hay (one of the women in class has a cattle farm). At the end of class, he played, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and that was our signal to place our artwork on a table for a little exhibit.

After everyone had their pieces up, we gathered around in a circle and Michael critiqued everyone's work (not scary at all, very supportive and encouraging!) He really spent a good amount of time with each piece and went over them carefully making observations, asking the artists about their ideas on the work, and pointing out features of each piece. It was really great to see everyone's interpretations of the "altered book" theme. Some pieces were actually finished, some were in development, the great part was that everyone's work was totally different. We all started in the same place, but each piece truly took on the personality and outlook of its creator. It was such a difference from taking scrapbooking classes, where everyone comes out with something that looks EXACTLY alike (that's the point). He basically provided technique and advice if asked, but where you wanted to go in your piece was entirely up to you.

I actually found symbolism in my work that I hadn't even realized at the start. He asked what my thoughts were on the piece, and I suddenly realized that there actually WERE thoughts on the piece. I guess I had better show you what mine looked like, right?

Jane's Assemblook (interior)

The picture in the "cage" is of the Priestess of Delphi (by John Collier).

The picture below one I took in Venice, Italy of the colonnade of the Doge's palace near the Bridge of Sighs.

I realized that the symbolism was about caging and subjugating your (mine, many people's) intuition and your authentic self. The Oracle represents the interior world, and the intuitive feminine gifts that are often discounted or disregarded. The Bridge of Sighs was called this because prisoners were led across it from the Doge's palace to jail, and it was often their last sight of freedom. So, in this meaning, we imprison our creative spirit often in a cage of our own minds, and our own fears about breaking free. You'll notice, however that in the photo, there is almost a fiery quality to it, and a look of broken glass (actually, mica) indicating that the fire of the creative spirit in the end will break free of its "prison."

Jane's Assemblook (exterior)

The exterior of the book, by contrast, is very slate-like and (hard to see in this picture) watery looking, and is free of ornamentaion, indicating the cool exterior that we/I present to the world. (As a note, if you believe in this sort of thing, I'm a Capricorn sun sign, with a Scorpio moon - work that one out!)

So, outside is all smooth and stony, inside, there's a creative firestorm when we allow it to happen! This was the first piece that I've made in the direction of symbolic art - something that fascinates me, and is totally the direction I want to go in, of using art as a tool of self-discovery. So, having a class with Michael is obviously transformative on many levels! As a bonus, I used lots of the paint washes and techniques that he taught us in the book's production.

So, to conclude this very long post, I thought I'd show you Random Arts in Saluda, NC. Random Arts sponsored the class. It's probably the only altered art store in the Southeastern US, and is a little nook of creativity, with so much stuff to look at and putter through. Jane Powell, the owner as well as Jen (I didn't get to meet the other Random Arts Lady, Julia) has fostered such a creative community of altered artists in this area (western North Carolina is already very supportive of art and general and artists to begin with). If you are in this area, make sure you go!

www.randomartsnow.com

Michael de Meng's Assemblook

2008-05-17T13:22:00.005-04:00

Michael's Assemblook - Front Cover

Michael's Assemblook - Interior Left Side

Michael's Assemblook - Interior Right Side

Before I took the Assemblook class, I was looking all over the place on the internet trying to find a picture of what an Assemblook might look like. A class sample, if you like. I couldn't find one anywhere, so now I've actually seen one for myself - actually Michael de Meng's and the ones created by my fellow artists in our class at Random Arts (see previous post for pre-class jitters). I thought I'd share a few pictures I took of Michael's, so you can see for yourself how beautiful it is! I sincerely hope he doesn't mind my posting pictures of his work here :-) Shameless plug for Michael de Meng - if you are an altered artist, you simply MUST try and find a way to take a class with Michael; he is amazing!

www.michaeldemeng.com

Studying with Michael DeMeng

2008-05-04T14:06:00.003-04:00

I'm going to be taking a class with assemblage artist Michael de Meng http://www.michaeldemeng.com this week called "Assemblooks aka Trashy Novels" at Random Arts in Saluda, NC. http://www.randomartsnow.com

My friend Cindy (fellow artist, and given to observations such as, "You know, scrapbooking just isn't subversive enough...")and I call him M de M - like we know the great man, right?

On one hand, I'm very excited about the opportunity to study with one of my favorite "BNA's" (big name artists) but on the other hand, quite intimidated. I've been getting together my art supplies (ordinary - paint, brushes) and out of the ordinary (Qwik Seal Tub and Tile Caulk, Liquid Nails, 5 minute epoxy - not liquid) obtained from Lowes. I have no idea what to do with the latter group, and am concerned that my brushes are not up to snuff in the former. I'm also supposed to gather "altered" materials - problem is, I don't really have that many. Everything I have is more in the scrapbook-esque line, not so much in the Rusty Things category. This for a man who wrote a book called "Secrets of Rusty Things."

So far, my rustiest thing is two quite lovely bolt-y things that have nice circles in the middle of them that look like medieval stained glass window structures. I found them in my driveway and have been rusting them nicely next to my ficus for some months. I brought them in and washed them off the other day, and my husband saw them next to the kitchen sink.

I said, "Look at these nice rusty bolts; do you have anything else like this, cause I really need it for my class."

He said (eyes slightly bulging, forehead shoots skyward) "Those are my missing pieces from my tap and die set! Where did you find them?"

I said, "Um, out in the yard.." (gestures vaguely towards the yard) "I think they're pretty...very medieval...haven't you noticed their design?"

We then stared at one another; incredulous at each other's ideas of what constitutes "art."

He seems to be a bit worried about what other items from his garage I'm going to purloin next.

Hoping to get around to creating a few stencils for Michelle Ward's Crusade this evening; I'm definitely leaving this up until the last minute. I've been rather overly busy this month, it seems.

Queen IsaBella of Dachsonia

2008-04-27T09:09:00.003-04:00

Lili, the Infanta of Dachsonia, has an older sister named Queen IsaBella. The Queen is very regal, if slightly confused at times. Her main interests are eating, sleeping, and keeping the Infanta in line as best she can. She conducts state visits in her quiet, dignified fashion, greeting her public in a more "paw waving" Queen Elizabeth II fashion than the Princess Di-esque wild embraces of the Infanta. Her people love her quiet good nature, and sometimes marvel at her patience at putting up with the Infanta's "enthusiasms." Queen IsaBella is currently napping, as posing for this vignette really took up far too much of her very busy time.

Crusade 18 - Carve your own Stamps

2008-03-30T15:55:00.012-04:00

Lots of fun with the Green Pepper Press Street Team this month! Michelle challenged us to carve our own stamps, direct results may be seen in the new and improved banner for this blog - made from one of my newly hand-carved stamps. Here are the images I carved - thank you for looking at them!

This was the first stamp I carved - mehndi inspired - I used to bellydance a couple of years ago, and I learned henna design from one of my teachers. I still use a lot of inspiration from henna in my doodling.

I decided this stamp looked like a Moroccan rug.

The second one started out as my name, and then (due to my realization that I would need to write it backwards) it morphed into a life of its own. I think it's a butterfish (butterfly x fish hybrid!)

The third one I made just for me; it is Lili, Infanta of Dachsonia (seen as the "furry muse" in a previous post) as a fairy of the spring.

Here's my favorite; this one was the most technically advanced of the lot (I actually carved it in relief as opposed to just carving down onto the surface of the stamp.

Thank you so much for playing along with me, and be brave with your art! Thank you Michelle for your inspiration.

The Infanta is on a Royal Progress

2008-03-25T20:26:00.003-04:00

I have it on very good account that the Court of Dachsonia is having a royal progress...and will be spotted in this hamlet upon the near-morrow as they go to visit neighboring Weenrovia.

Will Lili, the Infanta of Dachsonia appear? She is regarded as both a beautiful maiden, and a fierce and feisty warrior...attacking rogue zip ties and defending her family against gangs of marauding river otters. Who is this VIP (very important pup), and where can you buy souvenirs of her Royal Progress? Watch this spot for details. In the meantime, I (her scribe and servingwoman) will leave you with a vignette of her most recent comisioned portrait.

Peaceful thoughts on a Sunday morning

2008-03-23T10:40:00.004-04:00

I am not a religious person, in the conventional organized religion sense, but I am a spiritual person. Who am I to say what brings you peace and a sense of the divine? I know that for me, I went out in the garden this Easter Sunday to look around at the fruit on the Japanese plum tree, and the flowers that are opening, the lizards that are emerging from their winter slumbers.

Look around you at your beautiful world and see. Slow down and really look, even in the forgotten corners of your garden or look at your front porch flowers. You don't have any? Get thee to your nearest nursery/garden center and try your hand with a few spring flowers. Consider the peace and tranquility to be found in nature.

Peace, love, and be brave with your art.

Jane

Titania - queen of the beeswax

2008-03-02T21:43:00.005-05:00

Since joining Michelle Ward's Green Pepper Press Street Team activities, I've been feeling pretty motivated to actually make art, instead of just think about it. That, and I've been sick for the last week, so I've had some time to actually dream and ponder...let my creative, right-brained mind take over from my left-brained work mind. I would like to say the gears shift easily, but actually, they don't.

Well, when I wasn't fast asleep from taking cough syrup, I finally decided to put my courage to the sticking spot and break out the Melt Art pot and the beeswax. I've been wanting to try this, but too intimidated by the possibility of it catching fire (I hear wax has a low flash-point) and what if it looks terrible, and what if I burn myself, and oh, I just don't know.... Don't you hate it when you finally acquire xyz art supply, all excited to try it, and then you lose your nerve ? So there it sits, taunting you, in your art supply area, until finally, one day, you just can't take it any more.

Finally, the artist comes out, and says, well, it would be nice if the artist said something like the quote by Anais Nin - "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Actually, this artist said, "Oh, quit havering and just bloody well do it!"

Whatever works.

So, the result of my experiment with beeswax collage is above. I have to say, I really like it! I had so much fun with it that I made two more pieces of art today as well! Now I just need to figure out how to get the right lighting to show them to you. The light in my studio/library/lair just wasn't adequate so I'll keep trying with them, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.

Oh, I should tell you what I learned right? I learned that alcohol ink shouldn't be used to change the color of wax - it stains the melt pot (duh, me! it's metal) and that wax melts a lot more easily than embossing powder. When you hit the wax with a heat gun, it turns liquid almost instantly. Interesting effects can be had as far as moving it around that way, but it gets a little too random. I'm going to try using the quilting iron (as Claudine Hellmuth suggests in her book "Collage Discovery Workshop") next.

In the meantime, be brave with your art! You'll be glad you did.

Crusade 17 - My journal "to go" box

2008-03-01T11:54:00.014-05:00

Here's my journal box! It contains:

My hand-bound journal - it's in the back with the fun hanging fringe.
Water brush and watercolor pencils (a bit obscured in the picture)
Glue stick and trusty Cutter Bee
scissors
Pencil and London Underground eraser (souvenir from a trip to London)
Archival ink from Ranger and rubber stamps - for journal titles
Prepainted background pages (in the back next to the journal)- the journal is ring bound so I can make the pages and worry about attaching them later

As you can see from the picture, I had a bit of help from from my friends - this is Lili.

Who says dogs don't appreciate art? She's out enjoying the springtime in the garden. Where I live, spring is beginning to, well, spring...my Louis Phillipe antique roses (behind the dog) are blooming, the orange and lemon trees are blossoming. It's a beautiful thing.

Here are some closeups of the pre-painted (and inked) background papers.

And finally, here are some actual pages - one is a very quick watercolor sketch of Lili on the move - at six months old, she's on the move a lot.

Below is a page I did when I was feeling particularly frustrated that it seems like the quick answer is far more rewarded than the considered answer in our world. We all just need to stop and smell the roses a little more often.

I hope I get better at formatting the blog; I've never tried blogging before, so don't know anything about html, other than it seems a bit tricky....

Thank you Michelle for hosting the GPP crusade! I'm glad that I've finally gotten my act together and started coming out to play with the group!

"Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life" Pablo Picasso

Green Pepper - do I dare?

2008-02-24T02:04:00.000-05:00

I've been watching the Green Pepper Street Team challenges for months now, meaning to take Michelle Ward up on the challenge to not only create a blog, but create some art. Mostly I'm better at shopping for supplies and reading art inspiration books than I am at actually making something, but this month her challenge was just too tempting. This month's challenge - create an art journal kit! I've got my box, I'm painting my papers, I'm busily bookmarking all the sites on art journals.....next step, get a blog to display the work. So here it is. My blog. I'll put up an ATC that I made last summer just to show you what my art looks like.