Leaf

"Leaf" - what an original title!
Text pages were torn and glued onto cardstock then washed with 3 colors of acrylic paint, blue, green and yellow. Water thinned black acrylic was brushed over the dry paper and lifted off allowing some of the base colors to show. Gold wax was rubbed over the page to create texture and highlights. The "perfect" dried leaf was glued on and when pressed onto the page a piece of the leaf broke and a suprise bit of interest was born!

Link-of-the-month

http://www.gogratitude.com/masterkey/

Fragments

Fragment Series

Twisted paper, metal pieces on a crackled background. The distressed metal is from soda cans, my new favorite medium to use.

Links-of-the-week

http://www.kerismith.com/blog/ - check out her 100 journal ideas!
http://www.kerismith.com/100ideas.pdf


http://lazygalquilting.blogspot.com/ - from Egypt

http://www.knittingcurmudgeon.com/

Dreams

Picture It Digital Collage.
This is an example of what can be done with ordinary photographs: Palm frond, statue, park, peeling paint on a Mission wall and a Mission door. Text and stars were added.

Links-of-the-week

http://homepage.mac.com/catspaw/Menu6.html

http://www.encyclopediaofanordinarylife.com/

Asian Assemblage

This assemblage is for a techniques AB.

The skewers are wrapped with distressed metal and copper wire. The image (manipulated) purchased at the Antiques Mall is a toner copy heat transfer using my newest toy, a transfer tip. Background is a thick coat of titanium paint with Quinacridone Gold brushed through it and textured with a plastic card.

Martha's Vineyard

Metal is nearly impossible to scan or photograph, at least that has been my experience.

The backgrounds are gesso and water-soluble pastels. The Victorian images were inkjet printed on transparency film and adhered to metal. Dymo words say, "Martha's Vineyard." And two embossed metal embellishments complete this spread for a techniques AB.

Winter Sunset

I rarely use the rubber stamps I've collected, why I don't know, but this page for an AB seemed to be the perfect combination. I especially like the tree on the right edge of the page.

Oil pastels were randomly scribbled onto cardstock, Aleene's Tacky glue was coated over the entire page and a watered-down green grey acrylic was brushed over the glue. When the acrylic paint dries a nice crackle effect takes place.

Quote

Listen. Make a way for
yourself
inside yourself.
Stop looking
in the other way of looking.
Rumi

Friday Night

Another Posada image and another Citra-solv technique for the background.

Ah, finally Friday night!

Day of the Dead

Shall we Dance?

I have no idea why Day of the Dead images fascinate met. I was thrilled when I discovered that Jose Guadalupe Posada's images are in the public domain! A simple search on the internet will turn up a number of his more famous ones.

I made Photo Shop Elements brushes with a few of the images and played with them. The background on the bottom one, "Shall we Dance?" is a scanned National Geographic Citra-solv technique that can be found at: http://www.picturetrail.com/gpierce It's the 8th example in the Nevr-dull, Citra-solv album.

The official date for Day of The Dead in Mexico is Nov. 2, but it's sometimes celebrated on Oct. 31 coinciding with Halloween.

Link-of-The-Week

http://artellawordsandart.com/ZuraBethLedbetter.html

New Fun Journaling 4 week workshop starts Nov. 1. I am the moderator for this workshop.

Norton House, Martha's Vineyard

While on a tour of Martha's Vineyard in Sept. our guide pointed out the 9 million dollar Norton house and said, "If you use Norton Software products then you've helped to build this house." After having a weeklong battle with Norton last year when I was locked out of being able to update the AntiVirus software I had renewed and getting nowhere I thought that the house had the perfect makings for a creepy Haunted House!
I'm no longer a Norton Software user!

Quote

"America's strongest point is that they have an open mind."
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundaraja - yoga master

Links-Of-The-Week

http://www.lisaalbinger.com/

http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/a/collage/soulcollage.html

Who Am I?

Gesso play.
Lately, my mother seems to be disappearing into a corner of her mind that I can't reach. This piece reflects the decaying of our minds and bodies as we age.

My Birthday Collage

My Birthday collage - I hope to do this annually! This one is completely digital.

The background was painted on canvas paper and scanned into the computer. The man on the lower left is my great-grandfather, digitally manipulated and saved as a brush in Photo Shop. The stars and text are also brushes. The Carousel horse is an image I shot during my Cape Cod trip - manipulated and stripped of his color. He was also saved as a brush. There are also two ghost-like images of a self-portrait.

Fragment Series

Fragment series - dryer sheet - heat tortured and painted, aged foreign text over Stock Exchange Quotes.

Links-of-the-week

http://www.darkfiber.com/eyeinhand/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/judywatt/sets/209292/

Quote

When you get into a tight place where you feel you can't go on, hold on, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Link of The Week

http://www.moderngypsy.com/green/mandala/

A Wonderful Life

What A Wonderful Life I've Had! I Only Wish I'd Realized It Sooner!
Quote by Colette

This fella is my Great Grandfather. The background is glue crackle. White acrylic over yellow cardstock and glazed with Black Antiquing Gel.

Fragment Series

Fusible web fragments on collage background. The dark layers are the fusible web which aren't very evident in this scan. Another Fragment Journal page.

Fragment Series

From Fragments Journal. Found objects on the work table. Bottom of background is glue crackle over text pages that are semi-visible on the collaged and painted upper section. The left green and blue strip is distressed lutradur.

Link of The Week

http://www.typogenerator.net/

Type a word into the box, click on "generate" and you'll get a one-time-only image! Save it if you like it. This link is making the rounds of yahoo groups and is very addictive.

Weeds In The Garden

A new technique that I'm working on using pages from magazines, gesso and fluid acrylics. I scratched into the paint before it was dry.

Eucalyptus Face

Faces found in nature have always fascinated me. I saw this one looking at me when I walked past the eucalyptus tree but when I took a step back to photograph it I couldn't find it again. It wasn't until the
I got the prints back from the printer that the face appeared again. Elusive!

Link-of-the-week

A good friend of mine has an editing business that I'm only too happy to provide the link for! Check out Rhonda's site if you're in the market for book or story editing.

http://reversole.home.kih.net/EDITS/

Man of Stone

I love it when I can use a background created for a specific reason for something completely different. The background on the left is made from torn magazine clippings that were first glued to cardstock, then scribbled on with an embossing ink pen and finished with gold embossing powder.

The collage on the left is a scan of the magazine clipping background that was manipulated in Photoshop Elements. The second layer is a digital rubber stamp image created from a cabinet photo purchased at the local Antiques Mall. The collage will most likely end up on the left side of an art journal spread.

Porcine

This creature, porcine, wasn't evident until the film was developed.

It was about 95 degrees at the Hakone Gardens on the 15th and I shot photographs of anything that interested me without paying too much attention to what was in the viewfinder. The light streaming through the tree caught my attention. I couldn't resist manipulating the area of the tree were this porcine seems to have wilted in the heat.

Link-of-the-week

Nevr-Dull, wadding polish for all metals, has never been the same since Gail Russakov presented her
technique for altering magazine clippings in Somerset Studio magazine, Jan/Feb and March/April 2004.

http://www.gailrussakov.com/Home.html

Link of The Week

http://www.artistsrow.com/

Short Take

Hurray for the ARTS!

Gleaned from today's newspaper:
Stephen Noonan, the new school's principal (Mahanttan High School For Arts) said one science teacher at first "didn't believe that contact with great music, dance, painting or any art could support his work with students in, say, a physics lab. But what he found was that studying a dance made students observe motion, light, movement, speed--and their observations and notes in science improved, they became clearer."

Link-of-the-week

http://www.creativejuicesarts.com/index.htm

Eternal Smile & Another Tongue

Think Red
Pray Blue
Dance White
Live Green

No Sense
Her Mind is Wild Joy

Anonymous "refrigerator poem"
From The Creative Juices Arts Studio

Only as high as I can reach

Self Portrait - June 05 - oh how I love being able to manipulate photos!

My face is showing the toll Stacy's numerous hospitalizations has taken on me; dark circles, saggy skin and more lines and white hair than I can count! This image looks more like I feel inside and not the face I see in the mirror!

The Keys Are Held By . . .

This is one of my favorite techniques. Duct tape, gesso, water-soluble pastels, thinned acrylic paint lifted off and metallic wax plus a little scratching of the surface. I consider it my secret and only I have the key to unlock the technique. Ha!

A couple of nights ago I was watching "Life Aquatic" and the right lens fell out of my glasses and when I couldn't find the screw to put it back in I thought, "So what, I can't see anything out of that eye anyway!" And then I remembered something I'd read recently in Robert Genn's newsletter:
Recent loss no problem
by Gail Siptak, Houston, TX, USA
"I am blind in one eye. I've been painting since the '60s and felt "in my stride" for the last 20-25 years. I see things, people, as compositions and ideas. I see through my paintings. If I had lost an eye (and therefore depth perception) when I was younger, it might have made work more difficult. As it happened a year ago, it has presented no problem. My mind is the painter."

"My Mind Is The Painter," what a marvelous gift that statement is!

Short Take

Q. You've said, "To be an artist, one must live artfully, even if you're hanging clothes on a line." How do we do that?
A. In everything that you do--brush the dog/your teeth, read a book, take a child to the beach--you are focused. And being in the moment will give you the artful means.
Interview by Susan Cantrell with Caryl Hill - a pal of Henry Miller's

ATC

ATC - Four original flower photographs digitally manipulated in Picture It.

In the 80's I worked entirely in black and white and it still feeds something in me. It could be the tranquil harmony that is achieved in the tonal range.

"Using real ephemera from daily life can add richness to a journal. But packaged images--which might well be called pseudo-ephemera--besides not really being related to our lives have become ubiquitous, and like anything too often repeated, these images have become cliches. As such, this material weakens any artwork in which it's used unless it's radically changed or used very deliberately and for reasons that relate clearly to the concept of the piece." Gwen Diehn - The Decorated Journal

Mmmm, very interesting . . .

TIME

Time - manipulated image. First layer is a photograph of barrels. Images of a clock and a metal washer were altered and resized. Text was added and the entire piece was created in Picture It, 2002 version which is superior to the newer versions!

Gwen Diehn's latest book, "The Decorated Journal" arrived from Amazon.com two days ago and I finally had time last night to do take a serious look at it. While I've always attempted to follow the adage that less is more I have failed miserably to live up to that!

"When the buying crazies hit you, when your confidence in your own work slips, trying holding on to the idea that less really can be more. Try sticking to a small range of high-quality materials and practice with them to learn how they work. Once you can use these few materials well, you will be able to produce every effect you want." Gwen Diehn

Also, "The difficult truth about art materials is that the materials themselves are not as important as what you do with them."

I've always believed the above statement when it comes to having the "right" camera, but when it comes to getting the latest "must have" item I'm already a bust! I had to have Lutradur to make a fabric journal out of. I'm hoping that I can justify the purchase of it by creating an exciting journal to mail with my Flat Villagers for their whirl-wind tour to exotic places with Marie. She lives in Australia and to a native Californian the country down-under is pretty exotic to me.

Mona Lisa Eyes

Mona Lisa Eyes

Digital Collage - manipulated in Picture It.

Gesso and watercolor paint background. Mona Lisa is from
Aisling D'Art's Faces CD. The foliage is from my photo files.

"The world's engagement of beauty is my bible, and Art is my religion.
I come to it as a child, and I add all the grown wisdom I can gather.
Creativity is my salvation. My easel is the altar.
My paints are the sacraments. My brush is my soul's movement,
and to do poorly, or not to work, is a sin."
Robert Genn