Post Cards...

Another thing I finally did was get to the post office and found some new mail art in my box. So last weekend I visited my arty friend Leslie and while she did numerous amazing arty things, I got these mail art cards done and ready to go.

The backgrounds were already done and in my pile of "do something with these!" so I added dots and more dots and lines and a couple of quotes from this large print book Leslie had. I need to get over to my library sale book room and find a large print novel like this for cutting out totally random phrases!

I still have a large pile of finished backgrounds to play with. Maybe now that this 6 week long cold and cough is GONE I will be able to find that arty mojo that seems to have taken a hike and get more done!

Bits of color here and there...

I have been noticing Spring approaching in it's various ways.

Our garden tulips are starting to bloom...

My increased need for colors in my life...

Colors coming out in some paintings I have been doing lately...

I have stacks of fabrics to sew, quilt blocks to work on, canvases to get ready for a little corner of an art show a friend is sharing with me in May, and a ton of new ideas that seem to blossom in the Spring. Oh and a garden to plan... what to grow this year that the snails and bugs won't get to before I do?

Grow Your Blog Party 2015

Welcome to Full Circle, a ragtag mix of mostly paper and textile arts and crafts, painting, yoga, photos, travels, thoughts and quotes, an occasional recipe and other assorted nonsense! Today is GROW YOUR BLOG Sunday!

If you are here for the first time and came via the Blog Party, I welcome you and would like to thank you for dropping by! My name is Rhonda and I am blogging from Sacramento, California.

I am a recently retired middle school science teacher and now that I have more time, have gotten back into the arty side of my life. I have been doing some form of art most of my life and now I am finding I want to do everything! So I divide my time with some painting, art journaling, crocheting, natural dyeing, bookbinding, sewing and quilting. When did I ever have time to work before? I think the best way to see what my blog is all about is to scroll down through the posts. As you can see it is a bit eclectic!

It is time for Vicki's Grow Your Blog Party and this year I am participating! This is my second year to participate. Her "GROW YOUR BLOG" event is designed "to bring more readers and FOLLOWERS to our blogs. The premise is simple-- just visit as many blogs as you wish and sign up to follow those that interest you. In turn, all the other folks will be doing the same thing~ we will all be growing our blogs!" Last year she had over 500 people sign up! I visited a bunch of cool sounding blogs and found many I still follow today -- not all arts and crafts or cooking, but some just an interesting life somewhere else. So I am hoping some of you will visit my blog and find things you like that will keep you interested in more. Either way, I am so thrilled you have stopped in and would love to hear from you!

One of the keys to discovering new blogging friends is to leave a comment, which I always do when I visit a new blog for this kind of event. So please feel free to leave me a comment below if you are visiting for the first time or a repeat visitor! And of course, always feel free to follow or subscribe to my blog. If you use a blog reader, please add my blog to your reader. I usually post a couple of times a week. Welcome to my blog today! I hope I will see you again in the future!

Getting ready for Grow Your Blog on Sunday...

Last year I took part in Vickie's Grow Your Blog party to help arty type folks expand their blog audience. It was a great way to not only find a few new readers for my own blog but also I found several new blogs that I am still following today. So when it came around again this year I decided to do it again. It will start on Sunday, when over 500 people with creative arts blogs will all post a Grow Your Blog post. I look forward to visiting more blogs and finding new online arty friends.

In the meantime, I have been thinking a lot about all the art I have been doing and wanted to find where I had put the photos for it online. This has made me think about -- sometime when I have spare time -- that I need to reorganize the photos on my computer and get rid of old things (like school lesson plans) that I no longer need.

I made a little mosaic of a few of the things I have done in the last year or two, favorite journal pages, mail art postcards, paintings, textiles...

Linked to:
Paint Party Friday
Off the Wall Friday

WOYWW

It has been a while since I have participated in WOYWW (What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday) but now that I am in the thick of doing art again I thought I would contribute. It's a mess but I got really inspired last night and left everything to dry overnight without cleaning up!

The large journal is for the 2015 Documented Life Project and the smaller journal is my regular art journal. Now that I have started using that larger Dylusions journal for the DLP I am liking the bigger size. 

Both of these are backgrounds for the Jodi Ohl's Pod-tastic class I have signed up for. Eventually they will be covered up with strange looking doodled pods and smoothed out backgrounds. I will post those when I get them done. 

Linked to: WOYWW #293

D.R.I.P. Painting Weekend fun...

This last weekend I took a class from a local artist, Margaret Sarantis. We did her version of intuitive painting in a fun class called D.R.I.P. (Dreamy Realistic Imaginary Painting) and it was a great creative experience!

Margaret demonstrated her various techniques while also working on a painting of her own.

We started along the lines of Tracy Verdugo's class in making a grid on our canvas and filling it with personal symbols.

But then we branched out into Margaret's unique version of it and added color and more symbols and more color until our canvases had morphed into wonderful creations.

A few close ups of the interesting textures we came up with, scratching into paint, stencils, etc.

Here is our class art show at the end -- such great colors!

It was a wonderful weekend of laughter and painting and Starbuck's lemon cake and meeting new friends. My art friend Lisa Culjis also went (her painting is the dreamy flower one on the right hand side).  I love classes like this and plan to find more now that I have time!

Paint Chip Postcards...

Last Sunday I went down to Leslie's house for an art play day and we made paint chip postcards for the current MMSA swap. You can see hers HERE.

At first I tried to make a scene with the paint chips and it came out ok but I am not usually so patient and this one took a bit longer than I thought it would.

So for the next 2 I used one of my garish orange and purple background post cards and did some geometric pattern stuff on them.

I really like how these came out actually.

One of these days I will scan or photograph some of the Mail Art I have been getting from these swaps and other mail art trades.


Linked to:
Creative Every Day

Second set of asemic post cards...

For the same swap I mentioned the other day on THIS blog entry.    HERE is the original MMSA swap page.

I wanted to send in 4 cards but had only 3 of the backgrounds I used, so I made another set of 3 more today on a different background. Now I have one each to save for my reference.

So these started with a lighter background and I used some map scraps, old gelli paper scraps, postage stamp, other ephimera from an antiques catalog, a hand-carved rubber stamp and pens.

Hot pink and orange...

When Evie and I had our first apartment in San Francisco way back (1970?), it was painted a lot of bright colors. I remember the bathroom was bright pink and orange! THIS MMSA swap reminds me of that! The swap was for hot pink and orange so I took some white cardboard and gelli printed those two colors to start, swirling them around and getting nice blobs of color. That would have been fine for the swap but I had to add something, so I added a couple of stamps...

Here is one of them closer up to see the  color blends:

As with all these swaps, part of the fun is in making them and then part of it is in receiving post cards from others! It is amazing to see the variety from the same prompt.

Linked to:
Mandarin Orange Monday
Paint Party Friday

Asemic postcard for swap...

Sometimes a challenge comes along that intrigues me so I need to drop everything else and do it. Such was the asemic writing postcard challenge for MMSA (Make Me Some Art swaps). Asemic writing is wordless and without contextual meaning. 

Google has a lot of cool examples of asemic art HERE.

This evening I played around with it using 3 previously Gelli-printed post cards. I also used: tissue pattern paper,  stamps from India, topo map fragments, black and purple pens. This is what I came up with.:

I will probably use 2 of them for the swap and keep one for myself as usual. Then I will probably make a few others in a different look so I can send in the maximum of 4 for the swap. 

Getting back to Mail Art...

I took a long break from doing Mail Art these last years but those of you who knew me back when might remember all my stamping and mail art post card days... well, they might be coming back! Now that I have time to play, AND a new Post Office Box, I have reawakened my fondness for interesting little pieces of art via snail mail, aka mail art.

My friend Leslie has been doing this for a while (and has sent me things now and then) and also introduced me to the MMSA site (Make Me Some Art) a year or more ago, but I only did that sporadically. I also now and then made some post cards or ATCs for SwapBot then stopped when I had no extra time to play. Now I have time and I plan to let that be more of my art fun -- things I can fit into little snippets of time here and there and which are so much fun to do.

So yesterday I finally sent Leslie one of the two bird postcards we made together months ago. I forgot to scan the one I sent but it was very similar to this one which I kept:

Then today I continued to work on a few cards I had gelli-printed and stamped a long while ago but had never done anything else with. I added some doodles and paint pens and got them ready to send out. The top two are near ready to go, the bottom 2 need more work:

They made me think of the art pages I did last year in Roben-Marie Smith's style so I added more doodles in that vein. Nothing too serious, just something light hearted to send as a mail art postcard.

Want to exchange mail art cards with me? My snail mail info is in the CONTACT ME tab above...

Hot Glue Gun Stencils...

Who knew? Well apparently a few people judging from the You Tube videos available HERE, HERE, and HERE... but it was a new technique to me so I tried it this weekend!

You need:

a hot glue gun and a LOT of glue sticks, some parchment paper or a craft mat (I used 2 pieces of parchment paper),and I used a brayer to press down as it gets hot and hard on my hands to press the glue flat.

then for the printing you need:

a gelli plate, acrylic paints, and a brayer to spread the paints as usual, paper to print on.

You can follow the technique in any of the videos above, but basically, you lay down a design on the parchment paper using the hot glue gun, immediately press the other parchment on top of it, flatten it (for the gelli plate I found this is needed), then when the glue has cooled, lift it away from the parchment and you have your stencil!

Here are a few I did today:

Primary set (a la Jane Davies above), yellow layer first, then red, then blue.

Yellow first, then orange, then teal, with a wash of part yellow-part gel medium to soften it.

Olive green and magenta, with a softening overcoat of gel medium mixed with transparent iron oxide (Golden)

and its reverse ghost print (my favorite of all these I did today):

These are mostly tests, although there are parts of them I like and might tear or cut up to use in my journals or other art. When Leslie and I get together again after Christmas we are going to play with this technique more. I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

Linked to:
Colorful Gelli Party
Mandarin Orange Monday
Creative Every Day

Back to Mail Art...

Years ago (like 20) I was very deep into mail art and swaps, with things constantly gracing my table that I had gotten or needed to send out. Then I stopped... (and many years went by where no art happened)... and now the Mail Art bug is back! There is something so fun about making a post card or an ATC (Artist Trading Card) and sending it off to anywhere in the world... and then getting one back again!

And then yesterday I got my first Mail Art in the form of a post card from Leslie! Testing out my new PO Box and making it pretty!

I hadn't played with the gelli plate for a while and it was calling to me so I made some starter background pages this morning which I will turn into post cards (or maybe ATCs, although I prefer to do a whole page then cut it specifically for those). I will do some more with these before I cut them into card sizes to wait to send out. I love the gelli plate... so simple: paper and paint and the result is always fun! (If not, just do another print over and eventually you have an unexplainable thing of beauty!).

Here's a close-up of one I particularly liked:

And here are my very high=tech techniques for some of the patterns...

For the bubble lines:

And for the overlapping circles, I just used this contraption several times on the gelli plate before I printed...

Here is how you make it:

Told you it was high-tech!

So now to just join more swaps and find some new Mail Art buddies and I am good to go!

If you would like to trade mail art (post cards or ATCs) please contact me using the contact form in the tabs above if you want to set up a specific swap. For just random Mail Art postcards, feel free to send me a post card and I will send you one in return. Don't forget your return address! My addy for mail art is:

Rhonda H.
P.O. Box 292745
Sacramento, CA 95829

Looking forward to seeing your fun mail art!

Linked to:
August Gelli Party
Paint Party Friday
Creative Every Day

I think this one is finished...

I am not actually sure when someone is sure that a painting is done, but this one seems to be done to me, so I guess it is. I showed it last Friday HERE when it was almost done but since then I added a bit more of the blues/greens... It needed more dots! I guess technically it is mixed media since it is all painted over a layer or two of collaged book pages and music paper. The size is 10" x 10" (25 cm x 25 cm).

Also not really sure what to call it so for now it is Sun and Rain. That could easily change...

Linked to:
Paint Party Friday
Orange You Glad It's Friday

Finally Friday...

Yay it's the weekend!

So when I got home today I played around with some paints and thought about the weekend and what I wanted to do artwise. Not decided yet, so I will just stay open to a visit from any muse that happens to pop into my neighborhood and go from there!

I want to work more on this. So far it is layers of collage (book pages and music paper) and inks and paint on 10" x 10" canvas. The blue is one of my stencils. Not sure yet what I want to make with this background.

Amazingly it has both orange AND blue! And no doubt will have a lot more as it gets done!

Linked to: Paint Party Friday and Orange You Glad It's Friday.

Paint Pens and Lots of Color!

I decided to practice my doodling and using paint pens in my art journal this week. I came up with these two pages, both a lot more colorful than my usual pages.

I really like the Bloom one... I am liking this doodling idea!

And this one I liked for all the variety of paint pens I used...

Both started out with gelli printed, sprayed and stenciled backgrounds. I gotta remember to take the before pictures!

Linked to: Paint Party Friday, Art Journaling Everyday, Orange You Glad It's Friday, Show and Tell Saturday, The Octopode Factory Friday Challenge, Inspire Me Monday and Mandarin Orange Monday.

Catching up with the Lettering Class...

Luckily I am not concerned about being behind since it was an online class that is open forever, so I will just get through it when I get through it! And today I was motivated to work on lesson #5 Word Play Collage for Joanne Sharpe's Lettering Love 201 class.

We had to make a list of words we liked then write them around the page in only one color. At the end I added some color around the edges because there was way too much white space otherwise and it looked bare. I tried the Stabilo pencil colors and not sure I like them... maybe I need to press harder and get more color coverage to get better watercolor look when they get wet. That is part of the fun of testing out new supplies!

Catching up with JF365 and finding orange...

It is April so that means the Journal Fodder 365 group @ Ning is now on Chapter 4. One of the prompts for this month is Solitude and here is the page I made for it:

The other page I made for this group was using one of the month's techniques: overwriting. It is something I have done on other art journal pages too. I like it because it is possible to write out something that maybe I need to say but don't want anyone else to read. The technique is to write one line then write over it as you go down the next lines. I tend to go over it all a few times, and this time I tried it with various colors of paint marker pens over and over a few lines. The rest of the page isn't very pretty as it was mostly a test of the paint marker colors and some previous stenciling.

I was looking back through some of my travel photos from recent years (looking for art inspiration) and found a few that I wanted to post for all the orange challenges I have been doing lately. Seems I am very much called to the color orange lately so these excited me to see again.

The inside of a church in Prague:

A post box in Prague:

A mosaic bench on Green Street in one of London's East Indian neighborhoods:

Breakfast salmon in Estonia:

Beautiful flowers at the Midsummer Fair in Riga, Latvia:

The beautiful terra cotta orange tiles of Trakai in Lithuania:

Ok, I think I like the color orange! (And many more travel photos another time)

I love a Linky Party!

Linked to: Mandarin Orange Monday, Color Connection, Art Journal Every Day