Playing with more gelli prints...

Started doing up a bunch of lighter colored gelli prints for additions to art journal pages and scanned one to test out how it scanned. I didn't like the plain scan all that much so I started playing with the colors in PaintShopPro (my cheapo version of Photoshop) and made a mosaic in BigLabs to see some of the various colors I adjusted it to. The darkest one I made a negative of the colors. I have not played around with PSP for a long time and I had forgotten a lot of the cool things it can do, so I think I will be playing with it a bit in the coming weeks.

This was the original scan:

Linked to:
Pink Saturday
Colorful Journey Gelli Party
Ruby Tuesday2
Mandarin Orange Monday
Mosaic Monday
Blue Monday

Another painting with those lines...

I had so much fun using that silicone pastry brush to make lines on the last painting that I did another one, similar but larger (9" x 12" on canvas board) and with more little lines!

I am realizing I have no idea how to NAME an abstract painting! So for now this one is Window Reflections. That might change quickly if someone gives me a better idea for what to call it! Feel free to leave suggestions!

Linked to:
Orange You Glad It's Friday -- Take a look HERE-- she featured one of my other paintings! Wow!
Creative Every Day
Paint Party Friday

WOYWW #204

The last couple of nights I have been reading a lot of art blogs (in a never-ending attempt to catch up!), watching videos from various online classes I am in, and pulling out the watercolors to try a couple of techniques and play a bit.

So this is what is on my desk today until I have more time to do more watercolors. This is from a VIDEO I saw from Whitney Ferre (one of the 21 Secrets teachers but this was a separate video on You Tube), where you just doodle or scribble with watercolors. It is so out of my box that I am trying it just to see if I can do it. My first instinct is to grab the markers and go that route, so these last couple of nights I have been playing with the flow of watercolor, looking for a more zen-like approach.

Anyway, my desk as I last saw it while I pondered my results...

Linked to: WOYWW

Sunday painting...

Spent a lot of today so far playing around with paints, catching up on art blog reading, and generally avoiding cleaning up my messy art room.

So... remember this? A bunch of orange, black and white on a 6" x 6" canvas board...

Well this is what it morphed into...

I am calling it "Wormhole".

Question to my painting friends: How do you display these small 6" x 6" canvas boards?

Linked to:
Mandarin Orange Monday
Inspire Me Monday
Monday Mellow Yellows
Create Daily
Blue Monday

In our garden...

Such pretty creatures!

Linked to: NF Winged

Looking for pink...

I wasn't sure I had any more pink journal pages for today's Linky party but I found this, a journal page I had done for the Journal Fodder 365 group I am doing over on Ning. Not sure that I ever posted it anywhere even, maybe I meant to do more on it but now I have forgotten...

It's on a gelli printed background, traced around my hand and colored in with pan pastels. Then I sprayed fixative so the pastels wouldn't brush off and wrote the caption with black and white markers.

Linked to: Pink Saturday

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

Creative Dare for April...

Over on Tracy Weinzapfel's blog she lists the April Creative Dare challenge as "Pick 5 words that describe yourself"... so these are my 5 words for the moment. I actually have more words so it was hard to choose, but I liked these 5 the best this evening:

This was done in my smaller (7" x 10") art journal that is nearly full! It is a background of gelli printing and stencils, with various inked circles and writing. I actually had the page background done for a while and it wasn't until tonight that I found a use for it.

Linked to:
Creative Dare
Art Journal Every Day
Show and Tell Saturday

WOYWW #203

When I looked this morning it was more like what was on my workdesk left over from last night's Gelli plate playing...

Here are a couple of the stencils I used for the red and black gelli printing session last night:

Linked to: WOYWW

Seek...

I was looking in an old art journal from many years ago (this page was dated October 2006) and I found this entry that I have always liked. I thought I would post it here, guess I am still seeking...

Linked to:
Glue it Tuesday

Some red and black in progress...

Not sure what I want to do with these yet but I got home and felt like making something in reds and black so I got out the trusty Gelli plate and whipped up some layers of red and black stencil play.

Linked to:
Ruby Tuesday2

Mosaic Memories...

I was looking through some old travel photos from Spain in 2003 (hard to imagine it was 10 years ago!) and found these lovely reminders of Parc Guell mosaics in Barcelona. I adore Gaudi's work and this park is such a wonderful display of some of his whimsey.

Linked to Mosaic Monday

Colors Challenge...

This is what I made from my colors challenge with Leslie -- we picked 5 colors from Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party painting and made art journal pages with them. These were the colors:

And this is what I made with them in my 9" x 12" art journal:

It started out as a gelli printed background, then I painted over the edges and made the face, made the flowers with Posca Pens and collages on a printed quote. Rubber stamps are along the outer rim. The challenge was keeping to just those 5 colors (and white/black)... and it turned out to be a lot of fun working on it today!

Leslie posted her entry on her blog so you can see how different they were!


Linked to:
Monday Mellow Yellows
Colorful Gelli Print Party
Art Journal Every Day
Blue Monday
Creative Every Day
Simon Says (Color challenge)

Finished Doodles Page

From the online workshop: 21 Secrets. I think I have finished the Doodle Your Way class page!
Remember here it was last look:

And as of this morning, here is what I think will be the finished page. I am finding with these doodles however, that I often go back and add a little something... so who knows. But for me, it is done and I will go to another one of the 21 Secrets next!

Linked to Mandarin Orange Monday

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.

More doodling and WOYWW...

I wish I had remembered to take the very first steps of this doodle page but I didn't so here is the first photo I took for the Doodling class of 21 Secrets:

and then I showed you what I had gotten to last Sunday:

and here is what I have since then... it is a slow process for me.

And it is also what is on my workdesk today!

Linked to: WOYWW

Gluebook and Glue-it Tuesday...

The other day I glued in a bunch of various things from a bunch of discarded magazines at work and some printouts I didn't need... and not sure what I am going to do with the gluebook idea yet but here are a couple of pages so far. One idea is now to do some painting over parts of the pages and then work it as an art journal page. Other ideas I have seen include collaging over it text or found poetry texts. I will be thinking on these for a while on the back burner.

But in the meantime, I found a new linky and finally one for Tuesday! Yay, it's Glue-It Tuesday!

Linked to: Glue-it Tuesday and Creative Every Day

Photo Mosaic...

This looks so cool and it is really easy to make!

I made it using the Photo Mosaic maker @ Big Labs using photos from my Flickr files.

I found the tutorial @ Little Red House, who I discovered does a Monday Mosaic linky! My favorite new thing to do, so I made a mosaic to join in!

Linked to Mosaic Monday, Inspiration Avenue, Weekend Flowers and Pink Saturday.

It's Not Orange!

Yesterday I was looking through some of my old photos for examples of tiles and mosaics and found a couple of photos that caught my eye. Then later I found another cool linky party and guess what? It wasn't about orange! It was for blue!

Did I mention I love the idea of these linky parties? It gives me a chance to find new art friends and see some amazing blogs that I would never have found otherwise. And they are fun to participate in... so here is some blue!

From Spain:

Back to London's Green Street:

I think this one was mostly painted but I don't remember, just like the design!

Linked to: Blue Monday

Catching Up Sunday...

Gotta start out with a photo of my 20 year old cat, Pandora (who was not happy about having her picture taken!)

Here is what I have been doing this weekend:

1. Made 2 new pages (top tabs of blog): one for current WIP and one for all the linky parties I have joined
2. Worked more on one of the 21 Secrets classes (Doodling Your Way)
3. Went outside and took some photos of the garden and Pandora inside
4. Made folders for my photos in my computer so they might be easier to find
5. Uploaded more photos to Flickr
6. Planning my summer trip to Alaska (just a week to go see a friend)
7. Thinking more about this art room organization and how to make best use of my space
8. Watching more inspirational art videos... some people watch TV, I watch YouTube!

Here is the start of a doodle page I am making for one of the 21 Secrets classes (Doodling Your Way):

And the garden seems to be coming back to life... roses flourishing, irises and sweet peas finally showing up! Looking forward to the sweet pea flowers!

And I wish that I could bottle how amazing the orange blossoms smell!

Linked to: Nature's Footsteps Flower Macros

Pink Saturday...

I am just in love with color lately! And thinking about past summer trips and some of the great flowers I saw:

Linked to: Pink Saturday

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.

WOYWW #201

WOYWW stands for What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday, a long running linky party I recently discovered. And it is really cool to see what other people are either working on or their work areas. Mine is a little more together this week than the last time...

Last weekend I reorganized my pens so I have many containers like this at the far edge of the table:

I had them upright before and not only were the cups always falling over, but I keep reading how it is better to store pens (marker type pens) horizontally so I brought home some small plastic bins I no longer used at school and repurposed them for my pens. I had been using them for desk baskets at school and had bought a dozen or so many years ago but I use something else now so they were just in my cabinet.

And then of course... there are the white pens... do I have too many? LOL (the answer would be "no, one can never have too many white markers/pens" in case you were wondering!)

And the also on my worktable at the moment: a journal page I just have color on so far...

And finally I decided this heart painting needed a quote and I think I have found the one for it, from "The Little Prince". Now I just have to decide how I will do the words, hand lettered or as collage to make it more multi-media. I will work on it this weekend when I have time. But here it is with just a printout of the words for layout so far:

So that is what is on my worktable this Wednesday! Linked to: WOYWW

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!