Diva’s Challenge 186: “String Theory – Leaves! Leaves! Leaves!”

Tags

altered art, art journal, autumn, Diva Challenge, fall, gratitude journal, leaves, zentangle

Well, my Zentangle Inspired Art is certainly inspired by both fall and zentangles, but does not have the gorgeous tangles of the Diva’s renaissance Zendala tile.

I kind of went crazy with the painting yesterday and didn’t leave a whole lot of room for tangling. But I think the page works and definitely captures my day. What a glorious fall day it was.

Water the Flowers of Appreciation

Tags

altered art book, art journal, Beginning Anew, colored pencils, gratitude, illustration, monochromatic, Thich Nhat Hanh

Beginning Anew “During flower watering, the speaker acknowledges the wholesome, wonderful qualities of the others.” Thich Nhat Hanh

So here are some photographs from a wonderful family gathering. I think they have enough color even in a monochromatic arrangement. Some of my favorite people.

Here are a couple of posts from a painting frenzy that I had a few days ago. Wow did i have fun with acrylics! You may have noticed a hint of plum on the right hand page, ha! We got 10 pounds of plums from our organic fruit share last Thursday so I spent QUITE a bit of time making plum bread and plum butter. Definitely worth the work!

The image below is also in my Events page. It illustrates the technique of layering papers and mediums and using colored pencils and a variety of pens on top to create different effects. I will be demonstrating this in my October workshop at our local art center.

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Buildings

Tags

buildings, photography

The medieval towers of San Giminano, Italy

A different view of the Old State House and another fabulous building in Boston

An abandoned house along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin

A shed on the Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin

The Cathedral in Montreal, Canada

I have been thinking about entering a photography challenge for while, so when I saw that the topic for this week on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge was buildings. Well, I had to go for it! I love to photograph buildings and these are a few of my favorites that I didn’t think would be duplicates.

Diva Challenge DuoTangle and Other Amalgamations

Tags

altered art, art journal, Diva Challenge, gratitude, illustration, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, lettering, painting, patterns, trees, yoga, zentangle

I got a lot of inspiration this last weekend from Julie Fei-Fan Balzer on using primary colors and simple patterns to create fun journal pages. Once I got started painting I really went crazy. I am so happy with the flower that was a result of a lot of playing around with paint. It feels like it has been a long time since I have done one of the Diva’s challenges. these are both new tangle patterns to me, I’m pretty sure. I couldn’t quite get my Phicops on the lower part of my J to work out how I wanted it to, but I like how the tile as a whole turned out. To see the other fabulous interpretations of this challenge and to meet the wonderful Diva herself go to

I have really had a rewarding art week doing a lot of drawing and painting. I have also enjoyed settling in to the fall routine. I’m so happy to be back to yoga with my friends. However, I am super happy to still have some of summer’s BLTs left for the year, too. I have had some wonderful surprises come in the mail and have enjoyed playing with different ways of creating patterns.

Fractal trees from Marie Browning.

Virtual Blog Tour – Reblog

I asked my friend and fellow blogger to participate in the Virtual Blog Tour and here it is!

“I was tagged in this  Virtual Blog Tour by my IRL, far away friend, Jeanette Clawson, at Lunanista. She was tagged by Sue Jones at It Goes On. I don’t know where all this insanity got started.

Let’s play some Jamiroquai and not sweat it. Go on. Sliiide. Follow it with “Happy,” if you can take it. There. Even if you’re no Fred Astaire, that has to be at least a Tootsie-Roll’s worth of calories burned. Maybe two, if you wore a large goofy wool hat through both songs…now,”

see original post

Lunanista – Virtual Blog Tour

Tags

art journal, blog tour, gratitude, illustration, meditation, migraine, photography, watercolor

This Virtual Blog Tour was inspired by Sue Jones at It Goes On. I’m a little nervous and excited by this opportunity to share my creative process.

What am I working on?

My two big intentions for 2014 are contentment and to make good art. I’m really trying to have everything I am working on have those goals in mind.

My gratitude art journals are always a work in progress and usually don’t feel like work as much as they are part of how I move through my days. I enjoy focusing on specific artistic skills and techniques and stretching my limits in my journals. Now I am also working on larger collages that have grown out of my art journals. I have done a few drafts of an abstract garden color meditation collage that is coming along nicely. The sketches were in watercolor and acrylics with different cut paper flowers. For the final collage I am making individual flowers in different media and attaching them to a painted canvas. I posted part of the work in progress, some blue Zentangle on paper flowers.

I am also playing around with different ideas of art to abandon and considering different challenges for Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine. However, I have decided that these are not my highest priority right now. I get easily sidetracked from completing big projects so I’m going to use these as incentives as I finish bigger projects.

Speaking of big projects, I have been working on transforming an extra bedroom that we have been using as a storage room into a studio. This is a really big project. I want to get my dining room back and I think that having a dedicated studio space will really help me see and finish my big projects. However, I have to pace myself and many days it is a choice between making art and working on the studio. I guess I’m waiting to have a creative block to get going on the studio. No, actually, I have days when I feel energetic and I can make some progress in there.

Cereal box installation. What, you may be asking yourself, is a cereal box installation? Well, you will have to wait and see, but I’m really excited. Environmentalism and contentment are part of the driving forces behind the idea for this. At this point I will tell you that, for now, I’m mostly collecting cereal boxes in my “studio” and that is not helping with the cleaning/organizing in there.

How does my work differ from others of my genre?

I guess my genre is art journals and that covers a lot of territory. I am inspired by many of the art journal artists out there. I most certainly am not the only altered book art journal artist, but I do seem to be the only one with the focus on gratitude that I have. I think the story behind how I came back into doing art full time may be what sets my work apart.

Some of you know that I have had really chronic migraines for the last 3-4 years. By really chronic, I mean that I cannot remember the last time I did not have a migraine. I have been keeping a pain record journal for the last 3 years or so and it was when I started that journal that I realized that my migraine never really went away. I have other pain problems, too so it has been a little complicated. What this level of migraine means is that I spend a lot of time laying quietly in a dark room doing (almost) nothing seemingly for days and weeks on end. I practiced gratitude daily long before the migraines and it has helped me through more than one of these long quiet days. Do you know what happens when you give your mind that kind of space? You notice things. Some days I’m grateful for the lyrics to a song and the cat lying on my pillow. Some days I spend an hour or more doing loving kindness meditation to pray for freedom from pain for my future self and every being on Earth. Sometimes I lay there and think about the fact that people are doing metta (loving-kindness) meditation for me and praying for me. Do you want to know the really wild part of this? I actually worked as a school psychologist part time until last October with the full time migraine. I’m not sure how I did that. I know it didn’t leave much left over to be a mother or wife and it led me to a life with pain levels of 6 and higher almost all the time. By that point I was working maybe one or two days a week and spending most of the rest of the week in bed. I had started my blog and gratitude art journal by then. I am happy with the work I did, but it was generally much simpler than what I do now and I didn’t post as often to my blog either.

The migraine has had vision implications at times and always has stamina limitations. These have had an impact on the ways I can express myself with art. Art journaling is the perfect venue for expressing art within varying constraints! It is really difficult to paint with watercolors or acrylics in 10-15 minute increments. However, Zentangles are perfect for short periods of work. I am getting to the point where I can work on multiples of something, such as prepping canvases and journal pages and getting into more watercolor and acrylic painting. A lot of the time now I will start something with paint and then embellish it with Zentangles. A photograph is something I can manage on even my worst days, or gluing some text from a magazine, or writing out a word or two.

Why do I write/create what I do?

I started to really enjoy exploring new avenues of creativity while I spent hours being quiet and trying to think of something other than pain. Like I said, I have been practicing gratitude in one way or another for many years and I am so grateful for the joy and satisfaction that working in my journals has brought to me. The fact that anyone else is interested has been such a wonderful bonus.

How does your writing/creating process work?

As I go through the day I notice things that I am grateful for. I have developed metaphors for many people and activities in my life that are frequently included in my journals. Some examples from this week’s post include the use of pages from my father’s hymnal and old magazine clippings that my great aunt collected as a metaphor for my mother.

 

Usually when images are cut up, as in Saturday’s entry, it represents some kind of related work I was able to do. I like to use images of cut up food for time spent happily cooking. I like to represent organizing stuff with orderly rows of circles or squares with different design elements in them. I have to say that I was so happy with the way the photos of our latest CSA bounty turned out. It was fun to cut up the ingredients to make the salsa with the food processor and then with the scissors. Some days I also want to use specific art supplies to prepare for a workshop. Tonight I’m teaching a back-to-school gratitude/art journal workshop with mostly Crayola supplies. This watercolor was done with crayons and pan watercolors available for less than $5.

So some days the things I’m grateful for determine the media and the process and sometimes it is the other way around. I have to admit that I am also addicted to books and videos about how to do different things. At any given time I have 20-30 things checked out from the library and that may determine how I express my gratitude on a given day. If a book is due that day I may add it to my reference page to use a technique I don’t yet have the materials and/or stamina for yet or I may jump right in and try something from the book and mention it in my blog.

And some days I’m not up to much of anything so I lay in bed and make a few notes in my pain journal to use as reference. Those days usually end up being pretty simple pages. I may focus on a word or person or my cats or all of the above. There are so many things that I am grateful for everyday, even my really bad days. I have made stencils to represent my husband, son, and cats. I have a stash of photos that represent different friends. I have started to collect washi tape and special papers that reminds me of individuals.

My photography has generally been used to support my children’s scrapbooks, my journals, cards, and as reference for my artwork. However, I bought a really nice camera a few years ago for a vacation to Italy and I have been getting into photography more and more as an end in itself. As I mentioned before, I have also developed a stash of photos that act as metaphors for different people and activities. My friend Dawn is such a morning person and I have a photo of the sunrise over Lake Michigan that is so her.

As I have been blogging longer and reading other people’s blogs more, I have been writing more and sharing more of who I am. This post has been the biggest share of all time for me and I hope you have enjoyed it. I am looking forward to learning more about the creative process of 2 fabulous writers I follow Lora and Ellisnelson.

Savoring Simple Pleasures

Tags

art journal, CSA, doodle, fabric collage, gratitude, illustration, letters, photograph, tomatoes

Wow! I really had a lot of journaling to catch up on. It has been fun for me. Thanks for waiting and I hope this is fun for you, too.

This two page layout is from yesterday and today. I’m not going to be really careful to be chronological, but I think it will make as much sense as it ever does.

I love food. This is the best time of year for eating and I really do savor my food. If you have been following me for any length of time you may have noticed a lot of tomatoes and other foods make frequent appearances in my gratitude journal. Part of this is that I am so grateful for the plenty that I have access to. Another part is that I love my farmers. I belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm. My farmers provide me with the best tomatoes ever. Seriously. I have included parts of our newsletter in past posts, too because they have great recipes. Not only do our farmers provide us with superb, fresh, organic vegetables, but they coordinate with a local bakery so we get fresh bread when we pick up our veggies. Awesome, right? AND, they coordinate with organic fruit growers in our region (and sometimes a little farther away) and we get organic fruit that we pick up about once a month at the same place. So, when I talk about savoring food I’m not just talking about those brief moments when my mouth is bursting with pleasure. I feel so good about what I eat. Although I do have to admit that I am not a vegetarian anymore. Do you want to know why? Bacon. It is the gateway meat. The most perfect food on earth is the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich that I make here in my kitchen. I make yummy sounds when I eat it. It is just that good. So, I also buy sustainably raised beef and Amish chicken. However, for the bacon it must be Oscar Mayer. I have tried to substitute others and I know that I shouldn’t, but I CAN NOT RESIST. I only buy about 2 packages a year. That may contribute to the savoring. But I need to stop writing about bacon. NOW.

The fabric landscape was inspired by an episode of Sewing with Nancy. She is our local celebrity and I just finished reading her autobiography.

http://wpt.org/SewingWithNancy/Video/art-quilts-fusible-collage-workshop-part-1

I believe I need to stop into the store to get some more subdued cotton fabrics to make more visually pleasing fabric collages. The techniques in this video are so fun and easy. Now that I’m caught up I may dig into this in more detail. It really supports the multimedia landscape ideas I have percolating in my head.

These four pages were initially done in a book called “Garden Open Today” that has beautiful drawings. It is a lovely little book, but it turned out to be too fragile to make into an altered art journal. That is part of the reason for the delay in posting. Anyway the two pages on the right are inspired by a quilt and are some variations on the layout and color scheme. The two pages on the left include some architectural details from photos from my Boston trip. I have been having so much fun playing with them that I’m going to continue. Note: heirloom tomatoes.

The Garden Open Today book would have been such a perfect fit with this time of year. Here I incorporated the title page that I have embellished. Notice my little watercolor of little vegetables. And the holy Peach Cobbler. How do you like the image of the iPad mini out on the balcony to announce to the masses how to travel in comfort all narrated by the lovely Siri (who I have altered to become Mr. Darcy – not that I am seriously all that hung up on Mr. Darcy, but I so love the book and character.) Is this my longest post ever?

 ta-da