Sending out Peace

Tags

Blue, cards, Christmas, Christmas card, Holiday, paisley, Peace

My hope in life is to contribute to peace and beauty in the world. I’m taking that very literally this Christmas/Holiday season. I’m individually painting & illustrating my cards. Here is the first set of 10.

I made a stencil for the large paisley and for the word Peace and then I played with Derwent Inktense watercolor pencils, Ranger Distress Markers, some random gel pens and my Pigma Micron pens in 005, 01, and 03 of course they are all the blues. Making peace and beauty out of the blues. And I used my Pelikan Opaque Watercolors for the backgrounds. Each card is Zentangled and doodled and signed by me.This really fits nicely with the Diva’s Zentangle challenge #297: Give the Gift of Zentangle. For more tangled holiday fun check her out at

The quote on the inside of my cards is

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.                                                                                                             Melody Beattie

Peace.

I have uploaded one of the cards to Fine Art America if you want to purchase a set to use for your Christmas cards.

Draw a Bird Day: Blue Jay

Tags

acrylic paint, bird, birds, Blue, Blue Jay, collage, Draw a Bird Day, Painted paper

Here are my 2 blue jays that I made for Draw a Bird Day.

I’m planning to use one of them for my Christmas Card, but I can’t decide which I like better. Please let me know which one you prefer and help me select my centerpiece for my Christmas card. I love how my painted blue jay paper turned out.

I have been working on building up my painted paper stash because I want to get into more painted paper collages. This texture and color combination screamed blue jay to me. I grabbed an awesome reference photo from Kathy at backyard bird nerd and I was off! Laura at create art every day is taking a break from blogging, but I wanted to keep in practice for Draw a Bird Day.

 

Mandala 14 of 100

Tags

100 Mandalas, Blue, Orange, Zendala, zentangle

Community Art Project Mandala in Progress

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, Blue, collage, gratitude, Green, Inktense, watercolor, Watercolor pencils

I’m working on a 6×6 canvas for a fundraiser for my Art Association back in Beaver Dam. Here are my gratitude journal pages that have been helpful in the process of trying some things out. I will show you the finished project by the end of the week.

It has been interesting to only use the art journaling supplies that I brought with me to the hotel to create this canvas. I did a lot of experimenting with textures because I only had markers and watercolors to add color and I also wanted texture and a mandala. So…

It began simply enough with some stamped and stenciled words and smiley faces scattered around the canvas. I covered them with some watercolor washes to get a layer of color on the canvas. Blue and green just make me think of summer so that was where I started. I drew a purple flower with my Derwent Inktense pencil into the wet watercolor wash to see how it turned out. It seemed like too stark a contrast and I wanted to stencil some gesso over the top to add some texture to the piece.

I cut a heart shape out of some netting that a bunch of lemons came in. I tried to use this as a stencil with the gesso but that was quite a fail. So I attached the goopy heart into my journal. I have had a lot of success with this technique with acrylic paint, and it was interesting to try. Without a brayer I couldn’t figure out how to use this to make a print. It left some strange gesso globs on the canvas that left me challenged. It is very difficult to draw a mandala on top of a highly textured collage, but I really like how it looks. So I had to get creative. I added a layer of facial tissue that had soaked up a bunch of my watercolor paint and used matte medium to attach it. In the past this has provided a nice surface to write and draw on. It was too fragile to draw the mandala on the dry tissue and was still a little too textured for the kind of detailed mandala I had in mind.

I then started drawing mandalas on a variety of papers to see how I liked them. Fortunately we needed to buy a gift for a young friend and I was so happy to buy some tissue paper. I had never drawn a mandala on this flimsy stuff but it went a lot better than I expected! I’m really excited about exploring this technique some more. You can see here I attached a piece of the mandala over all of my experiments in my journal. I really like the way the watercolor pencils add depth and highlights to the mandala. I hope you have a beautiful day!

 

Compass Rose Mandala

Tags

100 Mandalas, Blue, Compass Rose, Mandala, purple, red, Zendala, zentangle

I haven’t finished a new mandala in quite a while and I was so happy to finish this one today! I hope you like it. It is a celebration of my new reading glasses. They don’t fix all of my vision problems and I’m still waiting for my new bifocals, but it feels so good to art and read again! I hope you have a beautiful day.