Pot pourri of me

A little 4x6 post card goodness to show you. I needed to do a card with a Japanese landscape theme. I'm like, how am I gonna come up with an entire landscape? Then, as serendipity always does, my answer came as junk mail. I saw cover artist Tom Jones' gorgeous illustration on the ASW art supply catalog and tore it right off.

Then, to my rubber stamps and my pieces of scrap acetate that I collect off of packaging. I had read about Buddhist temples sitting so high on the mountainsides in Japan that the mist makes them appear to float in the air. So, I stamped my temple stamp on acetate with black Stazon and colored it with my Sharpies. I really really really wanted to use my blossom tree stamp too, so I did the same thing with that one. I also had a few of those red bordered words that I was RAK'd, so that made 3 red elements for me to arrange in a visual triangle on the landscape.

I cannot remember another simple-looking card taking so long to make, but sometimes that look of simplicity is a complicated process, I guess. At first it looked too simple for me, but I didn't dare change a thing, and that was good because the look grew on me very quickly. :-)

Ok, the photo above is my nomination for "What were they thinking?" This is Maybelline's new vibrating mascara brush. That's right. You turn it on and the mascara vibrates onto your lashes. Hmmm. Sounds just like a litigation machine to me. First time someone vibrates a dang hole into their eyeball, look for this product to be second-guessed. The worst part of the whole thing is the $14.99 price tag. Yeah, I don't need mascara that bad, do you?

Lately, I've entered into a couple of conversations where scrapbooking was kinda slighted. And even though I cannot remember the last time I scrapped (and I do need to), I've found myself a vigorous defender of it. I don't think that people mean to diss it. I think they don't realize how it has evolved in the last few years to where basically, anything goes. And, if all I saw of it was the QVC Cricut infomercials, hey, I'd still be afraid of sticker sneeze, too.

It's weird how Life goes. The very thing that caused a loosening up in scrapbooking is the very thing that I used to not like at all, and that's the scrapping style of say, Kristina Contes. That very informal, messy, who-gives-a-crap spontaneous look, sometimes involving office supplies and often including stream-of-consciousness journaling? The uber-sloppy distressing and tearing of the paper borders still unnerves me, except now I am fascinated by it (one reason being that it is almost impossible for me to do...so far hehe...one day I will conquer it! lol).

Anyway, it was this wave of earthquake change that has blurred the lines between art journalling and scrapping, if you choose to scrap in that style. In other words, when you art journal with photos, it looks similar to the Contes style (Autumn Leaves called it Freestyle and put out a book. I pulled it off my shelf the other day and was finally wowed for the first time, applying current tastes. There's a section on doodling and this book was published back in 2006! Doodling has been hot for about a year in multimedia collage and art journalling. Interesting...)

Now, I first began scrapbooking in one of those magnetic sleeved photo albums using notebook paper or stationery journalling and my photos, stickers occasionally, also ephemera like movie or concert tix, whatever was relevant. This was back in the 1970's and 80's. The second time I got into it was in 2004, where I got my instruction in the new basics of 12x12 just prior to the earthquake wave change into graphic design, like Ali Edwards and Stacy Julian. In addition to introducing graphic design principles to layouts, this group made letter-size layouts a very hot trend and eventually a permanent choice.

Contes and her contemporaries like Ashley Calder, Kelli Crowe, Emily Falconbridge wanted to push the limits of materials and canvas/substrate/form. They also took graphic design and funkified it, and introduced an anchored style that bunches elements around a focal point and requires significant white space. Whimsical is allowed and even desired. Art cards, art journals, layouts on canvas. Nothing was off-limits with this generation of scrap-trenders.

So here we are today. I just can't seem to resist defending my old love. It has been through my own journey sideways into altered arts and multimedia that I have a refreshed appreciation of scrapbooking. It's all expression and documentation of our lives, and I hope the lines continue to bleed and blur between all paper arts, because we are the most free to express as we want that way.

Until next time,