A little Darkness never hurts

I've been up all night, creating, packaging traded mail art to new homes, working on 3 different projects an hour here, an hour there. And then it occurred to me that October was almost over and I hadn't done Michelle's GPP Street Team Challenge #34, which was to start with a black journal page.

Since I had my inks and embossing powders already out, I decided to use them. I took my Ranger Inksentials white gel pen, hurriedly wrote what was on my mind in a stream-of-consciousness way, unedited and in very sloppy handwriting, until the page was filled with white cursive. Then I rubbed in some watersoluble oil pastels, and stamped over that with pigment inks and heat embossed.

I like the results so much that I scanned it in to use in the future as a background. Click on the photo to enlarge it -- you can really see all the embossing and different colors. And if you like it, you are more than welcome to snag it for yourself. It's my Dark Side gift to you.

It seems like only yesterday it was the beginning of the month -- time is moving much faster to me than it used to -- and I had planned to do dry pastels or embossing ink and Perfect Pearls for the challenge. So much for that.

I still want to do dry chalk pastels on black paper someday soon. I recently read you can *burn them in* with rubbing alcohol so that they won't rub off. Don't know if that is true, haven't tried it yet (I did manage to have fun doing that with a charcoal pencil the other day, though, so the alcohol does do something along those lines).

Black paper definitely has possiblities I never seem to remember to utilize. I'm glad I took a few moments to *Challenge 34* myself and Come Over to the Dark Side. :-)))

Bad Hair Day Life and Art School Update

I made this page with my hair affliction in mind, which is that I just have bad hair. Period. And, when I have the supreme luck to have my hair look good, it's all gravy, baby. Looking on the bright side.

I used collage sheet images from Nancy Baumiller's Collage Play with Crowabout challenge group. And my painted background is another page in my Kelly Kilmer monthly ning class A Prompt A Day.

So, a little art school update: I have winded down on doing art journal pages, as I am worn out from it. I pushed my envelope, enjoyed it, challenged myself and kicked my art up a notch due to it. But I had to just stop this past weekend, enough being enough. I needed a break and I did nothing artistic. That behavior bled into this week, and last night I realized I could keep it up even longer, which will really blow my schedule all to hell because I am already behind in multiple classes. Time to get a grip.

My adjusted gameplan is that since I created 12 journal pages in 24 days and that is an average of one every 2 days, I plan to continue output at that speed or maybe 1 every 3 days. Yes, 1 every 3 is the plan. This means I will continue to do September prompts throughout October and that is more my style. Since each page usually takes me 3-4 hours start to finish, you can see I was doing little else when I was churning them out.  I would dearly love to do a page a day, but I like my pages to be just right how I like them and mean something, like collages in a book, so they do take longer. That's just the way it is and is going to be. I'm embracing reality with a smile. We won't even factor in my physical restraints.

I should be on Lesson 3 in my Suziblu class; instead, I've barely finished Lesson 1. Suzi cleared me to go to Lesson 2, but I really don't feel she should have (how is that for confidence?). I shall advance anyway, and if it bites me in the butt I will start over, no problem. She recently extended our stay in our class until the end of December, so that means we have a lot more time to do the course. Was that a prayer of mine being answered? No, she has a book deal and magazine and all kinds of famousness brewing, and has to juggle that and her classes. Whatever the reason, I'm happy. Another reason I am happy is that I realize now that I can draw those doll faces. I have Suzi's pdf's and videos that teach how, so I have accomplished my biggest goal, which was to discover the secret to it and find out if I could do it. Again, the quality wil be mine and not hers but I never ever expected to have her quality. I actually enjoy her method as there is a surprising amount of geometry involved, and I'm always up for a good game of math, you know. ;-) (Sorry, I cannot divulge any more technique secrets as she will have me killed if I do -- proprietary info and all.)

I haven't even begun my friend Linda's altered tin and cards class and we are in the 2nd week. {Hanging my head in shame, but I know she forgives me...that's what friends are for...let's not forget I didn't really need the class, but I wanted to support my friend, plus I am taking it for the motivation to make Christmas presents, and it'll probably be one of my more enjoyable classes, too.}

I hope to concentrate today and catch up quickly, so all will be perfect. Since we are to do only one tin in there and I am going to do a minimum of 3 (and since I basically knew how to do it -- I am emphatically not saying they'll look great, but I do know how to alter a tin), I think I'll be caught up by Sunday. I have to cover my tins and then do my dividers that go inside. I wasn't motivated to do it before, but now I am actually looking forward to it.

I wish I could say the same thing for my Paint Shop Pro classes. I just cannot seem to get past my fear and my lack of desire combined. I'm going to do a few lessons this morning before altering my tins, and if the feeling continues, I'm dropping them. I am so unmotivated to learn so many of the things PSP does that I'll never do, just in order to learn the few things I do want to know, ya know?

The free Taking Flight book study began again over on On the Wing ning, and since I blew my first chance to study Kelly Rae Roberts' awesome book, I really have to do it this time. My lovely friend Teri has decided to lead it again, but probably not 3 times. My realization about being able to draw petit doll faces will only help me with Kelly Rae's faces, which I love equally, so strike while the iron is hot, I say. I should mention, this was not on my original class load, so it's an Add. Dang, I'm an art glutton.

While we are on Adds, I had counted the Lynn Perella Artists' Journals and Sketchbooks book study group over at Artists Round Table (where I did the Gwen Diehn class), but now I have finally decided to audit this, if only for the section on decorating slidemounts, which is my favorite part of the book. We will see how it goes, but I've decided to sign up today.

Well, I'm worn out talking about what I'm gonna do and now need to rest in order to actually do something. Doncha love it? Onward Christian Soldier! LOL Here's to Don Quixote and Windmills! Laterz!

High School No-Knows

I've been trying for awhile now to use up my paper scraps (heck, all my stuff, anything will do!). Since I'm in an art journaling class that uses paper collage, I'm thinking about letting my scrapbook style come out and play even more than it usually gets to. So, just warning you, if my art journaling pages look more and more like a scrapbook page in the future, you read it here first. :-)

Day 7 (yes, I am behind, but still chugging along!) of my Kelly Kilmer class page:

The tags are great, so I can keep the journaling hidden (sorry). My journaling is on the backs of the tags...3 subjects: boys, math, and electives plus room for more subject tags in the future.

Top half of the page is covered with a boatload of teenager-type stickers left over from scrapping for my former teen child, Missy. :-) Only got rid of one sheet, so I'll have to do this again sometime.

The image of the girls (and 3 other retro images you cannot see) courtesy of Nancy Baumiller and Crowabout for Week 46. (I'm old, that was the actual style of dress in my day, lol.) And the design was inspired by LotusPaperie's Challenge 140 sketch.

Ridiculously old Urban Lilly scrap papers (that unnerve me how well they go with the stickers) were used to cover the shipping tags and the pocket front. I brushed on a thin coat of whitewash to dull things a bit. Scrapworks alpha rub-ons and my Pitt and Uniball Signo pens. Let me add: these are still just paper scraps, I did not cut into any full sheets. yay!

emo faces: crusade #32

Having finally finished the exhausting Lesson 3 in my Decorated Page workshop, I needed a break, a distraction, before beginning a very comprehensive Lesson 4.



As serendipity would have it, I checked out Michelle Ward's GPP Street Team to see what the current crusade was. You can read about it here: Crusade #32 - Knock Yourself Off.

Turns out this was something that fit perfectly into a solution for another little problem I was having. I'd done a set of atc's for an emotive faces swap at my Paper Traders yahoo group, but I didn't like them and they just sat there as the deadline grew closer.

The first set of cards had been done by finding faces of models in magazines, scanning them in, desaturating the color out, printing them and then altering them with paints and pens.

Here are each of the 5 cards I made back in June (I named each model), next to the printed image I started each card with. First up is Ursula:
Ursula, desaturated original
Ursula, painted

Next, we have Rayma:
Rayma, desaturated original

Rayma, painted

Next I present Stacy:
Stacy, desaturated original
Stacy, painted

Okay, the painted Ursula, Rayma and Stacy were the best ones. These next two I had problems because I tried painting their skin. I discovered that I shouldn't have done that, so I had to try to make lemonade out of lemons, as you will see.

So, here is Rika, who I ended up making into a Geisha wannabe:
Rika, desaturated original
Rika, painted, the Geisha Wannabe

And here is Emily, who I should rename Jackobea, because she appears to be a Michael Jackson wannabe (Note - you may notice the original is that Padma chick from Top Chef):
Emily, desaturated original
Emily, painted - the MJ Wannabe

So, anyway...I made this set and wasn't happy with the last two, so I put them aside, waiting for... what-I-do-not-know.

It was then that I read the new Crusade #32, and another idea came to me -- to do them over and *knock myself off*. I decided to go back to those original magazine pages and this time use some tracing paper parchment, trace the major lines of the faces in pencil, outline in Pitt Pen, fill in with colored pencils. and adhere to the back of adhesive cardstock.

Here is the new set I made for Crusade #32, along with the original color pages from the magazines that I traced (Ursula was in black n white in the magazine).

Here's Ursula:
Ursula, magazine original
Ursula, trace-sketched

And Rayma:
Rayma, magazine original
Rayma, trace-sketched

And Stacy:
Stacy, magazine original
Stacy, trace-sketched

And Rika, this time NOT a Geisha but a woman of color:
Ria, magazine original
Rika, trace-sketched

And finally, Emily (who is no longer trying to emulate MJ):
Emily, magazine original
Emily, trace-sketched

SOoooooo, what do you think? I'd love to know, who is your favorite, and what process do you think is more interesting or artistic?

It's a funny thing how even with tracing, these are every bit my own creations. Notice how each are different...it's like I've created 10 different women with 5 different names!

I ended up liking my *knock offs* so well that it made me take another look at my painted set and now I like them all, even the skin-challenged Rika and Emily. Funny how that worked. But if I know Michelle's genius, she had it planned all along.... *winkwink*

Until next time,