It's BOO Month!

It never fails. When I have a calendar collage ready to show on the first of the month, I forget! So it is here, but I'm grateful I remembered on October 2nd. This month, I practice my colored wax pencil layering. All the orange bordering you see is really a few different colors and about 6 layers.

Did you know that when you color with pencils, you should lay down multiples so lightly and thin that you can barely see the first one? (I'm talking the regular pencils, not watercolor, although I'm guessing it wouldn't hurt to layer those either.) If you use good waxy ones like Prismacolors, the wax will move the color around the paper, and on each subsequent layer the wax will help the color to fill in where it skipped on the prior layer. I learned this back in the stone age when I was taking art classes as a college undergraduate. My instructor would say, "A light hand lets the wax work."

It's true. Most people apply too much pressure on the first layer and/or give up way too soon when coloring. The first layer of color should be hard to see, in fact. Although this is tres difficult for me to do as well, I've had my best luck doing it by pretending to be testing the color to see if I like it and that helps me apply it lightly. Something else I do is to wipe each layer with a tissue occasionally in between layers. Some people do not do that. They like to keep the bits of color dust on the surface. It all depends on personal preference.

Anyway, we shade and color our dolls with Prismacolors in Suziblu's class, so that means this is another technique I need to do decently. Practice makes perfect, ya know! LOL

My collage for this month's calendar page was simply done, as the Karen Foster paper is very busy on its own. The skull is a rub-on from Marah Johnson's Skull & X-bone Designs booklet, and the pumpkins and witch are from my stash. I made the calendar grid masthead with a strip of scrapbook paper (Theresa Collins for Junkitz) and various stash alphabet stickers which I then outlined with black gel pen. I added a digital frame around the photo in my PSP Pro Photo X2 software.

Back to making greeting cards! Happy World Card-Making Day, by the way. Today is also the start of my second workshop class over at A.R.T. (a study of techniques in Lynne Perella's awesome book, Artists Journals & Sketchbooks (we use the acronym AJS). I will be having a crafty weekend and hope you will, too.

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!

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,