My girlie glam!

Well, I still haven't touched my caterpillar stitch book, but after a few dry days I did get marvelously back into creating things.

I took a day off on Monday this week and did something totally new--a Scratchbord kit that I picked up at Jerry's.  It was interesting following the steps through and seeing what emerged.  I do like to follow someone else's instructions the first time when doing something new--it's a great shortcut to becoming familiar with something.  I still need to go back and scrape away some more from the area around the window and then reapply the ink, and I will also go back and redefine the tablecloth areas.  It was fun to do but I did have to remember to keep good posture and not hunch up.



Some of my time was also spent on the annual reorganization of my studio area (two walls of the dining room).  I realized that drawers just work really well for me at this stage, and they are a great way to put a lot of stuff in a pretty small space.  But I do think I need just one more cart out here (this is by no means addressing all the stuff I have crammed away in our utility room) . . .







Yesterday while going through stuff on my desk, I put some scrap papers my mom had done last August whilst working on a birthday card for a friend together with a quick 5-hole pamphlet stitch for a little journal.  Can't believe it took me six months to do that!!










I also spent some time (hanging out in the community center while kids had taekwondo doodling on a tag made from one of the earlier projects of Traci Bautista's free Strathmore online workshop.  The last six weeks plus Traci's workshop has made me much freer and more confident.  I think those two go hand-in-hand anyway, I suppose.

Finally, I have finished the final project of Traci's--the Girlie Glam.  I had absolutely oodles and oodles of fun doing this, and the end result blows me away.  Not with the quality of drawing, mind you, but how it really does get to somewhere amazing the more layers one adds.  I followed Traci's color palette pretty closely for this one, so not too many of my own choices there, but what fun!

I have never done a freehand drawing of anything that I expected to be recognized before, so I am quite glad one can see that it is a female.  With an eye.  And a mouth.

The doodling was so much fun, and I loved the way her hair turned out--it's got watercolor pencils, acrylic paint, markers, Prismacolor pencils, Sharpie paint pens, and Stickles, and it just looks cool.  I'm so pleased!  (For my own records, I used the following paints, all Golden Fluids unless otherwise specified:  Quin Magenta, Naphthol Red Light, Hansa Yellow Med, Perm Green Light, Quin Red, Pyrrole Red, Turquois, Ultramarine Blue, Quin Violet, Cobalt Teal, maybe some Green Gold, Quin Crimson, and Titanium White, and finally Derivan Matisse Southern Ocean Blue (Flow)).  Stickles were Waterfall, Crystal, and Silver.