Turning out the Christmas Cards

I've been consumed the last month or so working on Xmas cards. Am trying to be healthier about it than last year, and thus am enjoying the whole process more and not driving myself nuts by taking all the fun out of it. Some card designs I've made ten of and others only one, and you know what--that's no big deal! Last year I required myself to make five to six of each design, but then I also was following directions for each different one then, and this year I'm trying to stick with what I've been doing lately and just seeing what develops. It's still hard, but I'm having fun, and what I'm producing is okay even though I didn't know how it was going to end up when I began.

Lately I've been going over the Tim Holtz 12 Tags of Christmas from both 2007 and 2008 obsessively, trying to hone in on techniques that I can and want to use. I loved his Day 8 tag from last year and made a bunch of those this year. Then I wasn't sure what to do with them so set them aside for a few days. Finally I thought of using some of the really twee paper I had from a Christmas paper collection I'd bought my first year when I didn't know any better, cutting a panel to use as background, and sanding it to get the right distressed look to tie everything together plus obscure the tweeness of the paper at the same time. Doing that turned some of the most boring paper into some of my favorite! I love love love the sanded-paper look and want to go around sanding everything now.

Also pleased with myself because I figured out how to put the tag on the card so that it could be easily removed to use as a bookmark (as per a friend's request who wanted to buy some from me). You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find directions to do such a thing! I found plenty of entries for crafters selling cards with removable bookmarks, but some were perforated and the rest didn't share how they'd accomplished such a thing. For this novice that was a little discouraging. So I'm telling what I did to create a removable tag on a card:
--decided where on the card I wanted the tag to lay
--placed a strip of double-sided tape ON THE CARD (not the tag) where the tag should go
--placed a slightly larger strip of removable tape on top of the double-sided strip, with the removable tape sticky-side UP
Then the tag can be placed on the strip of removable tape and pulled off at will. Really not so hard, but boy was I pleased with myself to come up with that! (Full confession: the first time I placed the tape strips on the back of the tag rather than on the card. Ah well.)

Thoughts on "Beginnings" of All Kinds

Our challenge topic for November/December is "beginnings", put forth by myself. We are taking two months to do it with all the holidays, Thanksgiving travel, etc. I am making lots of Xmas cards and trying not to stress myself out too much. My mind keeps saying that I "should" be doing lots of things, but I try to cut that off right away and just enjoy playing around with different things.

I am amazed at how fast the transition has been for me from following very detailed instructions to create a clearly defined end result to just playing around and seeing where it takes me. Really, I thought that would be much harder for me to do! I think that all the projects and reading I've done have really paid off, which is how I typically do things--immerse myself in information for a while, then I surface and start synthesizing what I've learned to execute it in my own way. From somewhere I have gained a lot of confidence that I didn't have just a few months ago.

One of the things I did that has produced some lovely embellishments to use on my Xmas cards was to make some monoprints with alcohol inks on glossy white paper (I think I used red pepper, oregano, and the gold metallic mixative). I thought they might work as background panels for something else, but they didn't, so I then put some gold peel-off stickers I got in England last summer on them. They looked nice but like stickers put on paper (which they were, of course!), so I put Glossy Accents over the exposed parts, and they really look quite nice now.

With all the coupons Michael's has been handing out the last few weeks, I've been adding some neat things to my inventory. One is the Sophisticated Finishes Patina set, which I'm dying to play with but may not get to until after the holidays (sob). An idea for one of next year's Xmas cards is to cut a big Xmas tree with upturned corners, patina it, and punch holes to hang little ornaments from on tiny jump rings. Or, maybe, just do the tree as is once it's patina'd--embellish it by putting a star on top or something.

Anyway, about beginnings:
--One idea would be to do a collage with many different images of beginnings on it--January calendar, blank book (3D element), wedding ring or announcement, graduation picture, clock or timepiece of some sort, etc. This could be good practice for identifying a focal element and arranging different items, and it would be fun to use the different media for blending things together, especially now that I have the encaustic medium.
--I really like the idea that a beginning is also an ending and have found it very hard, in fact, to separate beginning from ending when thinking about this challenge. It would be another mixed-media piece, but maybe I could fashion a Mobius strip out of something, perhaps with words or a quote written along it?
--I also thought of doing a sunrise somehow, maybe in Art Deco fashion and tearing strips of paper to serve as the sunrise. This would be a landscape-oriented piece.
--I could make it personal and do a collage of beginnings for me: first house I remember, anything else significant. Must admit this seems the least interesting of all so far though.
--Some artistic representation of the beginning of a fractal--see quotes below. Now that could be quite fun!

Quotes about beginnings that might be interesting to muse over:
--The beginnings of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. ~ Kate Chopin
--"In my beginning is my end." ~ T.S. Eliot
--"Play is the beginning of knowledge." George Dorsey
--"Solitude is the beginning of all freedom." William Orville Douglas
--"At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen." Ian Malcolm

Birthday presents

My friend A.'s birthday was last week, and I had quite a good time making her presents. The funny thing was that her card ended up being a wall hanging . . . couldn't figure out how to make it a card. My husband helped with suggestions on placements of the shards of mirror styrene; I ended up with an abstract easel supporting the sunflower collage. It worked out beautifully to stamp the design on acetate, color with alcohol inks, then use a Xyron to mount it on sunburst gold paper I got in England earlier this summer. I used foam tape to create depth among the background panel, styrene shards, and sunflower collage. This is one of my favorite things I've made!

I did also make a set of wine charms for A. These are done on 1x1" Stampbord using punched squares of paper and Liquid Laminate. Then I paint the edges with Liquid Leafing, punch a hole with my Crop-a-Dile, insert an eyelet, then add a jump ring and earring with suitable beads on it that complement the design while also maintaining a consistent look through the whole set.

Making progress on magic grimoire

Tonight I made good progress on my grimoire that I'm doing for this month's challenge with A. I decided to go with the idea mentioned in a previous blog entry about illustrating the seven black arts banned in the Renaissance. That means I need to produce seven illustrations, then seven panels for the opposite side, and figure out how to attach the seven pieces of bookboard together.

So far I've completed the panels for hydromancy, aeromancy, and geomancy. My favorite so far is geomancy (I will put up pictures in a later post when the whole thing is complete), which funnily enough was the first one I did. I hope it's not all downhill from there!

What I did tonight were more new things for me. I couldn't find a drawing of any flames or fire that I liked, so I had to draw it by hand myself--horrors! Never done that before, but I prefer my rendition to anything else I've seen. I used white transfer paper, which I'd never used before, and wow! the possibilities THAT opens up are huge. Anyway, I ended up cutting a reverse mask (I guess that's what it's called) so that I could pretend it was a stencil. I used it to apply copper embossing paste from Dreamweavers to cardstock, and once it dries I will apply glue from the Palette gluepad, followed by variegated red leafing. I think it's going to look great! When it's complete, I'll cut it out and plan to mount it on a background sheet of either glitter black, black bumps, or black velvet. Don't think I can decide until the leafing has been applied and I see how that looks.

I also started work on the panel for nigromancy, for which I'm using the Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous circles stamp. I made about five different versions using different inks and embossing powders, then cut out bits of one and bits of another to layer over a base image. I'd like to figure out how to attach some of them so that the circles will actually spin around--maybe just a straight pin? It looks good, though, at least tonight. Hopefully in the morning I'll still be as pleased!

Flower Fairy card with new technique

For my cousin's birthday card, I used a technique I had read about in the May/June 2008 issue of Rubber Stamp Madness and hadn't gotten a chance to try out yet.

I took a Flower Fairy outline peel-off sticker that I'd gotten in England this summer and turned it so the sticky side was up. Then I used a small paintbrush to apply dry chalks where desired (I mainly used my shimmer chalk set). Once I'd applied chalk everywhere I wished, I brushed the entire surface with Perfect Pearls (Blush, then Perfect Gold). To finish, I did corners and applied to paper and card as shown.

The whole thing didn't take long, and it came out quite nice as a birthday card for a four-year-old.

More thoughts on harmony; "magic" challenge

Harmony could be as simple as showing opposites that come together. It's things that are in tune with each other (there's that auditory component again!), or that complement each other. It's a feeling of rightness of place, that things are as they are supposed to be. Maybe I could do something with the Arched Glass stamp? That conveys a feeling of harmony.

Now, for my thoughts on the "magic" challenge. I decided that I want to do a book, and I think it will be an accordion book so that it will fall open like a pack of cards. There are two kinds of magic--the magician's kind, where things appear that weren't there before, or that were there and then disappear on a second look, and the "real" magic that transforms things, that brings a sense of wonder and awe and amazement, the beautiful things that seem too good to be true and thus we call them "magical". I guess there's a third kind, the magick of witches and wizards, potions and spells, fairies and elves.

I'd like to mix all of these things into one. The book will have seven panels joined together with something flexible (maybe tied onto skewers?), so that if I want to, one side could read "MAGIC" using the middle five panels, and then that would give me one additional panel at both the start and end to decorate.

Possible things to use: the frozen opals from Suze Weinberg's store. Glamour Dust. Holographic embossing powder. Pop-up or covered items. Watermarks.

A few hours later:
I Googled "magic" and took a look at the Wikipedia entry, and I came across an intriguing idea. It's a little more formal than I had been thinking, but it might be a neat challenge in and of itself. In the Renaissance period, there were seven prohibited black arts, which fits in nicely with my idea of having 7 panels in my accordion book. I could use each panel to illustrate a different black art (nigromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, and scapulimancy). That appeals to me . . .

Nigromancy--blackness. Maybe with some image in holographic EP? Skull from Mexican rubber stamp set?
Geomancy--use map, either image transfer or stamp, as background, then something on top.
Hydromancy--maybe build on last month's water challenge and put some water image behind a glass side (2x2"). That should be flat enough to work in a book format.
Aeromancy--this one is tough. I have a cloud Stampscapes stamp, perhaps work that in somehow.
For pyromancy, it would be neat to draw flames somehow and then put copper foil on them.
Chiromancy is palmistry--good opportunity for an image transfer. Key lines are heart line, head line, life line.
Scapulimancy--this is challenging--divination by way of the shoulder blades. That requires some thought.

"Water" Challenge Final Result

Late last week I finished my water challenge pieces. Originally I intended for the two to be one--I was going to have the glass slides hanging down from the canvas--but that didn't seem to work. I think if the canvas had been larger it would have been all right, but it was too small to support three. Going on the premise that sometimes one has to be ruthless and jettison one's favorite thing (advice from writing class in college), I pulled the slides out completely and made them their own piece.

Much to my surprise, I have to say I'm really pleased. It's a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.

Here were some of my musings when I was contemplating having words on the piece:

Surrounding
     Supporting
          Enveloping
Lifting us up
     Carrying us along
Rhythmic waves
     Currents
Motion and complete stillness
     Simultaneously
Our beginning
     Somehow we recognize this
     deep inside
Lulling
     Utter peacefulness
     Deep calm
Best when the sun shines
     Thousands of tiny mirrors
     Sparkling

What does "harmony" mean to me?

I checked this morning on Mixed Media Monday to see what this week's challenge was, and it's "harmony". (My jaw dropped when I noticed that before noon there were already 24 responses. How does anyone do that so quickly?)

So I am considering whether I can produce anything for this and trying to think about what harmony means to me. With so much interest in music, I have to say that the first thing I think of is audible harmony, but I don't really know what I could do with that. Perhaps my challenge is to figure out how to represent aural harmony in a different medium?

When I think of harmony, I think of different things coming together and finding some common ground. Rather like the saying about the whole being more than the sum of its parts. How could I represent that? Maybe go back to the prism idea, showing how all the different colors become one.

Or, perhaps, harmony means peace. I could make something that just feels peaceful, like coming home. The opposite of dissonance. That makes me think of strings vibrating, as on a harp or any stringed instrument. Could I use that imagery in combination with colors? Definitely vertical strings, not horizontal.

As I write this, I find I am thinking only of colors, since sounds are not an option (lack of ability to make my own chimes!). No images are presenting themselves. Interesting. I wonder why not?

Harmony. Also speaks to what my yoga teacher said this morning--we are all happiest when we are doing what we are meant to do. Find what you are meant to do, and do it. That is harmony, being at one with the universe. So I could do something involving an image of someone or something doing exactly what it's meant to do, fulfilling its purpose. There's no greater harmony than that.

I shall have to think about this some more!

15 September 2008

Well, I got started on my piece and am very pleased so far, but then I got sidetracked with the preparations for the surprise baby shower I hosted last Saturday. I think sometimes I avoid doing something creative (procrastinate) because of what I have mentioned before—it’s all great in theory, but I’m committing myself once I actually start, choosing a path and thus shutting off all the other potentialities. But I have started my water challenge, now it’s just finishing it that will be the challenge!

I do find that I have a lot more confidence about this piece than I have any other original item I’ve done so far. It has been a leap of faith for me to do what I have done so far and trust that the piece will reveal itself to me as I go; very different than following instructions for a project and knowing at the beginning what the end result will be. But it’s exciting! I did spend the first week of this month just thinking about the piece, and that was very useful. It prepared me so that when I went to my studio area one evening, I knew I was ready to make a start. I still don’t know how it’s going to end, but I knew to begin, and that was something.

One thing I find interesting is that for all my thoughts on words and the enjoyment I get from other’s collage pieces, I am really resistant to putting words on my own pieces. Seems it will lessen them somehow, make them less serious, I don’t know exactly what it is. So I may, if I have time, make multiple items (perhaps meant to be hung in a group) and use words on some but not on others. But it’s a funny prejudice I’ve discovered, especially since I like it in others’ work.

31 August 2008

This is harder than I thought it might be to keep an art blog going while in real life rather than on holiday at my in-laws. I knew it would be tougher, but I didn’t realize quite so much! Of course, I did also have my parents visiting for a total of about two weeks, a baby shower at my house, and my cousin had her second baby, so I guess there have been more than the usual number of distractions. At least I am writing now!

Tonight I gave A. our first challenge, and by 30 September we will share our creations. The challenge is “water”. Once I settled on it, I tried really hard not to think about it, but now I can let myself toy with ideas. Here are some off the top of my head:

--glass paints on a bud vase
--bring out the idea mentioned earlier in this blog on the dolphins
--do something with some of the sea rocks and shells I brought back—use Dimensional Magic somehow to simulate water?
--shades of blue keep occurring, for obvious reasons—do another shrine like one for Danny—liked the teeny vase painted with blue glass paint
--try blue alcohol ink on acetate to see how that looks, then maybe use as an overlay on something

Perhaps I should think about how water makes me feel. More than anything, it makes me feel calm inside, serene, still, at peace, connected to the earth in a larger way . . . even the stormy water does that, enhances that connection and being caught up with something larger than oneself. I like the rhythm of the sound of the waves. It does also make me think of Kayleigh’s birth. There is a sense of weightlessness, fluidity, gracefulness. I do not find water threatening or dangerous, I find it welcoming. I like the sense of translucence associated with water. Also I like the freedom that seems to come with vacationing by water—appearances are less important, everything is more relaxed and laid back, meals and bedtimes come at all times—I guess it’s a sense that time is looser by the water.

Could try something on the glass tags from Stampington. Or instead do something on microscope slides—maybe a mosaic-style broken-up picture, using about five slides of different shapes? Hmmm, that’s intriguing. Place those five on a background to create the whole piece. I like the idea of having them in one of those frames like I have in the bathroom (can’t recall the name just now—floating?). Or take a picture of water, or poster, put slides on top of some parts, none connecting, and use those to do the mosaic-style piece? Maybe, thinking big, get a poster of water on a beach, then do slides to place on top of various parts of the picture . . . I like that too.

Could find a poem or words about water that I like, then do an accordion-style piece.

Along those lines, I like the Andre Gide quote used by Melody M. Nunez on p. 23 of Transparent Art: “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Could write my own haiku to go along with the piece, rather than using someone else’s words. Form is five-seven-five syllables.

I wonder: can the mica tiles be colored with anything? That might be interesting.

Also had thoughts of stitching onto the background, rather like water would run off from something. Use light blue metallic thread, maybe a few crystals here and there. Another thing is that I have always loved the way the sunlight shimmers on the water, if I could work that in somehow.

Could do multiple things to show (Dad’s card of sailboat could be one). Many small treatments rather than one great thing.

Okay, that’s enough brainstorming for one night.