Funky Flowers Ripped strips from music pages folded, painted, and glued. Vintage pins for flower centers. Funky fun .  

 Cards, Cards, Cards . . .  Been making lots of cards for a dear friend’s birthday. No more store card-shopping for me. Lots of fun to create.  Collage with interesting materials - tag fun with beads, copper washers, fabric, sewing, peaceful watercolor and doodled circles, gold foil, and fabulous art quotes.   

  Flower Flow Another taster session completed ; this time a floral collage project with Laly Mille. My art room has never been filled with so much collage fodder. I had myself boxed into a tiny corner surrounded by piles and piles of STUFF! I was pulling out doilies, cheesecloth, handmade paper, old ephemera, scrapbook paper, gel prints, magazine fodder, and old greeting cards. Then the supplies: gesso, acrylic paints, gel medium, matte medium, watercolors, water solvable graphite and Stabilo All pencils, all sorts of brushes, and a silicone spatula .  Making botanical bits was great fun. Painted old ephemera (music, book pages, letters) with gesso and then used water-solvable graphite to sketch botanicals with non-dominant hand. Adding water and smudging with my finger created an interesting effect. The graphite was softer; Stabilo-all was VERY stark, dark black. Loved how using non-dominant hand led to funky, wonky, imperfect drawings.  Very organic and great way to av...

  Maker Beehive Another great workshop with a fun, talented instructor: Jennifer Chamberlin. I loved her sense of humor and her relaxed, playful style of creating art and relating to her students. I learned more about techniques I have been using for quite some time such as working in layers, collage, adhesives, and reusing/repurposing. New learnings included the value of considering transparency in layering, underpainting, and a technique of laying down a paper towel over wet acrylic paint to create more of a printed look rather than seeing the brush strokes. One of Jennifer’s signature techniques is rubbing or blotting over a wet acrylic layer with a baby wipe or damp paper towel. Cool way to get a blended effect. One lesson helped me to realize that I need to do more frequent Zentangle doodling sessions, as we were to doodle inside splotches of paint, and I found myself struggling to come up with a wide variety of doodles. My repertoire is sorely diminished from lack of practice...

  BB Bash: SCRAPS For this prompt, I went scrap happy! Today was the last day that the BB Bash tutorials were available unless one purchased Brooke’s masterclass. Having already purchased a year-long class for which I am already far behind, purchasing another was not an option for me. So today, I spent all day finishing up this week-long class. I’ve always been a down-to-the-deadline person - as a student, as a teacher, and apparently, too, as an artist. I’ve never created a collage this randomly and swiftly. Rummaging through my scraps bowl, I just quickly glued stuff down, barely thinking. Loved that! But the best thing . . . using my long-forgotten sewing machine that has been slumbering in the attic for 15 years. The poor baby ran smoothly, but judging by the machinery smell as it ran, I’m thinking it should go into the shop for a good maintenance tune-up. Everything about this spread was a creative delight; even the text strips in the scraps bowl cooperated. 

  BB Bash: CLUSTER, DYE, STITCH, and COLLAGE I loved working with fabric and needles on this spread, and I accomplished using 4 of the 7 workshop prompts: cluster, dye, stitch, and collage.  For the  cluster  I used some fabric that I dyed with India ink and stamped. I had to laugh when Brooke, the instructor, mentioned fishing “safety pins” and luckily I HAD some of those and some workable beads in my jewelry-making stash.  Slow stitching  the clusters was incredibly relaxing. The b&w palette gave me permission to use in my collage all of security envelopes I have been hoarding from the mailbox.  Brooke  inspired me to unearth my old sewing machine from the attic; it is now set up in my studio and ready to stitch some collages, my next project. Stay tuned.  I loved working with fabric and needles. DYED and stamped on some fabric. Had to laugh when Brooke mentioned those fishing safety pins: I HAD some of those! STITCHING the CLUSTERS w...

  BB Bash: Ornament This past week has been a joyful exploration of mixed media heaven participating in the BB Bash tutorials by Brooke Henry, and seeing all the incredible creations in the FB group has been wonderful and inspiring . 💕 The 7 lessons presented incorporated a variety of techniques which I combined in my journal spreads. Some techniques were already in my repertoire; others were brand new. Even if the techniques learned are familiar, I always manage to learn sim3 new little trick. I’m thankful that so many artist offer these free little “taster” sessions.  The prompt for this spread was ornament . The previous lessons involved dyeing fabric, and thankfully I saved the threads from ripping my acrylic-ink and liquid watercolor dyed fabric into strips. I made a little “nest” from threads and stitched on a button to hold it in place.  First, I tackled the right-hand page of the spread. The book page was one of my mop-up papers from an acrylic ink session. ...