This day is savable.

Hard to believe that the holidays have come and gone.

The visit to Montreal and my peeps was awesome !

And so was the visit with my friend Suzanne,

who came and spent a fun New year’s week with us.

Now she’s gone home,

David’s gone back to work

and I need to re-find a routine that makes me fill fulfilled and like I am living towards my purpose.

Big ambitions, huh ?

Well, I started off small, which always works better for me.

I have pretty much given up coffee in the morning in favor of protein shakes (gluten, dairy, sugar free vanilla veggie protein powder with fresh fruit, spinach, water and ice in the blender).

They are super yummy, and keep me full and energized until lunch most days.

I have also re-committed to a meditation practice each morning.

I tend to have pretty lousy self discipline, but so far this new morning routine is really comfortable.

Pumpkin likes to join me at meditation time and perches herself on the arm of my chair.

Sweet Cat vibes add to the goodness.

The next addition will be some more physical exercise. Walking and/or a bike ride on my new bike that Santa Dave got me for Christmas.

My 7 speed cruiser in retro lilac ! Cute and comfortable.

Won’t be in any triathalons on it but good for getting this butt moving !

 

Another important piece to reviving my self-loving routine

is to bring back the ART !!!

Worked on a little 6X6” canvas today.

Acrylic paint and collage.

I was flipping through an old dictionary looking for a title and

the word

SAVABLE

popped out.

“Capable of being saved.”

Hmmm.

I think we all are.

I hope we all are.

I’m planning some fun arty days with some East Coast Florida friends soon. I really need that art tribe to make me feel complete.

I hope your new year, new month, new week, new day

routines are off to a good start, Beautiful Ones.

Big love to you !

Your Weird is showing…

Want to create some weird art ?

Here’s the technique.

Take some spray ink in whatever color you want – in my case, it was pink and purple.

Spray the ink into a blob on a blank page of your journal.

Let dry.

Go back a few minutes, days, weeks later and look into the blob.

This works best when you are suffering from a little PMS or feeling funky because of the endless grey skies, or how messy life can be in general…

Make sure to put some moody tunes on the jukebox for added funk-a-tude.

Take a black charcoal pencil and trace out whatever shapes you see in the blobs…

Maybe it will be flowers and pretty girls with flying hearts…

Or maybe it will be bizarre snake-like monsters

and sad looking girls, with mascara running, who seem to be falling…

Or feeling a little empty inside…

After your “shapes” are defined with the charcoal, fill in the rest of the page with watercolor in a loose, watery, blendy way, drying often in between with a blow dryer, to create a lovely background of colored chaos.

Then, let loose with the black paint, pencils and pens,

outlining, creating new shapes, journaling whatever emotion evoked from the stuff spilling onto the page…

in this case in handwriting that no one can really read…

A white gel pen used in the loosest of ways to outline and add some details can be a way to go too…

Then, stop every thing.

Back up for a second…

Or go check your Facebook or blog for the hundredth time today…

And when you are ready…

Take a deep breath

and look at what you have created…

Look at it for a while.

Does it kind of blow you away that this came out of you ?

Can you believe that you let go enough to just let it flow and morph however it wanted to ?

Can you give it a name or title ?

Mine is called “Empty.”

What descriptors can you give it ?

“Pretty.” ? No.

“Powerful.” ? Yes.

“Beautiful” ? Yes, in the eyes of its maker anyway.

“Art”? Oh, yes.

“Weird.” Yup. Pretty weird. But in a “let go and let all hang out” kind of way.

All of this done, you can choose whether you want to share your weird art or not.

Maybe it is just for you, an expression of one moment in your life, one facet of what makes you tick, and the only one who needs to see it is you.

Or maybe you will feel that if you share it, you will allow some other Artist to feel freer to just go there…

to allow themselves to make weird art and know that it is all okay.

“The world today doesn't make sense,

so why should I paint pictures that do?”

– Pablo Picasso

Give yourself permission to make that weird art if that is where your Artist Soul wants to go.

Who knows what you will discover along the way…

Big Love to you, Beautiful Artist Ones.

Painting is good for the Soul...

Here is a little video I created about my awesome creative experience in the studio yesterday!

I think it actually took me longer to create the video with Windows Movie Maker than it did to create the piece of art featured here !

But that's okay.

I learned a lot

and I am pretty proud of the whole damn thing !

Enjoy !

(Music by Neil Young - The Painter, from Prairie Wind, 2005)

Happy Wednesday !

I don’t wanna work, I just wanna doodle the day away…

I worked at the Halloween store both yesterday and Monday.

It was so boring…lots of customers looking but little buying yet.

That means I spent 5 hours on my feet, thinking about all the things I could be doing with my time if I was at home in the studio…

I could finish some beautiful doodling pieces like this to add to my 16 page journal… (I used my set of Micron pens in different sizes to create this piece a while back… )

(doesn’t it look gorgeous against this page of Fabriano Artistico water color paper that does awesome things with Golden Fluid acrylics ?Yummy !)

Or I could be packing and organizing things for the Art Friends Gathering Cape Cod Week Long Extravaganza that I am leaving for on Friday.

(See the cool ties I found at the Good Will store for one of our projects – a one tie purse that Terry will be showing us how to make ?)

The good news is that I am off for the next two days and I can finally get to the action instead of thinking about it as I have been for the last few days.

I am running a few errands to the craft stores today to get a  couple of last minute things, getting my groceries and then packing all the toys up to take with me.

Plus I want to bake some super decadent chocolate cookies to keep our creativity fueled…

The hardest part is deciding what art materials to bring and what to leave home.

You know, I can do a great page in an art journal with very little.

But I would hate to be on the Cape and be missing something that I have at home.

Mixed Media Artists and their toys…;)

I figure anything that can fit along with me in the Jeep Grand Cherokee is fair game !

Think there is any chance of fitting the whole studio armoire in there ?

Hee ! ;)

I know, I know, time to edit some !

I feel so very, very blessed ! This Lucky Queen is off to make some cuts !

Happy Wednesday, Beautiful Ones !

GPP Street Team 44 – In A Scrape

It has been awhile again since I participated in a Crusade lead by the incredible Michelle Ward. I read the prompts every month and plan to do them but sometime life gets in the way.

Today, I was supposed to be packing for my Cape Cod trip but I decided that I couldn’t have all my  favorite supplies packed up on this grey and quiet Sunday. I needed to play !

The Green Pepper Press Street Team Crusade #44 – In A Scrape was a great place to start.

Michelle shared techniques using an old credit card or a paint scraper to cover your pages with paint. No paint brushes required ! I did get my fingers in there in a few places…

here’s one where I used my fingers to blend in the corners and make those circle shapes. I love how the blue paint scraped of – almost like it had been ripped…  

Michelle also suggested using stencils and masks and dragging the paint with the credit card  over top of them. You can see a circle flower stencil in this one…

I certainly didn’t have as much success as Michelle did with her masks but I did have fun trying…no critics in the Queen of Arts Studio!

This page has a heart I cut out of an old acetate and used as a mask. Loving this one!   

This piece of paper was kind of my blotter for my credit card and for my stencils. I like its a little more subtle colors. It will make a good background to build from too.

I saw something in this page as soon as I smeared that purple on with a circular smush of the credit card…

Do you see it ?

Yep ! A Bird !!!

This is is Irving, the Homing Pigeon and his home, who came into being with some additional painting, some black ink and a collaged house on a pole.

I love him…

One more benefit of playing with paint like this is you end up with fingers that look like this :

I think I can see these shots played with and added to a journal page in the future as well.

Painted fingers are a definitely JOY to me !

So a big thank you to Michelle for the great inspiration she provides every month. Head over to the GPP Street Team blog to see some more great scraping !

Come on, Irving, let’s fly away home…

Happy Sunday, Beautiful Ones !

Works in progress...

Some works in progress...

Look at them while being serenaded by the lovely Norah Jones...

A rainy Friday in the studio kind of vibe...

Mother Nature's work in progress.

Magnolia blossoms in the rain...

"I'm Falling..."

My own work in process...

I drew the falling girl with my new toys on a beautiful painted background created a while ago.

Loving those Derwent Inktense pencils....

Ooo la la !

"Paper Heart"

(Paper clay on a canvas I created way back in Carmen Torbus's class)

I added some scribble of white paint, some writing...

and so far the progress has led me here...

Not perfection but good enough for a painter in progress, painting reveries...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am feeling much better today. David brought home some Sudafed and a half dose of one pill is doing the trick on the nasty sinus stuff ! Feels so good to have some relief !

Sonia is coming for pizza and a movie tonight so the rest of the day needs to be about tidying the house a bit.

Happy Friday, Beautiful Ones ! May your weekend be full of reveries...

Rhapsody in Red - GPP Street Team Crusade # 29

So for this month's GPP Street Team Crusade, Michelle encouraged us to get down and dirty with our paint brushes and play around with paint effects like dry brushing, mono-printing, and a little thing she likes to call "dirty brush".

Kind of sounds a little naughty, but it is all good clean dirty fun !

One thing that I like to do periodically is have a paint play session to create a ton of painted papers that I can use later as backgrounds, in my art journal or in collages. I sometimes choose one color to concentrate on at a time, if my stock of one color is low or if I find a new color scheme I want to play with. For this play time, I chose red.

I usually get out a pile of papers, a couple of cheap chip brushes, a make-up sponge, few kinds of paint in my chosen color (ie: craft acrylics, Golden Fluids, Lumiere metallics, inks, etc), a ton of my favorite stamps and stencils and a plastic table cloth on the floor so I can just throw the wet papers down to dry in between layers.

Then I play.

This is my Rhapsody in Red :

Here is some watercolor paper with Lumiere paint in gold dry brushed over top.

This piece shows my hand carved circle stamp in the background. Then I pooled Lumiere paint in gold and some Vermillion Red Golden Fluids mixed with water on the cheap sketch book paper and let it dry for a couple of hours. Gorgeous effect, I think !

This one has a variety of tools, like hand carved stamps (the points), masks and my own flourish stencil, used both as a stencil and as a mono-print. I also used Michelle's dirty brush technique - mixing red and black on a dry chip brush and stroking the surface here and there.

This page has my hand carved leaf stamp and then my bought letter stencil used as a mono-print - apply a lot of paint to the stencil, place on top of your paper and rub.

The next couple of shots show where I tried a tip Michelle shared for mono-printing brush strokes from an acetate onto your paper :

Paint on acetate

Smeared paint around with a brush

Mono-print onto painted paper

Second mono print onto white blotter paper

What did I learn from this one ? It can be a bit of a balancing act with acrylic paint and brush stroke mono-printing. How much paint to stroke one to your acetate to get a nice print of the brush stroke, but not too much to have a "paint blob" mono-print. Also, not to rub too hard, practice a little portion control I guess, to get better "strokes" printed.

Playing with paint, brushes, paper and all the other fun tools is really my idea of perfect art time ! I lose myself in the play, not really worrying about any end results but often falling in love with what comes out of it !

It even makes great left-overs ! Check out this blotter paper, where I rubbed off all my tools, getting every last bit of paint goodness off of them !

And this veteran of my play time (see the hand prints from the Shape Up Challenge), the card board I use to cover my play table. I think it will soon be retired and added to a journal or something.

A lot of great Crusaders have had a wonderful time playing with Brush Effects. Head over to the Street Team blog to check out their links as well as the wonderful tutorials and inspiration that Michelle provides! Then join us in the challenge fun !

Onward, Crusaders ! Happy Monday !