First Chunky Page

What a waste of a weekend this long weekend has been for me! Too darn hot to even think about doing some arty stuff in my studio....even though it IS air-conditioned! I think my brain must've been over-heating as I had hardly any inclination to do anything....well, maybe not nothing at all as I did do a few atc's and finished my first pages for the chunky swap for tonight. Our first theme is Text and here's my page....had to do 9 of these.....the picture of the girls is printed on transparency...background is multiple layers of text pages, paint and stamping, and there is a beautiful blue/silver shot-organza ribbon attached to the spiral on the right that you can't see in this picture.

Jarred (oldest son) left yesterday morning to fly back to the east coast of Australia where he lives after his few weeks home over the Christmas break. He hooked up with a girl that he used to know in high school while he was here this time....all very intense as early romance is, but she's a nice girl and they seemed to be getting along really well and making some noises about her flying over to visit him at Easter maybe. This picture was taken when he was over here last July for a combined party for Jarred's 21st and Cort's 18th which were both last year....oh, plus it was our 25th wedding anniversary and my hubby's 50th birthday! Talk about a milestone year!!!

Seem to be going through a "dark" period at the moment, maybe it's how oppressive this hot weather is??? Don't know but here's the atc's I did this weekend....

This next one is a test version for a gel medium transfer using Chromacryl impasto gel medium...wanted to see if it would work the same as the Matisse gloss gel medium, it does!

All I want.....

My Tuesday night class at Scraptivate was very productive! All the girls got their triptych's finished and you can check out Tania's one that she posted on her blog...it looks fantastic! I think the girls really liked the effect of this particular technique when used with the alcohol ink as the base colour too.....this first atc is the sample one that I started on the night so of course I had to finish it off today. What else do you do on your day off besides grocery shopping...make atc's of course!!! lol

This one doesn't scan anywhere near as good as it looks in real life....clear embossing on black cardstock, then rubbed with Treasure Gold in a couple of colours as well as some of the metallic waxes in various colours. (Thanks for the inspiration Ruth). Must experiment more with this technique.....

....and I thought it was about time we had some eye-candy too! mmmmmmmm

....hence, the "All I want" title above...like I said.....mmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!

This is a transparency over a background piece that I made to do my 9 "Text" pages for this month's chunky swap. Will put that particular picture up when I have them complete and have given them to the girls on Monday night. Bad luck girls, you don't get the man! hahahaha

Texture Paste & more....

I finally got a whole day in my studio to get some atc's made that I owe for trades plus some time in just for playing too! Here's a couple that I made yesterday before going to work to teach the texture paste technique ..... which went really well.... much better than I thought it would, considering they had a limited supply of pictures and even more limited in their choice of colours to use, the girls did a great job! Darn, forgot to take my camera again...promise to take it next time!




This atc is the sample that I did in class to show the girls how to incorporate their image, the texture paste & the mulberry paper. I had to wait until I got home to finish it off as I needed to use my Lumieres, though one of the girls had bought hers so I did use them a bit to show them the difference that metallic paints make!















These next few are the ones I made today.... some to trade....some to keep.....I STILL have trouble with the "Trading" part of Artist Trading Cards. I think I need to rename them AKC's....Artist Keeping Cards....lol I think it's probably because I tend to make one-of cards and try new techniques all the time so I end up keeping them to remind me what I did!






and more......

I also managed to get my 9 backgrounds made for a chunky swap that I'm doing with our ABC (Altered Book Club). We are doing a chunky each month with a specific theme so we make 9 pages, swap them all and end up with a themed little 9 page chunky each month! This month's theme is "Text"....can't show the pages yet though, firstly because I've only done the backgrounds but secondly because I know a couple of the girls in my group read my blog and I don't want to spoil the surprise on the swap night next week!

Teaching again on Tuesday night next week.....soot stamping this time and I hope the girls have got their "plier hands" ready....lots of jump-rings to attach to make a 3-tier wall hanging atc thing.

A quickie before work

I just thought I'd post a quick couple of pics before I get ready for work. As some of you know, when I teach my atc classes I give away an atc in a raffle. My class this coming Saturday is Texture Paste so I had started an atc yesterday as the Texture Paste takes a bit of time to dry, just finished it off last night.....here it is.

Here's another few of really, really old ones that I made when I first started this atc caper.....early 2005...

though this one with the circles on it (sequin waste used with the texture paste) was made last year (2006).

LOVE texture paste!

Adorn Canvas

Last Friday I had the first "girls" day of the year. Our ATC (Art Tarts Club....also stands for Artist Trading Cards) girls got together for our monthly play date. We used to hold it at each other's houses on a rotating basis but now at work (Scraptivate) we have a great classroom that can be booked for groups. It's so much easier with more room, no house to clean up beforehand, no huge lunches to prepare as there's Japanese, pizza, Red Rooster & kebabs within a few steps of the shop! Plus the added bonus that if you run out of DM or double-stick tape or just feel the need of a little retail therapy, it's right at your fingertips!

Anyway, for the first meeting we all worked on the little 4" x 4" (10cm square) canvases. I had previously put some texture-paste on a third of each one and stamped into them with some foam stamps to create some texture.... they were then layered with paint, images, more paint, stamping and whatever else we had on hand. I finished mine off at home though I did take some of my metal embellishments with me and mucked around trying this one and that one to find "just" the right one...which I think I did! Pity I only have one of these....should've bought more! Here's a couple of pics....

Why do I make things that are just SO difficult to photograph!!!!

I had all good intentions of spending some of Saturday and all of Sunday making some atc's for trading but of course, with the weather as hot as it was, I was just totally unmotivated to do it...though I did clean off my studio table so it'd be nice & clean for when I AM ready to start. Here's a couple of pictures of my studio... all ready for me to work on Wednesday....promise to myself!!!

Keeping track of blogs & more atc's

When I first discovered the world of blogs I saved the ones I liked into a folder in my favourites, but then found that I'd forget to check them every few days and if I did check and nothing had changed, I was disappointed. So now I use a great free little program called blogarithm, you add the addresses of the blogs that you want to keep track of and each day it'll send you one email to let you know which, if any, of the blogs have changed their content....easy!

My atc class yesterday was full and the girls had a go at the Mary Jo McGraw "fresco" technique using watercolour tube paints as well as the much easier watercolour crayon background & colour techniques. I had a thought after the class yesterday, in future I'm going to get the girls to lay out all their atc's that they do after each class so I can take a picture of them to post on my blog and you can see how well these girls are going! I gave them the option of trying the more difficult of the two techniques and they all jumped at it.......always a good sign!!!

So below are a few atc's that I made up as more class samples and I always give away an atc at each class so it's good to have a few spares....plus I owe some people some atc's.

This atc is a very early one I did when I first started making atc's back in 2005. It's a photo of my eldest son when he was 4, my brother altered it slightly in Photoshop....when I saw how fantastic the blue eye looked, I knew I had to use it on an atc. It's probably right up the top of my most favourite personal atc list! Jarred is currently down south at the huge concert in Busselton with around 20,000 other young people, having a blast I bet! He'll be leaving in another few weeks to go back to the East Coast (Newcastle) as he's in the air-force....3 more years to go! I'm so glad that he's stayed in very close contact with a bunch of friends that he's had since primary school, gives him a good grounding and it's like no time has past when he returns home once a year to catch up with everyone.

I'm so very lucky to have two fantastic sons, and a great hubby....not everyone is as....I want to say "blessed", but not being that way inclined, whatever the equivalent word is.....heck.......blessed!!!!!! How great is it that when you come home from work one day your other half has totally cleaned the house (& he does a more thorough job than me!) and done 5 loads of washing - though that is a phobia he has....he hates to see the washing basket more than half full and is always doing loads of washing, I encourage that little trait! hehehehe

I've updated my picturetrail photo's with some more atc's too....must get some of my extras into my "for trade" album.

New Year, new art!

How do you start a new year off? By playing with all your art stuff, that's how!!! The colour in this first red/green one looks crappy.... it looks much better in the flesh - it even has sugar embedded in it!

During 2006 a local group I belong to (ABC - Altered Book Club) created a colour chunky book. It took us all year to do it but it was definitely worth the wait.... there are 9 of us in the group and we each wanted art from all the other members so every month we made 10 chunky pages in that month's particular colour. We used the usual format of ROYGBIV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) plus Black and White which was 9 colours in total. As it's such a BIG book, 81 pages in total, I've decided to split mine into 3 books - 3 colours per book. So today I've scanned the completed cover pages (they may or may not be completed....I think I'll put more stuff on them but as it'll get very textural with extra stuff stuck on, it's easier to scan them while they are relatively flat right now! Three techniques, all very different.

I also did a couple more Mona's using watercolour tube paints which give a very different look to the crayons from the previous post.

and........ I got a fantastic new large stamp (8" high!!!) of Lina Cavalieri's beautiful face. You may recognise this face, well, maybe not as it's only bits of it here on the atc's, but it was the one on my earlier canvas that I did for a Christmas present - the blue canvas. Anyway, it's Lina Cavalieri, a famous opera singer who was immortalised forever by Piero Fornasetti, a Milan painter, sculptor & interior decorator. He died in 1988 but he has left an indelible mark with this beautiful face that is used extensively on plates, chairs, cuff links, cushions.....just check out ebay for "Fornasetti" to see the huge array of items. I've just won on ebay a fantastic stamp of Lina's face cracked into 9 pieces.....can't wait for THAT to arrive!

These two atc's are going to be part of a triptych - when I find a suitable 3rd quote to go with these two that is...