Sun Burst

This was a fun piece I made for a friend away at college. I consider myself somewhat fabric-challenged, so I was happy it turned out the way it did.
  

Scraped Fabric

This was an experience.  I  decided to take Michelle Ward's Street Team Challenge and try scraping paint on a piece of gessoed fabric I am using for a wall-hanging for a friend.

I scraped on cadmium yellow, crimson, and phthalo blue.  Then I scraped some paint over a masked stencil.  It made neat patterns and a grungy kind of texture, but the images were lost.  An interesting combination of colors ... but not the color scheme I was looking for and defintiely did not match the trim I picked out.  

I brayered over most of it with French Vanilla and scraped more paint in pink and blue tones.  Coordinated with my trim better, but definitely not the colors I was originally aiming for.  I wanted a crisper look with my masks this time,so I used fluorescent pink and teal spray paints.  This was fun and I will definitely experiment more with tyvek masks on paper.

Painted Feather

Long time no see LOL I'll end catch-up post after my finals are over ... I just decided to post this now. I'm doing a mail art round robin with painted face envelopes with some other great gals from the Guild. You can see the start of Kelly Snelling's envelope here.

Rather than just paint a plain envie, Michelle Ward's Street Team post got me to thinking about how cool it would be to take advantage of some of the neat textured papers out there and alter them. Here are scans of my original papers.



Here is the back of my envie made with textured paper and molding paste:


And this is the front:


The background had a very earthy feel, so I felt inspired to draw and paint an image of a Native American girl -- cutesy as she is LOL I have a lot to learn about painting faces yet -- but I'm still in that stage where I am amazed it more cloely resembles a human than a Martian LOL

Chameleon's Breath

I started this page quite a long time ago, but it is a Picasso-like self-portrait. The drawing was pretty quick and easy, but I set it aside for a while and just completed the journaling to go along with it. This style of drawing was a stretch for me -- but so were the colors. I tend to do really complicated backgrounds, so lots of solid colors was waaaaay outside my comfort zone LOL


This also goes along with the GPP Street Team prompt this month on adding words to your art journal pages. I started out adding very little text and am slowly learning how to blend the journaling with the art. This was an unusual style for me, so it took a while for the words to come. I used to use rub-ons and rubberstamps for lettering, but have been getting braver about writing my own.

There is no grand meaning in what I wrote on this page. Sometimes I like to just write things that evoke a certain feeling or require imagination to visualize it. For this one I brainstormed a few words that popped into my mind based on my portrait and spun them into sentences afterward.

Hand-Carved Stamps

Here is a stamped page of all my missing hand-carved stamps from last year :( Sigh ...

So the timing couldn't be more perfect for Michelle Ward's stamp carvng crusade.

I did an art journal page with some of my new carved stamps, but the paper was a little too textured and some did not stamp well. I also added the pages were i was stamping off as I worked on them. They are pretty faded ... I was using an 8-year old stamp pad LOL

Fred Fang

I wasn't expecting to get 2 entries done for Michelle Ward's Crusade #13 -- but it just seemed to work out that way when journal ideas preseted themselves :)

I have a story to go with this page too LOL Last week I received an e-mail about a special project forwarded from a man at an outside agency named Fred Fang. That name kept jumping out at me and I just knew I had to bring Fred to life LOL

For my background, I used some spray-paint papers inspired by a previous crusade.

Too Dark?

Okay -- this is the darkest piece I've done to date -- maybe a little too dark LOL This is a journal page for the calendar RR -- and also my entry for GPP Street Team. Good practice for the Dark RR coming up too.

Spray-Paint Papers

I missed the deadline for this crusade on GPP Street Team, but I was really infatuated with the idea of spray-painting papers. I spray-painted an altered book spread when I was an altering rookie and got some neat effects where the paint resisted the glue on the page. I don't think I've done much with spray-paints since then.

Diva friend Vicki also tried some spray-painted backgrounds that got me kick-started to try it :) And she did more here.

I started out brayering 2-3 colors on each of my large papers and embellsihed by spray-painting with stencils. On the last big paper I had some white spots and experimented with an India Ink resist to see what the effect would be with the spray-paints. It was tough to do on a larger scale, but I liked the overall effect and drama of it.



Spray Painted Backgrounds

Graffiti Art - Cheap Tricks

Yeah!! I got to put my skills from Traci Bautista's class to use! I did several large backgrounds and cut down for my 4X4s. The trick was to make them look like finished work.

It suddenly occurred to me that I used some of my favorite Cheap Tricks in these swap pages ... the larger punchinella is so fun to use; puff paint is so cheap and I love the look of it ... 3-D doodling ... how fun is that? And my new cheap trick I learned ... I found this paint at Wal-Mart called Xtreme Paint by Tulip. It is similar to a glitter paint. It has a clear binder with neon colored flecks in it. The binder dries so clear ... it disappears on the page almost except for the confetti flecks suspended in the paint ... but painting over it and wiping away some of the paint for a semi-resist effect was so cool!



Graffiti Art 4X4s

Crusade #5 - Evidence

This is a journal page I did in response to Crusade #5 on Michelle Ward's Street Team. The mission was to document evidence from your everyday life. My life is quite boring LOL -- So I am documenting some of the trends with my art currently. I am discovering that some of the techniques and images I'm using are really symbols and with that knowledge my art feels more expressive and soulful to me now.

I'm not sure if my writing is readable, so here is a list of what I came up with ...

Sheer Overlays -- symbolic for veiling my emotions

Speckling & Spattering -- another form of veiling of my emotions

Wire-Wrapping -- Symbolic for the knots I feel all tied up in

Trumpet -- This is a symbol for my voice ... the only voice I had at one time

Hearts --- This symbol is the one I found most shocking, as I never perceived myself to be a heart person. It represents life force and the spirit.