It all started with Rainbow Sherbet...

....and ended with this little book.

But let me back up.

 I’ve decided to play along with Summer of color 2012 – six weeks of color prompts hosted by Kristin at Twinkle Twinkle. This year the colors are based on ice cream flavors and this week’s prompt is Rainbow Sherbet – bold oranges, pinks, yellows and a touch of white. 

 

Naturally, I started with an index card

But not just one index card.

Whenever my card idea involves a specific background technique, I will usually make multiple cards with the same background so I can have extras or in case I mess one up.

The first layer of this card is liquid watercolors sprayed through stencils.  Four cards fit nicely under an assortment of makeshift stencils

After spraying, I a grabbed a piece of copy paper to soak up the paint.

I rather liked the way it looked and set it aside.

Meanwhile, I’ve got handmade books on the brain.  I just gave away 10 little books as part of the All Together Now blog hop, and I’ve been itching to make more.  If luck would have it, the current theme at the Butterfly Effect is books!

 

I looked around my work table and saw the extra pink and orange index cards and thought they would make perfect little book covers, and that the cool blotter paper would make great pages.  Out come the stencils and spray again to make more pages.

Some trimming, some hole punching, some stitching, and I’ve got a sweet little Japanese Stab bound notebook in rainbow sherbet colors.

Since one book puts me in the mood for another, I decided to make a small accordion style book.  I went digging for one I’d made in the past to use as a reference and I stumbled upon some sheets of  plastic slides I recently bought at a salvage store.  Now THOSE would make interesting pages…

I painted the frames with alcohol inks, and bound the pages with washi tape.  

 I dug through the scrap basket for bits of my painted paper in complementary hues and collaged them into small covers. 

 

 I wrote a favorite quote on the film part of the slide using a white soufflé pen. 

 It reads, "Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting."

 I think I will add some kind of closure to it.

 

 Now, before I put some kind of closure on this blog post and head out for some ice cream, I'll show you one more sherbet inspired index card:

Happy Friday!

Linking up:

 

Red composition

It's week 5 of my composition class and look at me I'm keeping up!

This week was all about creating depth with layers and colors.  Since the theme over at Butterfly Effect is "red" this week, I decided not to make yet another orange and aqua collage, but to push myself to use my least favorite color.

I'll come right out and say it - I hate red.

I never paint with red paint.  I don't wear red clothes.  Red candies were the ones you gave to your sister or secretly threw on the floor of the movie theater.  

So as if my class assignments weren't challenging me enough (HAH!) I decided to work in a limited palette of shades of a color I hate.

I'm a glutton for punishment.

But I'm learning a ton in this class and I'm pleased with the first attempt at using this week's lessons.

dreamy

I have several categories of recurring dreams.

There are the control dreams, in which I am driving but suddenly realize I'm actually in the back seat and no one is behind the wheel.  And the one where I'm in an elevator and it starts traveling in all kinds of crazy directions, like the elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, and I'm absolutely terrified.

There are the procrastination dreams in which I realize I have not attended class even once this semester, and I haven't read the book, and in fact probably didn't even buy the book, but the exam is today.

And then there are the frustration dreams, in which I cannot open my combination lock on my locker, or worse I'm trying to dial a very long and complicated phone number and the phone keeps malfunctioning and I have to start all over again.  and again.  and again.

The worst dream I ever had was a childhood fever dream and it's haunted me for 40 years.  Enormous logs are rolling down a hill and they crush a single, tiny, fragile flower.  I know.  It sounds so benign.  But if I spend too much time thinking about it, I get a nauseous panicky feeling and I think I might cry.

To this day, I avoid piles of logs.

Want to see what other people are dreaming about this week?
Visit them at the Butterfly Effect.

painting of champions

Cereal is the perfect food.  I will gladly eat it any time of day or night.  (For those of you keeping score at home, this is the 3rd of the 29 exciting things you need to know about me.) As a kid there was no greater treat than being allowed to have cereal for dinner. A friend recently told me how guilty she felt when she was so tired one night she couldn't cook and gave her kids cereal.  Are you kidding me?  I assured her she was not a deadbeat, and in fact was the BEST MOM EVER.

I'm equal opportunity when it comes to my cereal.  I equally enjoy a bowl of high-fiber twigs-and-sticks type cereal and those technicolor sugar bombs disguised as food.  When my son was small and I was obsessing over the nutritional quality of every morsel of food that passed his lips, I would wait until he went to bed to take the junk cereal out of hiding.  Now that my mother-of-the-year award has been revoked, we bond over which box has the most marshmallows and which makes the milk turn colors.

My idea of heaven is not unlike my college dining hall - a dozen kinds of cereal lined up in giant plastic dispensers and permission to eat as much as you like.  *sigh*

One of the many good things about going through boxes of cereal the way some people go through glasses of water is that we always have empty cereal boxes in the recycling.  And if cereal is the perfect food, then cereal boxes are the perfect substrate.  They've been essential to my recent postcard making spree.  Last week, as I was cutting the little flappy parts off the front and back of the box, I decided to put them to use as collage elements.

So here's how my painting started: 

(oh thank god she's going to get to the point at last!)

After half a jar of gel medium and a few days pressed under a stack of heavy books, I was ready to slather it in gesso and get started.  I painted it a bright yellow green and rubbed dark oil pastels around all the edges:

Then I brayered on another few layers of gesso:

And then I stopped taking pictures.  

I do that all the time - I get so excited about what I'm working on that I forget my good intentions of documenting the steps along the way.

You'll have to take my word for it when I tell you I added a bazillion more layers of paint, and some big loopy black handwriting and some more paint and some more oil pastels and at some point covered the whole thing in tissue paper and painted all over that and tried some stenciling and hated it and covered THAT with more paint. 

I finally liked the look of the background, so I added some hand-dyed paper and a few charts printed on tissue paper and rubbed the surface with some pan pastels.

Here's where I ended up:

I was kind of liking it until I scanned it and saw it on my computer screen and then I hated it. Does that ever happen to you?  When I looked at this digitally, I didn't like that all that black and was especially peeved that the graphics weren't straight.  I'm usually pretty slap-dash, good-enough when it comes to life in general, but I couldn't get over this crooked bit.  I decided to cover that whole middle part with gesso with the intention of printing a new copy of the chart and putting it on straight this time.  As I was adding layers of paint on top of the gesso, the tissue paper underneath started to bubble up.  I though about stopping and letting it dry, but instead I tried to peel it up.   I figured I'd just add more gesso and more paint, but I ended up really liking the effect of the peeled area and leaving it alone.

so HERE is my very very layered cereal box painting which I gleefully link to the Butterfly Effect (whose theme this week was making layers) and to Paint Party Friday because it's been a long long time since I visited that talented group.

devil kitty

Came home from work today to find a mason jar full of turquoise dye spilled all over my work table, chair, and floor.

whose fault?

this guy:

paper eating evil beast

dumper of buckets

spiller of liquids

_______________________________________________

He knows I'm pissed at him so he's being ingratiatingly cute:

In the basket with the stuffed studio mink

In the scrap box under my work table

PLEASE don't be mad at me!
(I love that he's laying in the middle of Cameron's black kitty paintings)
(and no, Cam, your paintings are not still laying on the couch after all these months  - this is just an old picture)

Like most of us, he's a study in contrasts.

I've been messing around with my new Inktense pencils (LOVE!!!!)

and altering a creepy black and white picture of myself.

Here's one of my own contrasting sides:

Here's another:

I think I like this view best:

Linking up to the "Opposites" theme over at the Butterfly Effect, where we are ALL pretty ALL the time.

Go see for yourself.

book-altering, literature-quoting, weekend-loving geek

How cool is this?  Just one of the fabulous things I've learned in the altered book class is how to make alternating doors in a book.  Seriously - Natasha and Amy have some really great FREE video tutorials over there on Flutterbye.  I've got lots of other book-related things to show, but tonight I'm showing my  doors because this is what I used for my QUOTE (another last-minute link up to the weekly butterfly effect theme).

What's behind door #1?

Art is the only thing

that can go on mattering

Once it has stopped

Hurting

"Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting" - Elizabeth Bowen

Look how nice and flappy that is.  I've been geeking out over this for days.

 (Plus look how ORANGE it actually is.  My scanner made it look much more red)

And speaking of quotes - I'll leave you with the best Friday quote ever, courtesy of my son Max, age 10, as he got home from school today.

“There’s a new movie coming out and it’s called Max’s Free Weekend and the best part is it takes two days to watch and the even better part is there are no homework scenes”

love that kid.

Things Forgotten

Linking up to this week's theme at the Butterfly Effect.
After quite a few failed attempts at turning this into something else,  I'm posting my original sketch.

Got nothing...

...or next to nothing, anyway.

It's been ages since I've played along with the Butterfly Effect.  

This week's theme is "The Woods" and all I've got for you is an elementary school art project.

(I kid you not.  The project idea was found on one of the of the many websites we use to get arts-and-crafts ideas for the kids at work.  I think the middle schoolers are going to do it after school one day next week.  It involves masking tape and watercolors.)

So, I've spent the past hour staring at it, trying to figure out what to do to it to make it edgier. 

Trying to make it more worthy of a dedicated blog post.  

And I was getting grumpy and coming up with nothing.

AND it's too big to fit on my scanner bed, so I scanned it in two parts and spent another hour trying to figure out if I had any software that would stitch the two pictures together. 

(I don't, so I'm going to pretend it's supposed to be in two pieces. )

( I was going to call it a triptych, but that's three paintings. ) 

(What do you call two?  A diptych?)

 ( Dipstick is more like it). 

 So now worrying about this little painting has taken about 5 times longer than it did to paint it in the first place.  

I need to get a grip.

So here it is, in all it's fifth grade glory.

Just trying to get back into the habit of making art every day and posting here more than once a month.

Plus, I miss the radiant glow of all the pretty people at the Butterfly Effect.

Shattered

This week's theme at the Butterfly Effect is "Broken Pieces"

It's easy to feel fractured in this modern life of ours.  There are so many things that demand our attention, and so many roles we play in our own life and the lives of others.

When I'm creating, I feel calm and peaceful and whole - which only serves to emphasize the areas in my life where I'm not quite as content, furthering this feeling of being fragmented.

Of course one of the things I do best (and perhaps all women do best) is hold all those pieces together with a smile on my face, even when I'm being pulled in a bunch of different directions.

This piece started with a collage sheet I made months ago and never used. I'd layered dozens of squares of paper (some of my painted papers combined with scrapbook paper and book pages)

I also had a series of self portraits I took last year - close-ups of portions of my face.  I printed them and layered them into an approximation of my head.  I cut the whole collage into pieces and linked them back together with jump rings.  I attached a string to each of the pieces and "installed" it on the wall with the strings wrapped around push pins.  I think I might find an empty frame and  tie the edges of the collage to the edges of the frame - maybe with fishing line so it looks like it's floating.  not sure.

Here are a few detail shots:

Now I'm off to the Butterfly Effect to see how everyone else has interpreted this theme.