November Projects

Just a real quick post. It's Halloween evening and I'm all tuckered out. I succumbed to 3, no, 4 counting the lollipop with the gum inside, candies tonight. I tried, I really tried to be good. How many did you eat?! lol

Our fall is now surrounding us. The chilly air is settling in and I'm always wanting a roaring fire in the fireplace. I'm going into hermit mode. However, I have two projects in November that will keep me busy and surprisingly out of the house. So much for staying inside my comfort zone.

The first is this: National Novel Writing Month. Yes the written insanity has taken hold of me, mostly for the actual accomplishment of completing 50,000 words in one month. They have said we can not write one word over and over so my original plan has been snafu'd. So now I've had to think up an actual plot with characters, settings and the like. Let me tell you, I've gone through three plot scenarios already. And now with the first day of writing looming over my head in a little over an hour, I think my brain is moving onto an as yet unformed NEW plot. Ahhh, gotta love the mind and its creative twists and turns. No easy road for me, I guess. We have a local NaNoWriMo chapter that will be gathering for weekly Write-Ins, so I guess I'll be leaving the house for those. Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year?

I saw a twitter this evening from 26Things about their new November challenge. I'm thinking I will participate in this as well. My camera, my lovely new Christmas present camera, has been sorely neglected the last couple of months and it's time I pulled it out and started snapping. I'm thinking I might invite the kids to join me in this challenge as well! 

So that's a quick update on what's going on around here. As to art, I have several canvases half finished, one is only waiting for that certain special piece I can't seem to fathom at this moment, and then it will be done. The art room is in disarray again but what is new? I'm not working on any altered books at the moment but do have a project for Altered Pages in the works as well as a couple for Red Lead ruminating in my brain. It's going to be a busy (hopefully successful) November, I can tell.

What's up with you in your world?

Art Lessons

Once upon a time there was a mom. Okay, an artistic mom, who had trouble teaching art to her child. I know, CRAZY!! you say. Yes, definitely. The mom would take the artsy child to the art room but then not know what to teach.

'Okay, um, how about we play with some paper? Or stamps?'

'Mom, we did that last time... and the time before that!'

'Ummm, what about making a book, I can show you how to sew a journal.'

'Nah, doesn't sound fun.'

'How about drawing a picture?'

'Umm, I don't know what to draw.'

'Okayy, wanna sew something?'

'What should I sew?'

'I don't know.'

See? I'm not good at teaching. I have this weird picture in my head of her just walking into my art room, grabbing this and that and magically creating something she likes. This doesn't happen often. It helps if I plan something out first and as we get going it morphs into something else, that's okay.

I have grandiose plans of teaching her about other artists, and their styles of art. This involves planning too. Because to be perfectly frank, I am embarrassed to say I don't know much about any artists. I'd love to learn about them too.  What makes this even worse is that we homeschool. 

Well, not that part but we do good amounts of school Monday -Thursday so we can have Fridays off for Art, Math/English games or field trips. I'd like to see us get to the end of our school year and she be well informed about all types of arts and artists.

This past Friday we did manage to create. I pulled out a bag of wooden house shapes I picked up at a garage sale and we both created one. She preferred to paint more of hers (SEEN UP ABOVE), with some collage of a roof on top. She made it as a birthday gift for her sister so she wanted to add a picture of herself in the door. I thought it was cute!

Mine includes plastic fencing, a fabric heart, pompoms and furniture tacks. I used all handmade, handpainted and textured papers. We had a pretty good time, despite my non-planning but it was touch and go in the beginning. We almost quit due to lack of plan...

At the end of our creating session we painted off the rest of the paints puddles we had out, on papers for future use (I have a thing about wasting paint! lol)

Cross your fingers I come up with ideas by next Friday. Any suggestions? 

Party at POE'S Art

I'm slowly catching up on my obligations to the Raven Altered Book club at Altered Gypsy. I finished up the last 3 books I had in my possession this weekend. Most pages you saw a few weeks ago but I did manage a few more.

For this one I started with a leaves theme but then got stuck. I finally went with the Trees poem by Joyce Kilmer. Love that poem. (It's a two page spread.)

I used the same poem on a canvas quite awhile back (2 years ago I think? It already sold) but you can see info about it on this post.  Here's the pic of the canvas:

The second two page spread I did was entitled Party At Poes! Once I put a hat on Poe, the page naturally went from there.

I will tell you about the process of making the whole page since it was an experiment in experimenting. Here were my steps:

1 - glue down scraps
2 - swipe yellowy green paint all over the pages
3 - hate the look and try something new
4 - emboss big round emblems (stamp is by Stamp-In Up.) with a clearish rainbow embossing powder, very proud of myself here
5 - swiped brown paint all over the background, thinking the embossed part would act like resists and paint wouldn't stick to those parts. I was wrong
6 - again hating the background so I decided to heat up the embossed areas again, thinking they might magically pop through the brown paint. By accident swiped my finger through the heated up HOT paint and it wiped off revealing some of the embossed pattern. Burn - bad, pattern showing up - good. So I keep doing that and got interesting results
7 - embossed more in different areas with a vertigris color and a fence type stamp in glossy red. Starting to like it more.
8 - ran out of ideas so I started flipping through a Somerset Studio for ideas. Saw a house in one with a pic of a person so I thought I'd try that. Made a house for Poe out of corrugated cardboard, painted papers and a Poe image from AlteredPages.com Poe collage sheet.
9 - Made a pocket for Poe's house and slipped it in (it is removable). From there I just attached birds, lettering, rub ons and stapled on feathers (yes, too lazy to glue them on.)
9 - then apparently I wasn't too lazy to glue on beads. Or to draw circles all over with metallic colored pencils. Go figure.

And that in a nutshell is this page spread. I might do this type of background again. Like how it came out.