More Glam Girls

Hmmmm....more Asian Art

Hmmmmm......another Asian Themed project. Two birds with one stone as they say. This is suppose to be my project for the February Book Club Week Three...Traci Bautista's Book, Collage Unleashed. We were to use photo copies as a background base, I rubber stamped images. Then we were to glaze over with heavy bodied acrylics. I wasn't sure what that was, so I used my matte gel medium, then painted onver with three different acrylics in a wash, applied some copper acrylic paint, adhered some of my Asian tissue and more gel, then voila...( oh, that's French) attached the little umbrellas. It needs some words or other flourishes. I'll let it dry and think about it some more. The embellishments are from my Asian Za Lotta Grab bag. It goes with the music.

I love color. I think I have a “feel” for color. At least on paper or in a project. ( I won’t discuss my early dorm room décor here,….and I moved out of the dorm room …a long time ago…but that’s another story.) I love to come up with color palettes. I love fabric stores, yarn stores, and paint chips. I want my house to be purple or blue, but we have boring faded yellow siding. SIGH. But it’s home. I digress again. I think with color I can have various moods. I can be bright, vintage, shabby, gloomy, moody, cute. It depends on what has caught my eye when I last shopped at the scrapbook store for decorative paper, or the fabric store remnants or the rummage sale vintage linens, yard goods or clothes. I have always been in love with blue. As a little kid I saw blue wagons at the store. ( you know the little red wagon, only this one was blue. ) My folks got it for me for Christmas. Then one year it was blue ice skates. I know they had to hunt high and low at the store for them.. I miss them, my folks, the blue wagon and the blue ice skates. But what I don’t get is why they painted my room yellow. Sigh….they never did explain.

Now I have to argue with my dh about what color things should be. Doesn’t he know I’m suppose to get to pick out the colors of everything.,(LOL) ok, this is minor in the whole life scheme of things.

My understanding of the color wheel is a fairly recent phenomena in my life. And I love it. I do consult it quite a bit when thinking about color choices. I use it as a guide, it is not stone. My favorite color has evolved from blue to expand and include all the colors on the color wheel from blue - red in a clock wise rotation around the wheel….blue, blue violet, violet, red violet, and red…and all the hues, tints, values , and shades that lie there in. But really, there is no bad color.

Action Crayons

Action Crayons. A submission for the ZNE Book Club. ( Read previous post) We chopped up crayons and baked them at 250 degrees in a muffin tin lined with foil. Bake about 10 min. Carefully remove from the oven, and let cool, you then have cool ( in many ways) crayon cupcakes. THEN....you hold your cupcake with a pair of pliers or some other tool and apply it to the heating surface of a hot iron.....and then apply the iron to your paper. I used a small craft iron. It took some action to make this painting. It may become a background for another project. Who knows.

Check out this link to inspiremethursday and read all about Action Painting

Crayola Art

BOOK CLUB ASSIGNMENT

The ZNE Book Club continues with projects from Traci Bautista’s book “Collage Unleashed“. This week we are playing with crayons. We were to take broken crayons and place them in muffin tins lined with foil and heat them for about 10 minutes at 250 degrees. This created a very colorful crayon cupcake. After cooling we applied the crayon cupcake to a heated iron and then apply the iron to cardstock, and create a fabulous background. Be sure you get specific instructions and use an old iron, before you try this at home. I used some of the crayons I had at home, and loved it so much, I went over to our church and “borrowed” one of the huge dishpans of crayons. I plan on picking thru them and getting out the old broken ones and do some more with this. ( I’ll take the rest back, but have you ever known a school or Sunday school to run out of crayons, at some point you always get new ones before the old ones run out. They seem to clone themselves.) So here is a great use for those crayon stubs that the kids don’t want to use.




















CHILDHOOD CRAYOLA MEMORIES

Next! We were to talk about a childhood crayon experience. I always remember the first day of school and getting new crayons. As little kids we got those jumbo crayons. We each got our own set of 8 in a real box with a lid, not a fold over flap. I remember one girl who sat behind me who always borrowed my purple crayon, it seems it was her favorite color and she wanted to keep her crayon perfect. She did, she used mine all year. I tried not to sit by her after that.














MOST MEMORIBLE CRAYOLA EXPERIENCE

My most memorable experience with crayons was in 1997. I was taking a drawing class at the local community college. We usually drew our projects with “prismacolor” pencils. Our last project for the year was to make some sort of imaginary drawing that in some way involved a Monopoly ( the board game) board, cards, dice, playing pieces, etc. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I saw a short article in the newspaper, about that time , at the back of the business section, that inspired my project. The article stated that Smith-Binney ( owners of Crayola) was closing its Winfield, Kansas Crayola manufacturing plant. The company only made $92 million in profits and had anticipated $96 million, or some other ridiculous figure. Winfield had recently suffered from the closing of a state hospital and an oil refinery. The job losses were pretty large. The community was also going to suffer from the loss of tourism as many folks passing thru Kansas on the way to other attractions would stop for a tour of the plant.
Thus my art project evolved. I made this illuminated manuscript / stained glass window to lament the closing of the Crayola factory, and decided to do it with crayon. You notice the bad folks are all on their way to …..with out passing GO? Who knows ? The photos are not the best, the piece is framed,and has glass so there was some reflection from the flash. And it is really large. I enjoyed doing this, coming up with the color palette. I never thought about the color palette of my crayons when I had only 8.





Check out the slide show below!

Collage Unleashed / Let Go & Just Do It

Collage Unleashed by Traci Bautista is the book for February for the ZNE Book of the Month Club.
Our first assignment was to experiment with inks and paper towels, to use for backgrounds. I used rubber stamp pad ink refillers on top of the shiny side of freezer paper, squirt your ink on the paper and splash with a bit of water, then go for it.




Traci explains her philosophy around collage and the act of creating in the introduction to her book. As part of our assignment we were to think about writing our own book about the act of creating art - what would the title be and why.

“Just Do It” comes to mind.( I know, it’s been used. ) I know we all struggle with things wanting to be perfect, the best, most original. I need to remind myself ,in many areas of life, to go ahead and just try, it doesn‘t have to be perfect, sometimes just showing up is enough. Yeah, we all want to do more than show up, but you have to start somewhere Once you show up you are on your way. Go for it…just do it..

Sometimes we feel like we have to have special equipment or the right art space to make something creative. Just experiment and give it a try. Use what you have,. Learn by trial and error, when all else fails read the instructions, and really only do this when everything else fails. (Now I wouldn’t want the brain surgeon trying this method)

I also think, too about 12 step programs, sometimes I feel powerless in a creative issue, I really want to control the situation, I find sometimes that something more powerful than me is in charge of the project, and I have to let the “spirit” guide me. Then something inside tells me…it’s just right. Call it the Holy Spirit, “Sophia” or some other entity.

So…. my title would be Let Go and Just Do It. It might work as a title.