Peace Swap

 I signed up to do a swap with Peace as the theme with the Carving Consortium. I did a carving a few weekends ago, but when I went to stamp it on the cards I had a very strong reaction that she was turned the wrong direction. When the pages are bound together, she would be facing the binding.

I really didn't like that, so I carved another stamp. Unfortunately, things were getting down to the wire. I needed my pages to arrive by September 1!  I've been swamped with work and family and didn't have a chance to do anything during the day, so one night I stayed up and worked on a new carve. I didn't realize until I did the test print that I had carved out her back!

I tried to carve a plug and glue it in, but that didn't work well. Finally, I just carved a new, smaller stamp that I could use to fill in the gap. That seemed to work okay.

I decided to spice up the background with a spiral stamp and Versamark ink. Here's the final look:

Technique Flashback

I did another face using the technique I learned from Christina Romeo in Courageous Creativity. Fast and fun.

Say Their Names-Tamir Rice

Tamir Rice (June 25, 2002- November 22, 2014)

Tamir Rice was playing in a park with an airsoft replica gun when he was shot by Cleveland police. Although the police say they yelled for Tamir to raise his hands several times before shooting him, video shows the incident took only two seconds and the police car was still in the process of stopping when he was shot.

Courageous Creativity with Christine Kidder

I realized I never posted the art that I made from the Christine Kidder demo and interview with Amanda Mauck. Actually it was just the painted heart and hand at first until last week when I did some doodling with a black pen and added the spirals, dots and outlined flames where the heart paint was messily done. Simple but fun.

Paper Friendship Quilt

The collaborative art journal is back! The challenge to me was to create a paper friendship quilt. I found a paper piecing design that I liked online and sorted through my paper stash for colors. I cut out all the pieces by hand and glued them down. I started drawing little stitches on with a paint pen. The paint pen is a little faulty, so I get it primed on another piece of paper and it often lets out a little puddle of paint. Unfortunately, my cat stepped in the paint and onto the journal while I wasn't looking. This led to recovering one paw print with a new piece of paper and stamping images onto the quilt squares to hide the other paw print. I tried to do images that reminded me of my friend, so it all turned out in the end.

Now to figure out what my challenge to her will be!

Weekend Art Journaling

On Sundays, I've been making art with three other women online.  Each of us have our own projects and we dedicate the time to connecting, chatting, getting stuff done and showing each other our work (when we can get the right angle on the camera).  This last weekend, I didn't have a project in mind so I did some art journaling in the SmashBook that I created from the Courageous Creativity course.

I had already painted the pages white and then smeared them with some color.  Next I tried a technique from Tracy Verdugo, gluing on pieces of paper napkins.  Here's a tip: give yourself time to pry apart the dang two ply; it took me forever. But once you have the single layer of napkin on the page, it almost melts into it. It's so cool. I found some quotes that I liked that fit with the pages and spent some time playing with lettering.  Clearly more time could be spent practicing lettering! I also did some doodling on one of the pages.

Fun way to get the creative juices flowing again.

Art books

A friend of mine gave me a gift certificate to a bookstore.  So much fun to pick out some good reading material. I'll give you an update as I work my way through them!