Merry Christmas!

Whatever your tradition or faith, I hope you are having a beautiful and blessed night.

Giving and Receiving

Hello Pocketeers, long time no see!  Sorry I haven't blogged in a few months.  I have been making things, though, so I'd like to catch up a little.  Most of what I've been making has been for a swap group I joined on facebook.  Most of the swaps I've signed up for in the group have been ATCs, but I've done a couple of tag swaps.  Here's some of what I've sent out:

Black Cat ATC

Tea Time tag

 

These sets were for an Earth, Wind, and Fire ATC set swap with a group of 5 of us.

An Apple A Day tag

Christmas Tree ATC

 

It's kept me busy.  I've done a bit of my own stuff, though.  I started a cigar box with the apple themed papers from Authentique from a year or two ago...  You can see it in the photo from the last post.  And I've done a few of my 52 Card Pick-Up cards:

I'm only making one Christmas present this  year, and I can't really show it too much of course, but here are some sneaky previews of my super sneaky secret project:

I have yet to make my gift tags, but I'll post those once I make them.  I'm excited for Christmas, but this year I haven't done much Christmas art.  It's taken a while to get into the spirit.  And my art space is such a mess, it's not very pleasant to work in right now, so I haven't been as active in general.  Ah, well.  I'll get it cleaned up and get in there more often soon!  In the meantime, I plan to share some Christmasy stuff with you this week.  See you soon!

Disaster Area?

The ever-amazing Seth Apter had a great idea.  We all see the beautiful studio spaces that get published in magazines and stuff, and we all drool and get jealous, right?  Well Seth wanted people to post pictures of what their studio space really looks like on a daily basis.  It has been really reassuring to see other people's messes!  So here is mine:

What's sad is that, while I have three projects in progress on the table there, only two of them are active and I haven't touched either of them in almost a week. 

 

And then you turn 90 degrees and you see the space that is supposed to be my cutting surface, but it's occupied by piled up junk that I don't have anyplace to store. 

 

Oh, and my book press.  Which is also not currently in use.  Of course. 

 

Somebody save me from myself and my disastrous mess.

Hitting Print

Hey there, Pocketeers!  I've been slowing down on the cards, but getting together with Zingala and RunningWave has spurred me to action a little bit more over the past couple of weeks.  Still only resulted in three cards, but I dug into my scraps and cutting dies a little more for these.  Plus, this weekend we got together to play a little bit with RunningWave's Gelli plate, with fun results. But first, the cards:

 

The primarily green one has ivy die-cut from one of the papers I printed on the Gelli plate.  The mushrooms collaged onto the other are from a napkin I had in my stash.

The banners and the edging at the top are cut with Spellbinders dies.

My favorite prints from our Gelli Plate adventures, with leaves die cut from one of them, and what's left of the paper I cut the ivy from for the green card.

I love the layers and peel-y look here.

This was a ghost print after pulling a print through a stencil.  Look at that delicious texture.

In two weeks the three of us are taking a class together on using the Gelli plate, so I'm looking forward to learning different tricks and techniques for getting unique prints.  And I kind of want my own plate, but where on Earth I'm going to put it is a different story...

Halfway

Wow, it's been a while.  And after I had been so good earlier in the Summer.  Well, I haven't been as persistent with art stuff as I was at the beginning of the Summer.  Been reading more than arting, because I might be a little bit obsessed with the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (OMG).  But I have made a bit more progress on the 52 Card Pick Up deck, and started a new project.  This post shows off the rest of what it took to get to exactly halfway through the deck. 

 

 

As for the new project, it's coming along slowly.  It's rather a large one, for me anyway, and it had to spend some time on the balcony in time-out today while the spray fixative I used on it dried.  Really didn't need it fuming up the whole condo. 

The Gathering

Hi there, Pocketeers. I promise I've still been arting. Slowly, little by little, I've been building my 52 Card Pickup deck. Some cards I'm really happy with, and others less so. But I'm having fun working on them (if you can call it work). Here's what I've put together lately: 

That last one isn't my favorite, but it is the result of me finding my new stamps from Lavinia Stamps in the mail and wanting to try them out RIGHT AWAY. I had forgotten that the oak tree stamp, which you can just barely see in the background, would be so small, but the stamps are great quality. They're clear cling stamps, so they are also great for partial images if you don't put them on a block. 

Part of what I'm enjoying about doing these cards is the scale of them. It's something I will keep in mind for future art. One of my friends who gave me a lot of the Magic: the Gathering cards I'm using talked to me about artists who over-write the art that's printed on the cards with their own original art, and suggested that I try that out. The more I think about it, the more appealing the idea is. I might experiment with that one I finish this deck. Or I might just start before then. Who knows. But it's a great challenge. There's all kinds of magic I could try to work with these cards. 

In the Name of the Father

I hope everyone out there who is or has a dad has had a good Father's Day :)  We started with bringing breakfast to Mr. Pocket's dad (and mom) and finished up with dinner with my parents.  And I got to give my dad a little project I put together just for him.  I actually decided on this gift because I had done a similar one for my mom for Mother's Day, and decided that it was only fair to put the same amount of effort and love into Father's Day. 

Ok, so here's where it gets Jesus-y.  If you have problems with religion, this is your warning that there is religious content ahead.  Not trying to convert anybody here, just showing my art which happens this time to express my (and my family's) Catholic faith.  Ok, disclaimer over.

So the gifts I made for my parents for their respective holidays started out as canvases turned around backwards.  I used photos as the focal point for each, and embellished around them a la Finnabair, but simpler because it's me.  For Dad's, I used a photo I found of the stained glass window at the United States Naval Academy Chapel, because he is a Naval Academy grad and retired Navy pilot.  The window depicts Jesus walking on the water.  As another meaningful element, I used the first and most recognizable words (and alternate title) of the Navy Hymn, which also tie in with it being Father's Day quite well.

The background is a sample of textured wallpaper from Graham and Brown, which I painted and wiped off.  Many thanks to Seth Apter for the tip on where to find fantastic textured wallpaper :)  The waves in front are painted and scrunched tissue paper.  Various embellishments came from my stash, some are Prima, some are random, some are Tim Holtz.  The bottles are filled with water and a trace of Distress Ink, and some of the Glossy Accents I used to glue the corks in place leaked into the water, which made it cloudy kind of like real ocean water.  Happy accident. 

Detail shots.

The words are stamped on a length of the Tim Holtz ribbon that I sprayed with a shimmer mist that's pretty subtle, so you probably can't see the shimmer in the photo.  But I managed to get wings in, since Dad was a pilot.  Also, I LOVE that wallpaper.  Now I need to get more.

So, in case you were curious, here's the original, which I made for Mother's Day.  I've always wanted to do a Marian piece for my mom, since she and I both have a particular devotion to the Blessed Mother.  So finally I figured out what I wanted to do, and shortly before Mother's Day this year I learned a new word.  "Kecharitomene" is a Greek word that means something more than "full of grace" but less stilted and formal than "most highly favored."  It occurs only once, as far as anybody knows, and that's in the Gospel when Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she's going to be God's mom (pretty heavy news, really).  So I decided I wanted to work that in, and originally I was going to fill the background with different names and epithets for the Blessed Mother, but in the end I decided it would be better with just the one term.  For the photo, I used a photo I took of a statue of Mary and Jesus at Kloster Eberbach last year in Germany. 

I sprayed all those white paper roses with pearl colored Perfect Pearls, and painted paper rose leaves gold.  All the metal pieces on the frame were the wrong color for the piece, so I painted them gold and whitewashed them with gesso.  The rest was all bling from the stash, and that Tim Holtz ribbon sprayed and stamped.

 

 

So there you have it.  I'm getting back into the art groove, and parental holidays have been helping, LoL.  I've been moving forward with my 52 Card Pick Up deck, too, but I'll show more of that later.  For now, I hope you've enjoyed seeing what I made for my parents.  Hopefully it shows how much I love them.  They're both pretty spectacular :)

Weekend Art Frenzy

Hi all!  It was a seriously long Winter.  I've only recently gotten my creative energy back, and soon I'll show off what I've done on my own.  But I just spent a fantastic weekend with my mom taking Seth Apter's workshops, and I just have to get out a quick lunchtime blog post about them.

Mom and I took classes from Seth before when he was at our local shop, and this year when we heard he was coming down again, I was afraid I'd have to miss it because I just don't have the money for all the classes I want to take.  But Mom paid my way as my birthday present, so I was able to go with her after all!  Seth is fantastic, and if you ever have the chance to take a class with him, do it.  He's very fun, very chill, and very encouraging.  And, like Michelle Ward, his classes use a project as a vehicle for learning techniques, so you do have something concrete to take home, but it's not going to look like anybody else's in the class except in form.

Friday night was all about working with the Spellbinders' medallion sets and dies.  We layered them with all kinds of found objects, and made backgrounds that we could mount them on if we wanted to (which I did).  I'll have to come back and add pictures of my projects from that class, because I was having so much fun I didn't think to take many pictures!

Saturday's class was on painting techniques, which we used on vintage book covers that we then made a book out of themselves.  Super cool.  I learned how awesome fiber paste is, and he introduced us to some new sprays that I really really like.  They don't flatten out to the surface as they dry, but stay dimensional in the shapes of the drips and spatters that they land in.  So cool.  Anyway, those pictures are on my phone and I can't post them at my desk because of terrible reception in here, so I will add them later, too.

What I do have pictures of that I can access on my work computer is yesterday's class.  It was called 52 Card Pick-Up, and once again taught painting techniques but also collage principles, this time to create a weekly journal or art book out of a deck of playing cards.  Now, me, I used Magic: The Gathering cards that my friends were going to discard from their new boxes, but they're the same size.  But of course, with that being the origin of my cards, I kept thinking of the stages of the process in terms of phases of the game.  Most of the day was spent in what I thought of as the deck-building phase. 

So much texture and color...

This was kind of like a drafting phase.  What do I want to do with which cards?

I call this the summoning phase, because I actually picked cards and made them work with me.

It was a blast.  I really want to keep working on my deck, because I rarely finish projects from classes but this one is really cool and easy to work on a little at a time.  Plus, I plan for it to be a fantasy inspiration deck, where instead of journaling on the blank sides, I'm going to write quotations about or from fairy tales on them.  Then, when I'm running low on imaginative energy, I can just draw a card and think about what's on it.  That's the plan, anyway.  In any case, this weekend was so fun!  It's a little hard going back to work after spending days in art utopia.