Apron!

Lookie what I made!! C'mon, you HAVE to think that's fun!! I'm totally in love with it!

The front is canvas, the back and bottom and pockets are just cotton fabric. The top of the pockets is double fold bias tape, and the yellow edging is single fold. I seriously love this thing. It was SO fun to make!!

Persistence

I'm a persistent kind of person. I will work and work and work at something until it's what I want it to be or I'm so frustrated I want to chuck it through the window. Sometimes both. But when someone ELSE is pushing and poking at me? I dig my heels in. That's just how I am. This is a Kellyism, because she's the same way!

Remember Angry Caterpillar? He's resisting the urge to become a butterfly! 

Where women create

I think the titles of stuff can be SO SILLY sometimes. I'm not a "solidarity, sister!" type of chick. I think division because of sex is stupid. This magazine could be called something like "Artist's Spaces" or something less sexist (oh, wait - it's only sexist if it says MEN, right?). Anyway, this is where this woman creates sometimes. 

That's my living room floor and I was sitting in the empty space! I had to get up and go somewhere with Mini Me, but I just left the stuff right there and came back to it. You don't need a fancy space to make art!

Pam Garrison Style

Something about this simple style appeals to me. The black lines and flat colors. It's simple. I like simple.

This is a brown paper lunch bag that I tore open:

This one is a piece of muslin that I'm thinking of making into a placemat:

Back to my first love: Moleskine!

I haven't been journaling lately, I have no excuse for why. Just haven't really felt like it. But getting back to Moley felt REALLY good! The color is Faber Castell gel sticks (NOT the gelatos). Suzi got them for me and I really like the way they feel when they're dry! They're matte, which I really like, and the color doesn't rub off, like watercolors can tend to do. So I'm happy! 

Here she is with the detail added back in after painting:

And some journaling on top (bad picture!):

Watercolor Pages, again

OK, so I got some artist's tape in 1/4 inch (Suzi bought it for me) and tried again. They came out MUCH better! These ones are watercolor:

 These are alcohol inks:

 The only problem now is I don't really like trying to FORCE myself to use them. It feels like what I was doing with cartooning. I know a lot of artists say that they had to force themselves to sketch every day before it became fun. (OK, most of them say "a joy", which is something I will NEVER say.) But I already have to force myself to do things. Study. Cook. Clean. How many things in a day should I hate and make myself do anyway? And should art be one of them? I guess it should if it's something I want to get better at, but for now I'm just going to hang on to these pages and maybe use them when I go to Florida as a travel journal.

September

It's a new month. Lots of "stuff" going on, lots of stuff to do, lots of thoughts in my head. So, this is the first page in my new Soul Garden planner. She makes me SO happy, but I was totally terrified to add color to her. Usually color is the part where I fuck everything up. But really, what's the worst that could happen?

I inked the flowers but not the face, then shaded her with prismacolors.

This is the part where I really hesitated. I carried her from couch to table to couch to table almost all day before I finally decided to add color to the flowers. I'm REALLY BAD at knowing what colors "go" together, so I just picked some random ones and went for it. They don't look bad. Maybe not awesome, but not awful.

When she was all done, I added watercolor around her. Since it's not watercolor paper, they don't act quite right, but I'm still really liking her!

Then a little stamping and Sharpie pens.

See those green spots? NO IDEA how they got there. I haven't used any paint that color today. 

Hubby's Birthday!

We made him a card. Believe it or not, Liam did most of the work. He drew the cake and painted the whole front. (I outlined the cake in purple marker.) He even stamped most of the letters for "happy birthday". I added the little owl stamp because Tim totally has a thing for owls. He's obsessed with Hedwig.

He wrote this - see the serifs on the "Y"s?? It's because I showed him the Y stamp and it had serifs! 

I added this stamp to the back, it's a stamp I carved of Liam. I need to gouge out the face a little more, huh? 

A Boy and His Journal

We're doing loose sheets here, but they'll be made into journals eventually! We are using stonehenge printmaking paper and watercolors - Artist's Loft and Winsor & Newton.

Affirmations

These were a birthday gift for a friend. This one was a little TOO bright, I think, but I gave it to her anyway. 

I did the same thing here as for the shirts, vinyl sick-on letters. The top one was cheap acrylic paint.

The bottom two are alcohol ink sprays that I made myself.

They're a foot square and make me happy!

A Birthday Plan Gone Awry

So...a great idea, right? I made these for Suzi's birthday. This is mine:

Kelly's:

Suzi's:

Alas, I put mine on and forgot the others...sigh. They had a lovely day on my couch. So, I was the idiot at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts yesterday wearing the "happy" shirt. 

BUT let me tell you how I made them - it was genius. I got some of those vinyl sticky letters and stuck them on the shirts. Then I put liquid Rit dye (black) in a spray bottle and sprayed over them. I was worried that it would seep under the letters, but it worked beautifully! I wanted to use blue on the blue shirt, and maybe red on the pink, so it wasn't so stark, but I wasn't sure if it was going to work, so I just got black. Since it was freaking AWESOME, I'm going to do it again with better colors.

Hell, take 2

I'm slightly obsessed with this one, I know. I'm really not sure why. But I added some red to her letters and I think it's freaking fantastic. Amazing. I love it even more than I already did. Seriously, how in love with my own work should I be? I can't help it, I guess! Every once in a while I'm just like "Wow. I did that?!?!?"

This is what I used for the red. So many people seem confused when you say "Sharpie water-based poster paint pen", so here is a picture. It says "water-based" on it. The oil-based ones are NOT the same. 

What IS that??

This is my hair. It's black. Those little streaks? White and yellow paint. I'm out in public, after a shower, when I notice this...

It makes me notice these things, too...

This is what happens when you paint near your computer!

Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with the paint on the computer, it was just an observation!

Uncomfortable with attention

Maybe it's "credit" more than "attention" that I'm uncomfortable with? I have a friend who wants to submit our Zombie Bunny project to Somerset Studios next Easter and the thought of my name in print makes me squirm. I've been avoiding putting anything in my eportfolio at school because that will be my name AND my work out there on the web for anyone and everyone to see. It just creeps me out, and it makes me feel like "Who the fuck are you to put your stuff out there like you're somebody? You're just a chick sitting on the couch animating fruit for idiotic cartoons." Harsh, right? We say meaner things to ourselves than we ever would to anyone else. See how I'm babbling to avoid  saying what I'm here to say? I'm super squirmy about this!

This is Suzi's book. By now, you guys all know that Suzi and I are good friends. She moved here to be close to me and Kelly, we hang out and drink a lot of coffee together. We paint together. Her book is really great. Amazingly great. It comes with a DVD, and shows all the steps and stages of making a mixed-media girl, Suzi Blu style. I LOVE it. But I've avoided promoting it (which is silly) because....

I didn't want to tell you about this! How sill am I? It's my painting in Suzi's book. 

So, the book is AWESOME, and you can get it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or from the amazing Suzi herself! Now I have to be done talking about it, I feel a little sick. Ridiculous, I know.

Hell is...

So, here is a girl...I might have posted her before. The shading is better in person, of course. 

And I really wanted to stamp "hell is other people" on her, my new favorite quote. I was using the alphabet stamps that I carved myself, and I thought were going to take up more space so I thought I'd put two words at the top and two at the bottom, but the first two didn't take up very much space. I was a little torn then, because leaving a HUGE space between the words - two all the way at the top and two way down at the bottom - seemed silly.

But I just went with it! I'm happy. She rocks my socks. 

Kelly's Angel

I don't know if I like her. I already showed her to Kelly, so I'm not spoiling the surprise or anything...

The words are the lyrics to Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah.

What makes a soul grow?

This is a little preview of Suzi's next class, Soul Garden. It's a collaboration between her and Kelly, which I think is SUPER fun and a first for them. The idea is a planner. A planner for our lives. NOT just one where we jot down our appointments. One where we make goals and have rewards when we complete them. Simple goals, like getting up earlier or eating a healthy breakfast. And more difficult ones like integrating exercise into our daily lives.

 

It's part journal, part scrapbook. The ephemera of our lives meets practicality.

Just in case you can't read that To Do List, it says "Carve light bulb, Make cartoon pages, Yesterday's cartoon page, Eat chips & Cheetos, Watch Gilmore Girls". Sometimes that's the kind of list I need - one I'm going to actually accomplish. There's also an elephant I drew, a little musing about weeds vs. flowers, and the top of an individual cream cheese container - and my face, of course.

Here's a horribly taken photo of Mini me, and a page where I wrote in shiny gold pen.

There's more, trust me. Stay tuned for much, much more!

"Tell Goog good night!"

Kelly and I skarted last night for hours for the first time in FOREVER! We made whimsy animals, Juliette Crane style. It was fun. Silly, messy fun. 

He's a penguin, just in case you can't tell!

Here he's supposed to be outlined with India ink and a bamboo brush, but I only have a small squirt bottle of ink for my Rapidograph pens, so I outlined him with it. I think he's finished, but maybe not...

What's Goog up to now?

Fairy #2

I don't know about this one, either. Maybe I'm just not a fairy kind of chick.