19 posts tagged “my art”
Coffee in hand I went to check out the Collage Mania site.
Collage Mania II started today! It's going right now! 235 collages are available today for a minimum donation of $80 to the American Cancer Society through Fiberart For A Cause. If that is too rich for your wallet, the ones remaining tomorrow go for $40 each. Help FFAC and Virginia Spiegel meet and exceed her goal of raising $30,000 for the American Cancer Society and add to the more that $150,000 already donated.
My believe sun already sold, yay! My Tribal Sun Collage is still available.
If you buy my Tribal Sun collage today and mention you saw this notice in my blog when I email you for shipping info on Wednesday, I'll throw in an extra surprise.
It's for a good cause. I won't even feel slighted if you like one of the other collages more than mine there are a LOT of cool ones left.
Important Edit: DOUBLE YAY! Both of them sold, now I wish I had donated more. I hope someone I know got them. I don't find out who the buyers are until Wed.
These are my entries so far in the "What Do You Think" Banner Contest...votes appreciated. You can vote once per banner, for as many as you like... the popular vote only counts for part of the winning score:
The first one is my newest... and I plan to flood them with sunshine before this is over!
My other 2 banner entries are here:
Aztec Sun Banner
My Kitty Insomnia Banner
and my daughter has two cute ones entered too:
Ramie's Robots on a walk Banner
And a banner featuring one of the girlies she draws
I am now cutting mats for the 2 painted sun faces I decided to give away from the November batch for the One World One Heart event so I can frame them and get them into the mail:
I painted a sunface bank:
I am working on finishing a round jewelry Box:
The cats have been amusing me by stealing paint brushes, buttons and glittery trims, they seems to be intent on living a life of crime:
I lined the sunface cigar box purse and have it ready to go up on my webpage.
I painted and appliqued 3 art bag purses at Vi's yesterday, but I lost my sunlight and cannot get a even semi decent pic of them right now with my cell phone so I'll post them tomorrow or the next day, I really went wild with them, each one is a different style, one is sorta a journal-style bag, I had loads of fun....Vi did a lot of head scratching, she said they are beautiful but she thinks I am nuts.
And I got the tops done for 6 fiber art cards that I am quilting tonight while watching TV, 2 of them were experiments in terror because I was playing with EZ Batik... I LIKE that stuff! I got pics taken and emailed them to myself, but it has been over 15 minutes and they have not come through yet so yahoo must be admiring them. I'll post them when they show up.
Edit: Well the batik ones made it through anyway, the one on the left is done on black fabric and the one on the right is on white, of course:
And finally, the painted sunfaces came creeping through, these will be appliqued onto fiber art cards and have pieced rays, hopefully by tomorrow evening:
See? I am not a total slacker.......
Since Christmas I have turned out 5 art purses, they have been packed up for their new homes, but I do have pics on my camera and as soon as I figure out how to get them off there I will post them.
I
am also painting a small cigar box style purse my daughter bought for
me to paint along with a bunch of other stuff, she seems to feel I need
to keep busy. Not sure if I am going to line the inside with fabric or
just paint it, but the purse in general is coming along nicely. It will
be going up for sale on my website as one of the first listings
featured when the site goes back up on the new host in a week or so.
Also going up it the memo board shown next to it below, an exact
duplicate of the one I made for my own kitchen that everyone tries to
talk me out of. The site is going to be a mix of things both painted
and textile, plus some of the wearable art clothes I design and make.
Neither of these cell phone pics is great, but they give you the
general idea.
The memo board is done, the sunface purse is in progress, still lots of detail work and outlining to do yet on it.
In
other news, I stumbled upon www.stumbleupon.com and I love this web
search/ bookmarking site. It's free and I have found a ton of stuff I
might have missed otherwise, the web is getting too big to search it
well all by yourself anymore. Some of my best recent finds are these:
A pictorial blog of links to recipes that made me gain 50 pounds just looking at itA great "How to draw" site with tons of tutorials, lots of illustrations & it's free.
Susan Lomuto's blog Polymer Clay Notes... which happens to be about a whole lot more than Polymer clay.... in fact it is one of the best art blogs I have found in quite awhile.
Canadian Textile sculpture artist Miles Lowry who casts the human form in cotton and paints it.... his work is absolutely amazing!
Seattle bleach artist Deborah Gwinn
Paper Mosaic Fusion artist S.A. Schimmel
The absolutely amazing art of Tina Blondell
That's it for now, back to painting the purse for me....
Usually I am all about fabric, quilting and fiber art, but lately I have been on a mission, a painting mission.
The Salvation Army thrift store near me gets the best stuff, and after 7 days they mark it down to 1/2 price.
It's been a flurry of fabulous finds this week. Starting with this jewelry box:
I had already started the painting when I remembered to take the before photo, it was all the battered brown finish when I found it on the mark down table for $3.00. A little sanding, patching and priming later it was ready to go.
It is well under way now, and the exterior looks like this:
Excuse the washed out photos, I had to take these with my cell phone as I was camped out with Vi all week while her live-in caregiver was out of town for a family emergency. The colors in reality are MUCH brighter than they appear in my photos....
The interior screamed " make a statement", so I made it a bold color change, not unheard of in Moroccan painted furniture, which is the direction the box is going in.., I hope.
So far I am quite happy with it, and oddly I am not even tempted to put a sun face on it.
I also found 2 other very nice jewelry boxes to re-do, and I was lucky to find the one thing that I have been searching for for months, a round ottman with storage space inside it.... I actually tripped over the one below as I entered the store.... added bonus, it's on casters, so it rolls. I want to recover it, with a bold colored, appliqued sunface on top, with black sides that have tribal symbols done in reverse applique in white on the surface. I did one like this as a custom order a while ago and have been searching for a round storage ottman ever since to make one for myself. Now not only do I have one to do this winter, it is structurally sound and it only cost me $2.99. they still make round ottmans but the ones with storage inside are few and far between.... it has been a very good week indeed.
This is my 1st art quilt ever, only they didn't call them that back then. It was created in 1978, I think, (not sure of the date), 3 1/2 feet long by 18 inches wide. I rediscovered it today, yes... there is a sun in it too, I guess I have always been a sun obsessed woman.
I was fighting a one woman battle to reclaim my life from Agoraphobia/anxiety attacks at the time.I saw a couple books by Jean Ray Laury thanks to the neighborhood book mobile, ( one on wearable art and one on soft sculpture), and I was so inspired by her books that I wrote to her (in those days artist/writers actually put their mailing address on the dust cover info if you can imagine), Jean kindly talked me through creating this wall hanging via snail mail, she also taught me soft sculpture via letters, and she sent me copies of all her books autographed with wonderful words of encouragement. Into the 80's we mailed back and forth, in fact she talked me into submitting my first manuscript to a magazine and sent me a small flower arrangement when a magazine bought my first article. She is truly a nice woman, but looking back at it now, I was an idiot, and she deserved a metal
for dealing with me at all....let alone encouraging me. Good gawd...
I've come a long way baby
Still I did something right, almost 30 years later, and in spite of horrific storage practices, it is still in great shape overall.... a monument to a turning point in my life. Somehow it has survived the years, and so have I.
On talentdatabase.com . Nice site, very professionally done, lot's of talent is showing up there from all over the world...
My listing can be seen here. I am still uploading pics to it, but the response has been very good so far. If you create a gallery of your art there, be sure to bookmark mine and I will bookmark you in return, it helps you to climb in the ratings so you get front page coverage and more exposure.
This was fun and easy to carry to work with me as a project to keep me occupied in the middle of the night when my client is sleeping. So far they are all sunfaces, ( of course), but I am going to do others that are not, eventually...
I feel very productive the last couple of days...
I was asked to paint a lap tray with a sun/moon, that design is shown below ( sorry for the crappy cell phone pic, my digital camera is not holding a charge):
I just love ArtRage, the trial version is limited, but not greatly, and it does not expire...but as I said with Photofilter, I suggest that this shareware is worth the $19.95 they want for the full version and then some...so if you download it, like it and plan to use it, please pay up when you can, it's the only way the developers have motivation to develop more great affordable programs. The best feature is the trace option. You can load in any picture and trace over it, then remove the original...so for art quilters this feature takes the struggle out of converting a photo to a sketch when making an art quilt, it would also be useful for people trying to learn to draw, while learning to contour and make features. The following is my latest dabble with ArtRage. Original photo of my oldest daughter is on the left, my ArtRage painting is on the right... I am teaching myself to blend and shade with it. I should mention, what I do with it HAS been a bit of a struggle, I use this program with a mouse ( I do not have a special drawing pad or pencil). It's tricky, in fact at times it is downright frustrating but practice helps, so does a stiff drink and the undo feature ;) Ramie this one is for you.... it took me almost a month of working at it very part time, I finished it tonight. The shading is a tad off, and the mouth is under defined but I am pretty pleased with it anyway
