Color Inspiration and Grids

I'm working on an altered book with the theme Color Inspiration.  I'll use it to help me out when I'm stuck for ideas or need to check out colors or color combinations.  Color inspires alot of my art ideas - I'll see what I think at that moment is the perfect color and will be stuck with it in my head - I'll have to create something using that color to release it from my head!

This month is Michelle Wards' GPP Street Team Crusade No. 41 and the challenge is Grid Lock.  You can check it out here.

Here are some pages I did recently in my Color Inspiration AB using grid layouts:

For this page I masked out the squares then painted the page with black acrylic paint.  When I removed my masks the text showed through.  I really like to leave some text showing in an altered book when I can.  I like the way it looks.  I then stamped the puffin rubber stamp in each square and hand colored the beaks.  I love the contrast of the black and white on this page.

This page is photographs I took at an Oregon State Park called Thompsons Mills.  It's an old flour mill and I was fascinated by the rusty gears and parts I found.  I took alot of photos so may definately have another rust page for this altered book.  I thought the specks of paint and the haphazard stamping of "RUST" sort of fit with the subject matter of rust. 

The facing page to this one follows and has a rust background.  In addition to looking at this page to see the dif shades of rust it also gives me ideas for combining colors like rust and turquoise.  I love the way they look together.  Although I would say the turquoise background does enhance the rust more than the rust background enhances the turquoise. 

This was a page in a magazine.  As soon as I saw it and the "Tranquil Turquoise" I knew it was destined for my color book.  And since I had already decided to do the rust page with a turquoise background this seemed like the perfect stuff for the facing page.  It was alot of fun to cut up the pieces and figure out how to arrange them.  Just cutting out squares all the same size was just not going to work for this grid!

Thanks Michelle for the Crusade idea.  I'm really enjoying working with grids!

Owl Collage

Here's a collage I did as part of the Spill It online worshop I took from Carmen Torbus.  You can read more about the workshop in this previous post,  I am soooo LOVING this workshop and all I'm learning about acrylics!!!

For this piece of art the lesson was transfers.  I learned alot in this lesson - mostly to learn from my mistake and move on.  My orig transfer was too similar a color and didn't really show up.

So, as you see in the completed collage (first photo) I painted over it in black. 

I then used some of my very favorite owl postage stamps that I had been hoarding, because I love owls, to complete the collage.  I've been wanting to do something cool with those owl stamps for a long, long time so I'm glad I finally came up with something! 

I've finally decided it is alot more fun to have something I made with a fav supply I have than hanging on to the supply!  What am I saving them for?!? 

I am an art supply junkie!  There, now I've admitted it!

Anyway, hope you enjoy the collage.  It's pretty cool, huh?  

Inspiration

Lot's of different things inspire my art - nature is a big inspiration, colors also spark many ideas.  Something I like to use for inspiration is song lyrics.

I just completed a journal page inspired by the Shinedown song - The Crow & The Butterfly. (lyrics can be found here)

The background is acrylics.  I turned the journal on it's side and put the colors of Golden Fluid Acrylics along the binding and sprayed it with water and let them run down.  Once dry I wrote the lyrics with a white pen.  The crow I drew and cut out of black paper and glued on.  The butterfly is a rubber stamp (that I recently got out of the $1 bin at Michaels-pretty nice, huh?).  The title I printed on ledger paper and cut out (ledger paper is sort of a unifying theme in this journal.  It's along the bound edge of all pages and used somewhere in most of the pages).  The dandelion at the top I painted over the top with golden acrylics.  I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I love the bright colors in the background, and the white writing, and the bird, and well, I guess I like it all!  I enjoy the song too...I'm sure you can find it on YouTube if you want to give a listen.

Here's some tags I created in the past using song lyrics for inspiration:

  

Think about some of your favorite songs or lyrics, look up the lyrics online if you aren't sure of what all they say.  What does it make you think about?  How can you use that as inpiration for an art project?

It's alot of fun to think about! 

What else inspires you?  I'm always interested to hear about inspiration...

Playing with paints - monoprints

I spent several hours Saturday out in the garage where I have set up a paint playground (use a garage for the car?  but then the driveway would be empty!).  I have an art desk and a card table.  Even a couple easles and all my paints and applicators and stencils and lots of paper.  The garden hose is even close by for easy clean up.  And it can all stay out so it's ready to go at any time - loving it!

Yesterday I decided to give monoprinting a go - as described by Michelle Ward in one of her GPP Street Team Crusades from a few months ago. I hadn't yet found this great blog at that time so wasn't in on the Crusade. But it looked like so much fun! And it was! Check out my results:

Some of them I love just as they are, some will be great in collage, some will be great touched up with a black pen, or colored pencils.  Most of all it was a BLAST to play around with these.  From drawing and stamping designs to cut out on a tyvek envelope to picking colors and paints to spread out on the piece of acrylic to pull the print from.  Give it a try sometime!

Having a BLAST spilling acrylics!

I've been taking an online workshop from Carmen Torbus called Spill It!.

I've loved playing around with acrylics for awhile now but Carmen has taught me to take it to a whole new level and really helped me expand my creative use of them.  Now I get a whole range of colors out of each bottle and from using colors together.

Also, I tend to be a messy artist anyway so anything that tells me to Spill It! on purpose and get my fingers into it and messy...well, all I have to say is more power to it!

Here's my first completed collage above - this one is pretty much all paint with a few touches of some fav paper added at the end (then painted over again).  She's also taking us through some transfer techinique, more collage, using words and using inks.  I'll have more art to share with you soon.

I would highly recommend this workshop if you are looking for some fun backgrounds, great art and collage pieces, want new ideas and technique, want to see a great artist at work, and/or want to meet a very nice lady online!  

A great idea for altered books or any book!

My friend Debbie has just open her ArtFire Studio and is selling the wonderful book thongs that she makes.  She uses the most amazing beads and they are beautiful.
The perfect thing for marking your favorite page in an altered book or to use as your bookmark in any book you happen to be reading.  Also, would look great adorning a coffee table book you might happen to have sitting out!
I love the turquoise one shown here.  She gifted me with a beautiful one - I'll take a photo of it soon to share with you.
So, head on over and check out her artisan studio here .  You'll have to keep checking back.  Rumor has it she'll have more great stuff for sale soon including some destash from her stores of lots and lots of really cool stuff.  In fact, if you check out her blog here you'll see a chance to buy a mystery box of some of that cool stuff direct from Debbie.  I've got boxes of stuff from Debbie before...I can tell you from personal experience that she can fit an amazing amount of stuff in one of those flat rate boxes and you won't be disappointed by what she sends - it's all really good stuff!!!

Art through a kids eye

My 10 year niece, Piper, spends alot of time at my house doing art with me.  We recently set up an art desk in the garage and use that for all our painting (I'm out of room in the house, plus I like to make messes!).  We have easels, and paints, and brushes, etc.  We're all set.  Piper and I spent some time over a couple days playing out there over Memorial Day weekend.  Piper is working on an altered book.  Here's a torn paper collage she made of trees.  I love it!  And especially how she used her fingers to paint the word trees.  We went to the thrift store to look for a book to alter.  She found a really cool little cookbook that had a border around each page.  I really like how she left the background painted so a little bit of that shows through.  You can see a little more about Piper and her art in this previous post.  Thanks for taking a look.  Feel free to leave a comment, I'll be sure to share them with Piper.  I'm meeting her school bus when she comes home tomorrow and will show her this post then.  Of course, I'll see her later in the week too.  She did give me permission to post a photo of her great art.  :)   

Cutting out red and blue!

Here's a couple pages I did in the Color themed altered book I just started.  Just started going through magazines and garden catalogs looking for red and blue stuff and started cutting.  All images on both pages are adhered with a glue stick.
I actually had been saving the bottle of hot sauce for awhile for just the right use - probably therefore the Red Hot Red title!  I first painted the background pages with gesso for these red pages.  The text still slightly shows through which I really like the look of.  I used the non brush end of a paintbrush, the non foam end of a foam brush and a q tip to stamp the dots.

The blue page all started with an ad with butterfly wings and this word - 

It pretty much fits perfectly with how I think of blue thanks to blue in nature - blue skies, ocean, mountains, etc.  Guess I didn't just cut out blue, for one page I simply tore strips.  Then punched circles and squares out for both pages.  And used a stencil and midnight blue craft acrylic for the word "Blue". 

Thanks for taking a look!

House of Blues

Here's a collage I made for Red Lead Paperworks Fly Away Home Altered House Swap.  All of the materials used (except the acrylic paint, punchinella stencil for dots, paper punch and glue were from Red Lead, one of my fav places to find COOL art supplies!).  I took one of their chipboard houses and painted it with navy blue craft acrylic paint.  I then painted the bottom half, back, and edges with silver craft acrylic paint., also painted the chipboard bird with the silver paint..  I then stamped the house using a rubber stamp Story Set on the blue chipboard house using the silver acrylic craft paint.  Also stamped it on gray paper using the navy blue acrylic craft paint.  While that was drying I used punchinella as a stencil and brushed the navy blue paint over the bottom half of the house I had painted silver.  I also stamped the bird on the left side of the house using the silver paint.  I had also painted some of the gray paper with the navy blue paint and accented it with silver and used a 1" circle paper punch to punch out the circle I glued the silver bird charm to and glued it on the chipboard house.  I cut out the house I had stamped on gray paper and used the circle punch again to punch a bird image out of a RedLead collage sheet .  And I punched the circles with music out of another RedLead collage sheet.  I then put it all together as shown, and glued the chipboard bird on.  I created the text in MS Word, printed it on blue paper, cut it out and glued it on the bird.

I mailed them off to the great gals at Red Lead and can't wait to see what I get back.

We each made two bird house, one to trade and one to be one display at the store.  Both of mine were the same, just different bird images from that same collage sheet.

I had alot of fun creating it and hope you enjoyed taking a look!

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend! 

new book

I'm a book junkie so, of course, my family gave me books as birthday gifts earlier this month.
One of my choices was Collage Lab by Bee Shay.
It is full of ideas to spark your creativity as well as expand your knowledge.  It has 52 experiments.
They're divided into 12 sections:  Building the Foundation, Texture, Gesso, Color, Surface Design, Line and Form, Papers, Paper Play, Mediums, Imagery, Visual Dictionary, and Unification and Composition.
Each one has a Learning Objective, Materials List, Instructions, Play and Experiment ideas, and Food For Thought for when you are done.
Complete with photos to help inspire even more creativity.
So far I'm just working through some Basic Gesso Surfaces but have paged through the whole book and I'm in for lots of fun!
So - I'd recommend getting your papers and acrylics and gesso out and taking a look at this book and see how many ideas you can come up with!  I think whether you are a beginner or experienced you would enjoy this book - it'll generate ideas I'm sure!
I know I'm going to come up with lots!  I'll share them with you here as I go!

Color inspiration

I love color - all colors - some alot more than others. Green is my fav color. But I really do love anything that is colorful. I am especially intrigued by the names of colors and love to read them whenever I get the chance. I think it's fun to check out the names of colors of paint samples while at the home improvement store. Paint companies get pretty creative when they name colors!

A couple years ago...yes it's been years...I made a color themed book for a swap and had to send it off to my swap partner. I've had the idea to do my own color journal or altered book ever since and have even saved some images here and there for potential color pages. Well I finally started on my color themed altered book yesterday! I'll share a post with you of the page I did as soon as it's completed.

In the meantime, here's the mini book I originally made that has had me thinking about color themed art all these years.

The front cover and the back cover are images I cut out of catalogs. The rest of the images are photographs I took.

Oh, and feel free to share any names of colors you can think of that might interest me!

Enjoy!

Limited online access

I have very limited online access for the next 10 days or so so won't be posting much. But...I'll be back after that!
See ya then!
Kimber

Newest member of the family

My birthday was earlier this month. My brother and family gave me a little aquarium and all the stuff to go with it. Thursday after school I picked up my 10 year old niece, Piper, and we went shopping for a betta.
We found the one pictured below and decided he needed to come home with us - and get out of that 1/2 cup of water and TINY container he was in!
He seems very happy in his new home with ALL that space and water, rocks and live plants.
His name is Molokai.
I have a cat named Maui.
See the theme? Thinking I may need to get a dog and call it "Hawaii, The Big Island". Will have to be a big dog, of course, with that name. I don't know about Oahu and Kauia yet. And what about the Atolls and all the little islands like Lanai, etc.
Hmmmm...
I think I'll stop at two islands for now.
Anyway - I can imagine Molokai inspiring some colorful art!

Tree Journal Page

Here's a journal page I made using a picture from a magazine ad that I had been saving for awhile until I came up with an idea because I love the tree.
I painted the background with acrylic. I tore the picture from the magazine page so it would have the rough edges, then tore a strip of scrapbook paper and glued that all down with gel medium. There were a couple people sitting on the beach. Since I was going for "nature" and since I hardly ever include people in my art (not sure why) I covered them up with the ticket my friend Debbie sent me that has blanks for "who, where, when" so I put "me, here, 4ever" (why not dream!). Page still needed something so I painted some copper fleur de lis brads dark gray to match the stripe I had painted on the background and added them.
Thanks for looking!
Enjoy!

New growth and shadows

It was a beautiful sunshine day here in the NW Oregon Friday. While spending some time at Thompsons Mill State Park I was looking for photo ops for some green pics for a color journal page honoring green.

I found these leaves and really like how the photo turned out. I think they are from a Marionberry or Blackberry bush - berries were still very green so couldn't tell for sure.

Enjoy!

Hope you are having a creative weekend!

More backgrounds

As promised in last night's post, here's some more backgrounds I made using dry wax deli paper.

This one on the left, I applied back ground colors using sponges. Then applied some white paint drops and scribbles direct from the bottle and drug a toothed tool through them. I found an old plastic sheets of stencils that had the fish on it. 1st I tried the fish with dark blue acrylic and a sponge but had too much paint so it made a mess, esp. of the middle one. Wasn't sure what to do but later while driving the Redbox to take dvds back I thought of going over them again with white pigment ink so they would have a blue outline to make up for the mess. I really like how it turned out!

For these 3 purple designs I was playing around with dots. For the largest dots I used a big round sponge. The 2nd size I cut a circle out of a big thick sponge like you buy for washing your car. In both cases I painted a dark purple back ground, let that dry. Then put some of the same purple out on a styro foam tray and added a little white and mixed well and stamped the first color. Then added some more white and stamped the 2nd color of dot. The one with silver is a silver background. Then I layed sequin waste (also called punchinella) over it and brushed on purple paint.

FYI - I get my sequin waste from one of my fav online shops SkyBluePink.

This sheet I put down a dark blue solid back ground. Then played around with a couple dif colors and a foam roller like you get in the paint section at any hardware or home improvement store. The splotchhes of color are where I dipped the edge of the roller in paint and

just got a spot and rolled it on the paper. I esp like how the white triangles look...prob couldn't get a that exact effect again if I tried!

Thanks for taking a look! Hope these inspire you to try some creative ideas! I think I'll go play with ideas for a journal page using the background sheet with the fish on it.

Background papers

As I stated in my profile, I sometimes enjoy the process of making art as much or more than the actual art I create. Lately I've been making background papers and really having fun! I've been using drywax deli paper (holds together when wet and paint doesn't soak through) and was inspired by Marilyn's post on her blog with video . Thanks for the inspiration Marilyn!



The one to the left shows 3 papers, one made by dragging a toothed tool I made by cutting notches in an old credit card and dragging it through we paint. The bright green is over a turquoise color and various techniques then used to scrape some of the bright green off so underneath color shows through. Blue with white is layers of colors for the background then splotches of paints on a foam roller to make the splotches. I used craft acrylic paints for all of these.






These next two were made by putting down a layer of color and letting it dry completely.
Then applied another color over the top. While top layer was wet I applied a dry clean stamp to it and picked up the top layer of color leaving the image in the underneath layer of color. I love how these turned out!





















I have a few more to share but blogger and I are not cooperating with one another with downloading photos tonight so I'll share them another time soon. (sometimes I'm just a low tech gal in a high tech world - lol!)

Thanks so much for taking a look at my blog!

More from the Bird altered book

Here's a two page spread I did in my bird book using birds I drew with colored pencil, scrapbook paper and metal letters.

Free Art Supplies

Recently, while at Home Depot, I decided to pick up some paint sample cards in all the dif shades of white to try out Zentangles on. I usually pick some up whenever I am there but in colors as I love to use them to punch shapes out of as the shapes come out with nice crisp edges and they have such a nice finish and great colors. But this time choose various whites or light colors. I used a Sharpie pen for the following card's Zentangle. I think I'll do a bunch of these and punch a hole in the upper corner and bind them on a ring. I'll use them as a resource when doing more Zentangles as I find it very helpful to look at dif designs to inspire me for what I want to draw in the next space I'm filling in.

And the price is right - free is always good!

Journal pages - tropical leaves

A favorite theme for me, always, is leaves.

Here's some I did for my journal. Having spent quite a bit of time in Hawaii, on Maui, tropical leaves are some of my very fav. Here's a couple I drew on ledger paper with colored pencil, cut out and stuck on journal pages with acrylic gel medium. The backgrounds are acrylic and I was experimenting with light and dark backgrounds with similar subjects. Which do you like better?

Journal and Zentangle

Here's a Zentangle page I did in my journal. I used Pitt brand black pens.

Zentangles

Lately I've been into Zentangling. I find it relaxing and just a little bit addicitng!

I've always doodled. Especially when on the phone. But now I've taken it to a new level after discovering Zentangles. I've never really focused on the overall design of my doodles like this!

Zentangles is a form of doodling. Rick and Maria of Zentangles.com started Zentangle and have made it popular. Check out their website to see alot of Zentangles and info.

Here's a couple of the first Zentangles I did.

And here's an owl I Zentangled. I got the idea from an owl drawing I saw in the Entertainment section of the newspaper.