Resolutions Revisited

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

• I intended to be faithful and blog at least once a month, maybe more!
• I intended to be a whirlwind of creativity, madly clipping and doing collage, painting up a storm and sketching everything I saw.
• I intended to make time for more art...to find the slivers of the day and fill them with color.
• I intended... I intended... I intended.

And I guess I did some of it. Well, not the blogging part, which apparently I'm pretty miserable at!

I participated in a tag exchange. Mine is the fish.

I spent an art-filled, snowy weekend in Mineral Point, Wisconsin staying in a historic home with my sisters and Pam. Here's an example of the exquisite corpse books we all worked on.

I made a lot of postcards to mail off to people I've only met virtually through the IUOMA (International Union of Mail Artists).

I redecorated my bedroom, painting the walls with exactly the color of periwinkle I'd been longing for, and finally adding the vintage chandelier. Well, I didn't do the painting, Pam did between cooking meals for her blog!

I went to Taos for a luxurious week of art - making a sketchbook then doing my best to fill it with paintings and sketches. All thanks to one of my fav people, Jill K. Berry.

I've even sketched a bit as part of the Sketchbook Challenge. I haven't kept up with every monthly challenge, but there's still time, right?

I suppose I haven't been the slacker I sometimes imagine myself to be. And I have the good fortune to work in a creative job with creative people surrounding me. I did help to launch a new magazine these past months - I guess that counts especially since I get paid to do it!

And it's only April, right?

Sow's Ear

At our recent art retreat, my sister Carol and I took a short class by Bernie Berlin called Resist This. I should have known there would be trouble when I looked at the supply list... an iron, rubber stamps... egad - paint AND hot irons? Rubber stamps? I'm so not a 'stamper'.

Here's the recipe...

1. Layer copious amounts of acrylic paint onto quality water color paper. Then crouch in a corner with your heat gun and try to get it completely dry.

2. Stamp your painted page with a rubber stamp using colorless embossing ink.

3. Back to the heat gun.

4. Then layer even more paint on top. Repeat drying process.

Allow me to interject here with the part about how little patience I have with waiting for paint to dry. Add to that the fact that we had paint everywhere by this point... well, suffice it to say we were not being star pupils.

5. Then fire up your iron. I was using an old travel iron that gets hot enough to brand cattle.

6. When your iron is smoking (okay, it shouldn't be smoking apparently - we figured that out by the horrified looks from the other class participants and the instructor's nervous laugh), lay a plain sheet of parchment paper (oh man, was it parchment - please don't follow my instructions!) over your painted page and simply iron, and lift, small areas at a time... simply iron, and lift! Lift quickly...and voila - a batik like pattern should emerge.

Ha.

Okay, at this point, my sister and I had dissolved into laughter and snorting. Each time we'd 'simply iron and lift' the paper would begin to scorch and would not 'lift' but instead leave great streaks of paper on the page. But we soldiered on, and attempted to rescue our work by using wet wipes and water to scrub the paper off of the page. We were quite hysterical (no doubt somewhat fueled by the wine we had before the class..) and I'm pretty sure hugely obnoxious to the people in the class that were merrily creating beautifully patterned pages.

So, we laughed and managed to have a fun time. I ended up with two, count em', TWO pages of 'custom' paper suitable for use in other artwork and collage. Yeah.

The cards you see here are the end product of the paper. The paper is the base for a simple collage.

I call them them Silk Purse Note Cards.

You may call them whatever you like!

(And my apologies to Bernie Berlin, a lovely person who put up with our jackassery with grace!)