Long time, no blog

Long time, no blog - just like the title says. I've been a bit busy, like the rest of the world. I'm hosting an inchies swap for the SSRefelctions ezine Yahoo Group because our swap goddess, Donalda, had surgery on her hand. I'm honored to have been entrusted with hosting this swap, but I'm sure Donalda is just waiting to get back to running them in her usual, uber-competent way.

The swap theme is the alphabet. 26 players (actually, we have 23, three people are doing two letters), everyone picks a letter and makes 26 of that letter. Then they all get sent to me and I make 26 full alphabets and send them back out. We're almost done - just the letter T to go. It's been fun seeing them all come in.

To the left is my inchie. I was the letter W. I took chipboard, painted it yellow. When it was dry, I put Pearl Blue Lumiere over it and used my noodle brush to make waves. Then I took a wooden ribbon spool and twirled in the almost dry paint. The flower is shrink plastic painted with yellow alcohol marker and shrunk. The W is done with silver metallic perma-marker.

I was out looking around the art blogs of the world and I stumbled upon this most excellent blog - A Note From The Queen. She had these very cool paintings she had done, I think she called them poured paintings. I love color and texture, so I thought I'd try one. They're very easy, but not as quick as I thought. I had to actually wait for paint to dry. Go figure! I used acrylic mediums, floating medium, varnish, and a gloss medium, mixed the paints up and poured. The paint mixtures are different consistencies, so there is some depth to the painting as well as texture. It's really hard to photograph this well. A 2D photo just doesn't capture it. But I tried, so here it is. Oh, and it's 8 x 11 canvas.


The third thing I've been working on is a mixed media collage. It took longer than I thought, too (do you suppose I'm too used to doing quick things??). I really like the way this turned out, as does my 15 year old. He wants it for his room. Just an 8 x 11 canvas board with tissue paper and other papers and lace glued onto it with gel medium, then I painted over it with Lumiere paint and flat acrylic. My husband helped with this. He stuck a soda tab on (you can see it to the upper left of the fairy's head), along with other bits and pieces. What a guy, huh?

It was fun, but it took a long time for the whole thing to come together. I just started with the tissue paper, looking for texture. Then I moved onto the image and theme. The words say "Fairies haunt my dreams".

I'm also working on an art journal called "A Charmed Life". It's going to be kind of dark, so I'm not sure I'll share it here. Probably will, but when I do, I'll try to explain the meaning behind it. It's been inspired by listening to Eminem's music, and knowing how much of his personal pain was poured into the disturbing music he made. I love his music, but if you listen to the lyrics, they are dark and scary, like most of us except we try to hide it. Anyway, between that and the ezine work, I've been quite busy but not posting.

The ezine is up for May. Michelle's Altered Magic Shoppe. If you want to go look at what I did this month, as well as all the other very talented women who work on the crew.