The Wreckers

This weeks wrecking has been a little slow. Not surprising really with the pages I tackled. I still have any number of in progress pages but the only four pages I wish to show you are these...

Lines in motion. I did this while F was driving, going from left to right across the page and down the page with each colour before starting at the top with a new colour.
Non-stop Line. I have drawn mazes in this way before and really enjoy the effect they give (see postcards) so it is not surprising I did the same thing again but then wrecked it... ink splodged on in various colours and then water sprinkled onto the page on top. The ink has spread through several pages.
Coloured Page. I started with some small shapes and then did contours round in a lovely set of pastel markers. I love the effect this page gives. The markers soaked through so a couple of other pages will have this as a background.
Doodled Page. I doodled in and on and around th text as requested...
Then there is my title page which I re-wrecked and forgot to post a picture of...
I have had a few other interesting bits.

The gum F and I stuck on the sticky page has slowyl dried and as I have kept flipping through the book and forcing this page open, some of the paper has now torn.

My composting page had a little seed sprouting in the thin layer of compost on top! It was too small to handle and move and seems to have suffered in the heat...

My time passing page now gets a date stamp whenever I open the book to that page and look at it for more than a split second. I write the time and date in whatever pen comes to hand...



So observations....Not many really. Just the gentle process of metamorphosis between create and destroy.... The silver tape on the spine is splitting as well as gaining a lovely rumpled texture. I shall fix this at some point and preserve both the texture and the broken bits in the process.... I love my journal..It is so mine. Other books I own always remain to some extent the property of the author. This one is all mine though. I own it and it is a reflection of me....

Melonomania

Lovely Leone of Naturebrushstrokes has tagged me with the watermelon award. I already completed this award on my other blog here, so this time my melons are going to be creative (maybe red with yellow splotches, or purple crosshatching with blue and gold highlights?)

So basically I list a few things that make me happy and then I list a few blogs that make me happy....

As this is my creative blog there shall be a creative twist....

• My journal makes me happy. I love wreck this journal. I love the bits I have repaired. I love the back cover with glitter and hearts trapped in a pocket so you can squidge them about. I love looking at other peoples wrecking. Thank you so much Jamie...
• I love postcards. They invade my life in several ways. Postcrossing makes me buy postcards and send them to people around the world and causes lovely postcards from exotic locales to drop onto my door mat. I love Postmuse, who sends her blank postcards out to people who live or have been there so they can write their stories or thoughts on tha back and then post them back for her to blog about them and share the stories. I love 4x6 expressions, a lovely postcard art yahoo group where beautiful people make beautiful postcard art. I love Postsecret where people send secrets on postcards to be published on a blog and in books.
  
• I love discovering new art supplies, like irridescent paint and metallic paint and beautiful papers...
• I love supportive soul sisters, who spread the comment love and give me lovely things to comment on in return. The first of these was the lovely Mel....
• I love making things. I love pay it forward and blog candy which make me stretch myself in new directions with new projects, mostly after I have started as getting started can be hard to do sometimes.
• I love silk painting. It doesn't matter what you, the beauty of those glistening paints on that lovely silk just works... Try it (and don't worry if you don't have all the fancy kit... Chances are you won't produce perfectly rendered drawings on your first few goes so...)
• I love clay. It feels so much like mud and I love it... I must play with clay more.
• I love paper. I need to learn more about it, to make it, to bind it, to use it... My Dad was (is) a printer and I grew up with the smell of hot ink and paper. I watched him caress paper so it would do what he wanted and all line up or so he could tell the thickness. Paper is in my blood, going back three generations. I think i am the fourth...
• I love my printer. It is a scanner, copier and printer all in one and prints off good quality photos on expensive paper. It is a real godsend...
• I love beads. All those millenia of human creativity have resulted in so many different types of beads made from so many materials. Then to add to it all, the patterns and stitches we have discovered for putting them all together....

and now for my ten blogs... Looking at my ten creative fave things, I really feel that for me, creativity comes in a community, the two things go hand in hand here.... and they should in these blogs too. This is my all time bestest so there will be some repeats, not only from me, but back up the chain of awardees as well.... Starting to go in circles but hey...!

• Mel's Creative Clutter
• Dianne's Art Beneathe Cottonwoods
• Misty's Art Gecko Studios
• Flora's Bone Head Studios
• Paula's Little Scraps of Magic
• Leone's Natures Brush Strokes
• Suzie's Spirit Whispers
• Rowenna's Warrior Girl
• Kavindra's Clear Path to Happy
• Carla's Leafdays

and if you can't see why i like them....

For Me?

The lovely Mel has decided to gift this blog with this lovely award!

The Guidelines:

1. Post picture of award with link back to person who honoured you - check!
2. Pass along the award to deserving persons whose blogs you have just discovered - more on that in a minute!
3. Leave a *note* informing aforementioned recipients of your bloggy award-love - will do!

Now I find I am not having so many new blogs added to my blog roll as I have had previously... That is just because I can not physically cope with too many more lovely people's lives and a full time job.... There are many, many mroe blogs out there I would love to immerse myself in....

But here are a few, and only arty ones because this is my arty blog...

1) A Clear Path to Happy
2) Mama Craft
3) Warrior Girl, You're a Warrior Mama Now
4) Here be Dreams
5) Knottyneedle
6) Little Scraps of Magic
7) Today and Everyday


I thin seven is an excellent number!

Each of these blogs brings little pieces of happiness into my life. They are all relatively new to me and (I think) this is the first time I have tagged any of them...

So thank you again Mel!

Wreckless

It feels like smaller steps at the moment... Doing pretty things more than reckless things...

I have started way more pages than I have finished...

The colour the entire page, page
The press leaves and other found things page
The sticky things page (I stuck some gum in and then managed to persuade F to as well *grin*)
The sample household substances page
The nonstop line page
The document time passing page


But I did draw lines while in motion (thank you F for driving!) and I really like the result...

And I wrote CREATE on one short edge and destroy on the other short edge and then metamorphosis on the long edge...

I also started reworking my front cover with some lovely irridescent paints...

Wrecking Roundup

I have really loved this weeks efforts. Last weekend was really productive and produced some things that I have written separate posts about.

My journal is for now going through a period of beautification but I am sure this will come to an end some time.....

I have been wondering why I couldn't pick a really difficult page to do last week. I came to the conclusion that I can plan something to do for every page but until I actually try and do it, I can't feel if I am resistant to it or not. I think the pages left at the end may be the ones I find most dull or the ones that are really, really challenging to me. So for now I am going with the flow....

I slept with my journal one night and wrote in my journal about it.... I spotted someone had stuck some fruit stickers on the wall and on the door at work, so I surreptiously released them as I walked past them, aiming for no one to actually spot what a strange thing I was doing, I think I suceeded... A journal page has traveled to Canada for some friendly destruction and my whole journal will go there to be posted back at some point....

Here are some pretty pictures of this weeks wrecking....
And some less pretty pictures!
Lavender oil and jasmine scent dripped liberally everywhere then hot vanilla scented wax and lavender flowers scattered on top. Bits of lavender and wax keep falling out! *grin*I used the 'slam the book quick' technique for my burning and it was much fun!



Oh and earlier this week Kelly Kilmer wrote a really nice bit about what it is to keep an art journal...

Sweet Nothings

What do you make a lovely young lady for an exchange? I thought long and hard and eventually decided to make a mobile... It had many incarnations that lived only in my head but eventually something emerged.

I made the letters to spell out her name using air dry clay cut with alphabet cookie cutters. I had to use the end of a paint brush to push them out which gave them an interesting texture. They are also all different thicknesses. I pierced each one with a needle to make a hole for threading them.

Once dry I painted them with PVA to seal them before covering them with black acrylic. Over the black I painted each letter with my lovely new goldens interference colours full of delicious glittery micaeous particles. I love the colour they came out!

I had ideas of threading them and wrapping them with wire and beads and having all sorts of bits dangling such as wool and ribbon and all sorts of glorious things. And I started this but it was just too much and it didn't work. I ended up rethreading the letters onto black cat's tail wire for added flexibility and fixing them in place with tube crimps and putting a lobster clasp at one end via a jump ring and wire guardian.

It may be a simpler look but I love this so much! Hope she does too!

Blog Candy: Aimeslee

I have finally sent of my first piece of blogcandy and when you finally get to read this it will have been received by the lovely Aimeslee!

I started silk painting this year with only instructions found online to help me. I have created three painted scarves. One for me, one for Mel and now a third....


I only had four colours of paint but I have now expanded my collection to seven!

The third and latest scarf was rather more complicated than my previous efforts. I had wanted to use some Islamic art and this was a good opportunity. This meant that the design was rather more ambitious than anything I had previously tried. In this style of silk painting you use thick goopy paint to draw lines that act as barriers for the liquid paints. In this design the gutta is black and there was an awful lot to apply! I copied the block and pinned the copies to the wall and stuck the scarf on top and then copied the pattern onto the scraf. Then I had to add paint inbetween all the lines.

The borders are a little different though as there is no gutta and the paints are more roughly applied so they merge and run into each other more. The very centre was painted in grey first before the navy was added over the top. The affect of the navy paint was achieved by sprinkling some alcohol on to carry the wet navy paint.

Although I love the scarf I am not sure if I would do one like it again. It was very time consuming and the precise design was difficult to do correctly. The scarf is full of mistakes. And I don't want to think about the time it took!

The scarf has had an interesting journey to it's destination that has been considerably lengthened by arrival at the wrong address. So it actually ended it up with not one but two postal journeys...

One other thing is that the process of making the scarf has left me with quite a few pieces of interesting paper where the thick black gutta has soaked through and the liquid silk paints have soaked into the paper. Every one is different and beautiful!