It's on the way!!!

I'm posting over on the new website now, but I thought I'd pop by here too... The ZINE is on the way to homes across the country!  Link to post ----> http://aweebitwarped.com/2014/07/29/its-on-the-way/

It's LAUNCH DAY!

With excitement (and nervousness), I'm proud to announce the launch of my new project - A WEE BIT WARPED - The ZINE.  What is it?!??  Details at http://aweebitwarped.com/thezine

Hope you'll take a look and join in on the adventure!!

Just ONE MORE DAY!!!

One more day until my new project launches!  Excited!  All the details will be over at www.aweebitwarped.com tomorrow.  Don't worry...I'll remind ya.  HAHA :)

TWO DAYS!

If you follow my Facebook page, you may know that I'm counting down!  Just TWO DAYS until the launch of my special project.  YAY!!!

P.S.  I'm going to be posting more often on my new website/blog than here most likely.  (www.aweebitwarped.com)  Hope you'll join me over there!

Awake

Well, I couldn't say what woke me up around 2:30 AM this morning, but I knew I wasn't going back to sleep.  At least some good came out of it...

And in an awesome, completely last minute burst of spontaneity, I'm headed to Mississippi on Sunday to Art-Is-You Dixie art retreat.  I can't wait to see everyone, and to get in THREE WHOLE DAYS of art and fun!  WOOHOO!!!

Rescuing Ruth

I got up this morning exhausted from being woken up repeatedly by large crashes of thunder that sounded like they were right on top of our roof.  The worst one was around 3:30 this morning, I think.  Not the best way to wake up.

 

Anyway, I woke up tired, so to wake up a little, I headed into the art closet.  The journal was still open to this page, so contrary to what I thought yesterday, I decided to try to rescue it.... mainly because of Ruth.  Ruth is the woman in the photo.  She's a relative of my Dad's, and my Mom helped take care of her and her daughter.  When Ruth passed away, my Mom gave me a lot of her old travel ephemera, greeting cards, and some duplicates of photos which now occasionally show up in my artwork. 

At any rate, when I looked at Ruth this morning, she told me to power through and make her proud.  So I'm working on it.  It also helped that when I'm tired and pre-caffeine in the morning, I have the patience for painting a little more, well... patiently.

 

I still have more rework to do, but it's getting closer to where I want it to be.

The one that got away

I really only like to work on a journal page a couple of times.  When it starts to get too fussy or too detailed, it no longer meets the purpose (for me) of journaling.  This one has gotten about four turns.  Way more than the allowance.  I pretty much know what needs to be done to "fix" it, but because that doesn't sound fun, I'm moving on.  Maybe I'll come back to this train wreck someday.  There are some good parts here and there.  Orrrrrrrrrrr.. maybe not.  P.S.  The words are from the Wake Me Up song by Avicii.  I'll have to add that somewhere along the way.

Art breaks are better than lunch breaks anyway

Lately it's all been work, work, and more work.  Today I decided I needed an art break to do some journaling.

So I started with my usual journal.  I don't know if I've ever shown what these pages start like, but my journal is a Victoria's Secret limited edition set of 3 books that I found at Goodwill a few years ago for $10.  The pages start out something like the one below, so I immediately throw down some gesso (primer) or paint to cover up the half nekkid ladies.

 Ack!  Too much gesso...

 I used an old credit card to take some off and flatten the gesso out.

Then I painted with some inks and messed a tiny bit with Pan Pastels.  At this point, I had no idea what I was doing and left it.

When I came back, I decided to dig in the paper pile and chose whatever colors made me happy.  After digging a bit more, I found the Archiver's ad on the right which had the same colors.  Coincidence, I suppose, but I'm attracted to bright colors, so I guess not really.

 After some paint, cutting, gluing and drawing, a journal page is born.

Look away! Look away!

Ok, perfectionists, you've been warned to look away.  Glue gun stencils... not for people with control issues.  Cindy Mayfield asked how the bird she spied in my journal in the last post was created.  I think I saw glue gun "stencils" first from Traci Bautista.  Easy enough to make, but I believe she sells the ones she makes on her website too if you'd rather do that.

Anyway... I was in a circle making mood this morning.  Hopefully you have a better glue gun than the sad little one I have.  I did these on parchment paper.  You could probably do them right on a cookie sheet.  Don't be mad if I'm wrong about that and you're scraping glue off of whatever you put it on. :)

Make shapes.  Let cool.  Peel off.  Use.

 Put on whatever you're going to decorate.

I used Dylusions spray ink.  I probably should buy more colors than the pink and orange I keep using over and over and over.

Voila!  I'm too impatient to wait for any kind of drying to happen.  I now have pink and orange fingers.  YAY!

Houston, We Have A Problem...

Ok, ok... it's nowhere near a rocket ship catastrophe, but I did have a problem.  I was working on the cover of my latest journal.  The journal decided that it would have "A Journey" on the front.  I didn't decide that, the journal did.  Usually I manage to leave enough space for my lettering, but I guess I'm out of practice.  I *could* have just painted over my mistake, but immediately an idea came to mind that just could not be put away.  The journal decided that it needed a tab to open.  I don't know why.  Suddenly it just did.

So I cut a tab using the two circles of some kind of pressed board ornament thing from Michaels.  And of course I couldn't be bothered to use one of the several saws we own.  I used a steak knife.  I probably wouldn't recommend that if you have other options, but it worked fine.

Now it's glued, clamped, and drying.  I'll be gluing the larger (back) part to the inside front cover of the journal.  We'll see how it turns out soon!

While that's drying, let me introduce you to my latest favorite thing.  WIDE Copic markers that were on sale at Michaels.  I would like to have all the rainbow now please.

 Happy, happy, happy...

Until next time!

And then there was light

Thanks to some chalkboard paint, wooden boxes, a lot of wall anchors and screws, my art closet has come together. Hoping some more art happens in there soon!

 

This girl was home quite a bit last week with the flu.  When she started to feel better she dressed up as Princess Leia in honor of the school dress up as a character (it was supposed to be a book character, but oh well) day that she missed.

 AND she lost her first tooth on Sunday!

It's about time!

We're still busy little bees around here.  Busier than ever, in fact, but I'm taking the time to get things wrangled into some kind of order around here.  It's been far too long.

 

So that meant... a new, clean office...

 

A straightened up and purged kid's room.  (She still hasn't noticed that four big bags of stuff have disappeared from her room.  Keeping my fingers crossed that continues.)

 

And even more wrangling... getting my art world in order.  I'm planning to make my office closet into an art space.

 Starting with some ART!

December so far

Well, it's been busy.  But who isn't busy this time of year, right?  We're trying to get in the Christmas spirit around here, so here's a few photos and a video to prove it.  Hope you're getting in the spirit too!

Our little decorator busy at work.

 The elf Sparkleheart is back this year again.  She's a party time kind of girl.

 

 

AND...Harper has a solo in the school play.  Here's a practice run before bedtime (with a little yawn intermission).

Link to her YouTube video ----> Harper singing Christmas Is Love

 

 

 

It was summer. Now it's fall.

Other than the subject line, I won't even talk about how long it's been since my last blog post.

SO, here's what's been going on around here (besides the usual work, work, work stuff):

I carved out a studio space in the basement (again).  Harper was taking over my art space in the dining room on a regular basis, so I flew the white flag of surrender and gave her the whole room.  Now I just have to figure out how to keep her upstairs with Daddy for longer than ten minutes so I can make something.  And maybe someday I'll take photos of the rest of the room.

 I got at least 45 minutes, so one journal page made it this far.

 Harper is still funny.

OH, Harper ran away once.  Before you call social services on me, I was at the door the entire time.  She kept looking back, and made it to that mailbox before she came back.

My Mom and my friend Sheila made this amazing Halloween costume.  (Sheila made the hat and my mom made the shirt and wings.) Harper loved it! (And everyone else did too!)

 I had my birthday.  At the beach in SC with my dear friend Judy.  It was sweet.

 I doodled in SC and on the airplane.

 Harper and I doodle in there sometimes too.

Only about 50 million other things happened too.  I just didn't take pictures of me sitting at a desk coding all day.  OHHHHH... one super cool thing happened a few weeks back!  I found out that one or more of my journal pages will be in Dawn DeVries Sokol's book!  Super excited!!  Dawn's book 1000 Artist Journal Pages really is one of the major reasons I got started journaling, so I'm so thrilled.  (We'll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for the book to be published though.  Gives me an opportunity to practice patience.)

Oh, You Poor Little Blog!

Poor Little Blog gets neglected while facebook and instagram (and work, work, work) get all the attention.  Poor little Blog.

My recent art stuff (which is minimal unfortunately) seems to only make it onto instagram because I've barely picked up my real camera lately.  Here's are a few shots that managed to make it though!

We managed to keep our tradition of chasing hot air balloons.  We have a great festival, and for one weekend there are hot air balloons all over town in the mornings and evenings.

 I got a wee bit annoyed with my husband though because our tradition is to jump out of bed and chase in our pajamas.  Ummm... he is showered and fully dressed.  We are not.  (insert eye roll here)

 Harper started kindergarten this year.  She's loving it so far.  We're all exhausted though!  Glad for a three day weekend.

 The week before school started, Harper was home with me for the week.  Lots of arts and crafts time (for her).

 I did sneak in some art time though!

Miss you

Enough with the great vacation already... Part 4

So the vacation was nice.  Got it.  Scenic.  Got it.  Lots of family quality time.  GOT IT.  But I feel like my life cannot move on unless I finish this one last blog post about the vacation.

Our last big stop of the vacation before returning to Olympia was Yellowstone National Park.

So here's a (sort of) funny story.  After spending the night at the RV park, we got up extra early and headed out to look for wildlife and to see more of the park.  Doug looks to his left and says, "Hey, what are those birds?"  "Pelicans", I say (not terribly excited... it IS about 6 AM).  Doug says, "Give me the camera.  We have to have a picture."  "Ok." I say (again, not so thrilled).

So the pelicans start to fly off, Doug is taking pictures, and I look over at the riverbank.  "BEAR!" I yell.  We proceed to get all excited and snap a bunch of photos of a bear running up the riverbank.  We're knuckle bumping, laughing, saying, "A Bear!  We saw a BEAR!"  We keep driving across the bridge.

Then TWO bears (somehow I only got one in a shot at a time) are booking it across the road in front of us.  Seriously speedy.  Pretty sure they were running so fast because I kept yelling, "BEAR!"  And all thanks to my husband's excitement over two pelicans.

 Ok, onward.  A thermal feature.  This one was dragon's breath cave at the Mud Volcano, I believe.

 There were bison everywhere.  We even saw some calves.

 Artist Point, I believe.

 Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces

 And, we're out.  I just spared you approximately 489 more photos.

You didn't think you'd get away without seeing one more photo of my kid, did you?  Relaxing with some ice cream in Missoula, MT.

Whew!  We made it.  Onward to the next adventure... whatever that may be.