Let's Wrap This Up.

Hey guys!  

I haven't been making as much art as usual in the last couple of months, but I'd love to show you what I DID manage to finish.  Wanna see?  

This little guy is an ATC.  It's a little 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" card, made from some very soft watercolour paper. The little critter is a Blue-Footed Booby. I did him for a swap I was involved in, and he's off in the mail to someone in the US. Safe travels, little buddy!

I waited for what seemed like FOREVER for Jill Berry's new book about maps to come out, and it was worth the wait. I've had a map obsession for years, and now I'm actually starting to make some maps on my own. I started with this phrenology doodle in one of my art journals: 

You might see more noggins in my work. I liked being able to pin down everything that was floating around my head and causing me to procrastinate. 

Next, I did this compass rose, inspired directly by Heidi LaMoreaux (she's one of the featured artists in Personal Geographies.)

I had so much fun making this. I actually got out my compass and ruler and spent a very peaceful evening creating this from scratch on watercolour paper. Then I used an X-acto knife to cut out all the blank areas. The page is now mounted on vellum, which is that cloudy white behind the compass rose. I have lots of ideas to make more of these, in different shapes and forms. We'll see how many of those actually materialize.  : )

 

And then last night, on a total whim, I stuck five shipping tags together and drew the road I live on. I wanted to capture the stories of all these homes and families on the road I've lived on for most of my life.  It's not as colourful as some of the stuff I've been doing, but it does have a certain charm.

After I had an argument with my 7-year-old about which house was ours (he strongly disagrees that we live on that side of the street); I dragged out the old typewriter and typed up a couple of sentences about each house on the map. For me, half the fun and charm is the fact that you can't erase your mistakes; but my kids thought this was horrifying. They both tried their hand at typing after I was done, but beach left the room in tears because they couldn't get it just right. They are definitely children of the technological age!  Oh yeah, my 9-year-old also wanted to know "what are all the little poops" on the page. *sniff* It is SO nice to have a family who's so supportive of my art!!

Finally: this is one of my favourite things that I've worked on recently. It's pretty big; 19 1/2" across and 6 1/2" tall. It's on a piece of black heavy-duty paperboard? I'm not sure what it's called. I think you could use it as book covers, it's certainly thick enough.  I was totally inspired by this Halloween costume I saw on Pinterest.  Pretty sure I like my version better though!  HAHA!

That is all for now!!  I hope that you have all had an EPIC year, and that 2012 brings health, happiness and lots of art to all of you.

xoxoxoxox!
Shelley

Whew.

So it's been a while.  The short version of the story is as follows: 

Things have taken a turn for the awesome around here.  I predict amazing things to come.  The end.

I'll probably expand on that one of these days but for now, here are a couple of things I worked on this week:

There is more to the address than just "SWARTZ" but I can't just go around giving away peoples' addresses all willy-nilly.  The font, called "circus" is one I downloaded from a free font site, printed out, then sat and painstakingly wrote out with a 0.1 Copic multi-liner.  I wanted to go for a circus feel, and I really liked that font.  The biggest compliment:  my son thought the letters were rub-ons.

The envelope is actually the main event - it's meant to be sent empty.  I put a piece of cardboard inside to stiffen it, but sending a decorated envelope was the whole point of this swap.  It was based on this book, called Mail Me Art (you can click to see samples inside the book); and I've been captivated by this project ever since I heard of it.  This isn't for the same project, it's a swap through swap-bot.  

My kids also bring me little bits and pieces of neat things because they know that I like to decorate the pages in my journal.  (See?  Awesome.)  They gave me this piece of cardboard, so I attached some bits and pieces I had lying around, then did a bit of random meandering journaling on it, and cut notches into it so I could slip it into the coil binding inside my book.   I hadn't worked in any of my art journals for a while, so this was more of a warm up than anything else.  

That's all for now, but stay tuned.  More awesome to come.  

Love Shelley!

Laid Bare

This is the cover of my new eight-dollar art journal.  I wanted something a little bigger (9x12") so I can make a bigger mess.  First I went through the book and tore some pages out, made fold-outs and stubs, and just generally made it a lot more interesting than it was when I brought it home.  This is what I've done with the formerly-plain-brown-and-boring cover, and as you might guess, the object of the game is to get right down to the bottom of some stuff that's been bugging me.  I have a couple of pages started in it, but nothing ready to share just yet. 

But don't worry; there will always be enough silly to go around... after all, this is me we're talking about.  This guy was speaking to me so I added him into my book, by gluing him onto a piece of cardboard and then punching holes to make him fit into the book. 

This is the back of that piece of cardboard.  Sometimes my favourite things are made from things that have no value whatsoever!  I guess I should take that to heart and quit buying expensive paper. 

HAHAHAHAHAA!!!  That will never happen.  EVER.

Love Shelley!

All Serious and Stuff

Okay, first of all that first page says "worth less" not "worthless".  I was having some pretty intense feelings when I was working on that page, of, well, being worth less.  Not as important, not as worthy, not as accomplished, not as interesting, not as attractive - I'm sure I'm not the only one who's ever felt that way.  It's a self-portrait, but to make myself feel better I made my nose smaller.  HAHAHAAAA!!  Also my eyebrows aren't really that scary, I just got carried away when I was drawing them in.  The miserable look was real that day though.  (Don't worry about me, this was very temporary.  Working it out in my journal really helped.)

The second page - well I love the badass quote, and to be honest, this is how I feel 90% of the time.  My heart is guarded, my feelings are well-protected, and most people can't see past that to the vulnerable person inside.  Which is just the way I like it.  It keeps me from having too many of those "worth less" days.  Don't tell anyone, ok?  I'm trusting you.

Love Shelley

YAY CANADA POST!!

SO glad the mail strike is over.  I know they don't have all their differences with the union settled yet, but I'm just (selfishly) glad that postal service will resume today.  Now I can mail some of these babies out:

I discovered a place in town called Arts Junktion last week.  It's in a semi-sketchy area but I went in the afternoon (ie. broad daylight) and everything was fine.  If you don't mind following directions that go something like this:  "Go behind the building, down the alley along the fence, past the loading doors, then up three steps into a small discreet wooden door" then this is the place for you. 

What they do is accept donations of "junk" that artists may be able to use - all kinds of stuff, from legit art supplies, to used binders and other office supplies, fabric and leather scraps, buttons... really anything that COULD be used for art.  Then?  And this is the part that floored me - you can come in and pick whatever you think you might use.  FOR FREE.  Yes!  Really!!

I was very careful not to go all crazy and grab up everything in sight, I took a few select things that I knew I would use.  For example, the three wee paintings at the top there are done with gouache and paint marker on old 5.5" floppy diskettes. 

While I was waiting for layers of paint to dry on those, I took a few minutes to put down a background in one of my art journals.  I had done half a page in here several years ago (it's horrible, I'll probably never show it to you - or I might paint over it) so I drew a black line with a sharpie and decided the bottom half of the page will be something entirely different.  Here it is so far:

I have no idea what it will be when it's finished but at least the colours are fun!

See you soon - go check your mail!!

Love Shelley!

The Daily Doodle

Do you ever notice that sometimes your random mindless doodling turns out better than any actual art you attempted on purpose in a given day?

Oh.  Uh, me either.

Because everyone likes a nice octopus, right?

I was busy writing a long-overdue letter to a sweet friend of mine and I suddenly started to worry that I was going to run out of interesting things to talk about.  The problem was that I had already taken apart several empty envelopes and trimmed them all to the same size and stapled them back together into a booklet, so I was really feeling the (self-imposed) pressure to fill every single page.

Of course this was before my son engaged in a dance-off with a carnie at a rural festival; before my daughter announced she was mad at God for letting her nana's cat get run over on the road; before my husband came home with a recipe for making mini bombs out of stray blobs of mercury; before I played 'make-up bag' with my sister, and before we met the dumbest waitress on the planet (when four people arrive at a restaurant for dinner, and the waitress asks you how many of you would like cutlery... seriously?!)  So it turns out I would have had LOTS to talk about, but that's fine, because who doesn't like a nice orange octopus? 

*sorry about the facing page still being there - I scanned this one instead of taking a picture, and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the extra stuff.  I COULD tell you what it says, but isn't it more fun to imagine what I wrote? 

And that's it for now.  I have more but I really have to figure out the technology part before I post this stuff. 

Love Shelley!