Lovebird Ladybird

if you feel like getting teary

go here now.It's the free verse photo project and it is simply amazing. What a cool idea! I made the mistake (not really, though) of looking at this site at work. Tears will ensure, trust me.

From "Gong Strikes" by Miriam Sagan:

The little girls
Running in the park at dusk
Are almost women now—
What you've missed...

10 cents

Our neighbor had a yard sale the other day. We went over and checked it out- not much to be found but I did score an old little address book for 10 cents. It had calendar in the front from 1969 and a page in the back full of people's birthdays.  I took that baby home, spray painted and glued it up all nice & now I've got a sweet little book that can be carried around and worked on & it fits in my purse!

I just took all of the pages out and spray painted them with various textures. Put em back in and collage away.

a nice day for art journaling (outside)

Ain't that the truth! Yesterday was mostly beautiful so I packed up a box full of supplies, dragged my blanket out and plopped myself out in the sun for some art making.

I grabbed this book from the friends sale at the library. It's called 'home stenciling' or something along those lines.. It's mostly cheesy stuff that I won't use- chickens, flowery things and such. BUT there are a couple gems in there! I've been making all sorts of poppies the last couple days thanks to that book and will be trying out a couple other things soon enough.


Smoking cigarettes and working in the traveling art journal = fun! Dory and I are doing a collaborative thing- we have two art journals that we swap back and forth. Finish a page and pass it on. Photo documentation of the whole thing to come.


haha- I should probably repaint my toes sometime..


Reusing library display items in my house is pretty awesome.

Well, today is supposed to be pretty nice again. More art to be made and tons of CD's need to get baseball stitches stenciled onto them. A fun day lies ahead!

You're on the Warning track!

Long time, no see! Made it back from the California road trip adventure. We had a pretty fantastic time. Got to drive down the oregon coast, see a baseball game, play wiffle ball in San Francisco and ride BART (which I had no idea that I would be going UNDER WATER before I got on). We had the craziest grocery shopping experience ever at a safeway in Cresent City, walked around Eureka ( I wanna go back and explore more) and hit a lot of thrift stores along the way. Fun!

I really got out of my art making groove, being gone and journal-less. Next time I need to make myself a blank one to take. Well not really blank, but like the board books I've been doing where I glue down scraps and then work over them. This trip just happened to coincide with me just having finished one and not starting a new one in time.

The art project that I've been focused on this last week is the cover & cd art for mister bird's band, Warning Track. They're a baseball punk band- complete with uniforms. haha. Anyway- there was a lot of rubbing on of letters, cutting and pasting and copier resizing. Puppy man even helped out by chewing up a baseball for the cover photo!

And the back cover:


I used these old rub on letters for all of the text and then inverted the back. I took apart one of those cardboard CD sleeves and traced it to use as a template. These are printed on grey cardstock. FYI- the copiers at kinkos are bad news for areas with lots of black. They put that weird line across the top of the back cover and the toner seems to be rubbing off..For the next batch I'm going to a local copy place. I think they'll have better quality machines.

I cut out a stencil that is the laces of a baseball (enlarged to fit on the disc.) It was the most annoying stencil I have EVER cut out.. But, I think the end result was worth the annoyance.


Mister bird did the inserts- They are kind of a tri-fold thing with all of their lyrics.

Oh, and off topic sort of. If you're into cover art & especially book jacket art, I found a couple awesome websites. I'm actually on this email list called Librarians Internet Index and they send out weekly emails with websites of note which is where these came from:

New York Public Library Digital Gallery: Dust Jackets from 1926-1947.

Book Cover Archive (RAD!!!)

MoMA Online Exhibit of Artists Books  (There 15 artists represented here and some really amazing work! I've been a big fan of Barbara Kruger for awhile, and it's cool to see some of her stuff that I haven't seen before.)

In my neck of the woods

spring means a lot of things.. It means not being as totally depressed as usual thanks to a tiny break in the months of rain and gray. It means that things are starting to bloom and come alive again- myself included. It also means new displays in ye ole library!

It also means me realizing that my camera is really getting shoddier as the days go by.


Anyway, if yr curious- I made these in the same way that I make those puff balls. The only difference is that I fluffed them up only halfway rather than into a ball like I usually do. The other difference is that I added an extra color to the center. Someday when it isn't almost 1 am and I'm about to leave on vacation the next day, I'll make a tutorial...


I lucked out and found some yellowed old newspaper in our craft closet at work. That's what the stems and petals are made of. I did the stems by rolling a couple pages into a tube. The leaves were just some freehand chopping.

Gotta run. California awaits in the AM. Probably should try to sleep.

Sunday AM book reviews!

I see all these great books everyday working in a library and I figured I ought to share some of them! Here's a few sweet ones:

Graffiti Paris by Fabienne Grevy

A simply amazing look at street art and graffiti in Paris. The photos are beautiful and the work is totally inspiring.

I Was All Thumbs by Bernard Waber

This is the story of an octopus who grew up in the captivity of a scientists lab and is suddenly set free. He spends most of the book trying to fit in and find his place in the sea. The artwork is so totally phenomenal. It looks to me like woodblock prints and watercolors. This is an old one, it was published in 1975 and was released in paperback in 1990 -it is out of print so if you see it at your library or a used book store check it out while you can!

 I Ain't Gonna Paint No More by Karen Beaumont

This is one of my favorite picture books- I've used it quite a few times for story time and the kids love it as much as I do. The story is about a little boy who is told to put his paints away but he just can't stand living in a world without color. He paints a different part of his body on each page as his world regains color.

Stenciling & Shrinky Dinks!

I've been messing around with shrinky dinks off and on for a little while now. I found this package of them that I've been carry around with me for years and I forgot how awesome they are. If you aren't familiar with them- they are basically 8.5" x 11'  sheets of plastic that you can draw, write, paint etc. on. Then you bake them and they shrink to about 1/3 of the original size and get about 8 times thicker. I got to wondering what it would look like if spray painted on them. Here's the result:

Okay, so Shrinky Dinks have two sides. One of them is glossy and the other is kinda rough. I spray painted onto the rough side (to begin with). The paint will show throw to the other side. I ended up painting the stencil of the woman on both sides just cause I wanted it to be darker than it was by doing it on one side alone.


I rounded my corners so that they wouldn't be pokey in the end. I traced a jar of gel medium and cut off the corners. Punch a couple holes where you want to hook the jump rings into.

Heat your oven to the whatever that directions say. I forget at the moment. 325 or 375- I don't remember so make sure you check! Get a cookie sheet and put a chunk of brown paper bag onto it. Lay the plastic sheet on top of that. Bake! I leave them in for about 2 mins and 30 seconds.

Pull it out and take the shrinky dink and place it on the counter. I have a flat piece of tile that I lay on top of it. This helps it to cool off and turn out flat. If you don't do this the edges sometimes curl up.


(Say hi to marla in the background - aka the plastic legs)

Put a couple jump rings in it and grab a chain and you're set! This one turned out a teense bigger than I might have liked but I'm still pretty stoked on it! It's interesting to me how much dark the pink turned after it was baked. There are so many things cool things you can do with shrinky dinks- Give it a shot. You most likely won't regret it. haha.

xo.

but he had the girl pants on, dude...

Okay- quick post. Here's some new pages. Updated. Written on. Made prettier.

On a side note that does not apply to these pages-- I've come to the conclusion that I'm totally okay with adding on to pages that were previously thought to be "done". I used to feel uneasy about it- like they needed to stay the way that they were when i thought they were finished. I guess I was thinking about preservation and comparing progress and all that. But, nah.. I'm over that- if you have things you want to add to something that you thought was "done", DO IT!! It's really worth it...

Tomorrow I'm gonna post about how to make amazing things with shrinky dinks & stencils. Watch out!

Annnd- I'm done done done with the Sid gel medium transfer thing! Actually, that's not totally true- I still have to figure out what's gonna go on that banner. Any ideas are welcome!



night night.