Monday, June 28, 2010

Crowns and Wings

I've been fascinated with  collage work that contains women with crowns and wings. Most of the pictures used in the collages are vintage early 20th century.  I've collected and printed many images to use with this style of art and here are a few examples of some of my attempts to produce collage:



Sunday, June 13, 2010

It's been a while...

I wish I had more time to blog.  I'm doing this quietly without anyone knowing about it. I'm not ready to make this public.  If it is public, then my obligation to post would be stronger and  just don't want to be pressured about this...I just want to post and display my cards at my leisure.  So here I am after a hectic week.  We had last minute guests from out of town this week which caused my not being able to attend one of Diana Kovaks' card making classes.  But, this coming week is another one and I'll sure be there for that.  I get such inspiration and a sense of fulfillment being among other card makers.  I learn from them.  There seems to be a regular group of women who attend and I'm getting more comfortable being with them and chatting about art and life.  
  Meanwhile, I'm going to post some older work of mine.
This card was given to a friend who lost a loved one.  It is a simple card made from patterned paper, some ribbon and stamped words on a card, over a card.  It was easy to make but I think it gave away a sincere feeling of condolences.


 

I've always been a little collage challenged.  This card was a pretty good attempt of trying to piece together images to form a feeling and a picture.  



The focal point of this card is the hand made alcohol ink design as the background.  On top of that I adhered a strip of  purchased hand made paper and outlined it in gold peel-off lines.  I adhered three pink pearls for an accent.  The lotus flowers/branch is a dimensional piece that was also adhered to the page.  I stamped the 'joy' stamp in black ink.  All this is on a black card.
I love this card!! I'm about to send it to a friend for her birthday.

That's it for now...more when I can take a break and  post again. 

Saturday, June 5, 2010

A perfect afternoon to blog

It's a quiet summer Saturday afternoon with a lovely warm breeze in the air and the the trees are swaying in the sun.  When the humidity is low, a summer day on Long Island can be quite pleasant.  I'm in my studio with the windows and skylight open, and the overhead fan spinning away. My hubby is having his Shabbat nap and I'm free to play all afternoon! YIPPEE! LOL
  I have something to post here today. I made my own background paper design.  I've read how the use of gesso on a stamp can make a really interesting affect on a design.  So I took some lavender color card stock and imprinted a leaf stamp all over the paper.  The I read about the affect of metallic acrylic paint over stamped objects.  So, I took a small sponge brush and randomly brushed gold metallic paint over the whole page. Well, here's a piece of that paper:

Oh, I'm disappointed in the results of the scan, but I also had to reduce the size of the jpg to make it fit here.  But, at least you can see what I've done.

Then, I made a card using this new patterned paper as the background of the front of the card:
As you can see, the colors used in the card, along with the two ribbons, the vintage picture and the three stones, seem to balance together. I outlined the picture with some peel off gold lines to make the picture pop out.  The actual card really looks better but I think that the affect I wanted to achieve worked! I hope you think so too.
 

 

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

It takes time to blog...

I work 5 days a week, so maintaining this blog is going to be a challenge.
When I'm home I like to make time to work on my craft, which during the work week is generally an hour or so sometime between 9pm and 11pm at night.  I turn on my laptop because I know I'm going to need it to either use the scanner, or printer.  I also need the laptop to run my Silhouette cutting machine. In today's modern age, in order to produce the most interesting crafts, electronics seem to be necessary. I use my computers (I also have a desk top computer that's in our home office) for both work and play.  But my laptop is basically my toy for playing at making cards. LOL Oh, and I must admit, that when my laptop isn't printing or scanning, it is tuned to Hulu.com with a TV episode on as background to my creativity. LOL  
   I need to stop now...more later.  I'm going to list some of my favorite websites and publications for card making inspirations.