Page by Page Nature Journal: Dogwood Flowers

Another Swap-bot swap sent, another Swap-bot swap received.  I am really into art journaling as of late.  I have a couple that I keep.  Some are sloppy and a bit more free but some are neat and tidy like this set of swaps hosted by naturenerd3.  The swap participants, thus far has been small, but I'm guessing that will change as the swap series continues.  I joined in on the very first one.  This theme, dogwood.  I received a lovely journal page from Pynart2.  It looks like she used watercolors to do this page.  Funny thing is that for the next month's theme she is my partner and I have to admit, I am a bit nervous about sending her my page since hers is so well done.  Here is what I received from Pynart2:

© 2012 by Pynart2

This is what I sent out to naturenerd3, the swap host.  I hope she likes it.  I had to do some google research on this one since I have not lived in an area where there are many dogwoods.  I recall a spring trip a few years ago when we stopped at my brother-in-law's house in Huntsville, Alabama when the dogwoods were in bloom.  I suppose for someone who grew up around those, they might not be very impressive, but I was taken aback by their beauty.  When in bloom they are so full of flowers.  And, in Hunstville, there are so many dogwoods.  It was really beautiful.  I made my husband stop a few times so we could view them up close.  I collected some of the buds and brought them home to press and used them in a few ATC cards.  My inspiration for this card was that experience of seeing dogwoods in spring for the first time.  Here is what I created:

© 2012 by Mary M. Garcia

Here Comes The Sun

So you may or may not know this about me, but I am a Beatles fanatic. I was so lucky and happy to be able to see Paul McCartney play live at Wrigley Field this past summer in Chicago. And, to top it off, I was there with my very best friend RH. We had so much fun. When the concert was over and we made our way back out of Wrigley Field and around the back of the stadium, the confetti was still floating in the air, the weather was gorgeous and the people were visiting and being friendly. As RH put it, it was magical. So, I thought it might be fun to do some lyrical art journaling and what better music to start with than with the Beatles. This is a series of swaps that I'm hosting on swap-bot. For the first of this series I picked, "Here Comes The Sun," one of my all-time favorite songs. The swap details are here: http://www.swap-bot.com/swap/show/115349. I put the details up on swap-bot and had a pretty good showing of 8 people. I'm still waiting to see if every one actually fulfilled the swap, but so far, so good. I received this lovely journal page from ameccan. She also wrote me a very sweet note with the page, letting me know that she is new to swapping. I hope that she sticks with it. What you can't tell from the picture is the beautiful paper that she put this on. It's very soft and has frayed edges (I love that). Thank you so much ameccan for your journal page and I hope that you had fun doing this swap. Here is her page:

© 2012 by ameccan

Sometimes I do already have an idea when I pick a theme, but in this case, I didn't really know what I was going to create when I picked the theme. When I started with this series, I had the song, "Rain" in my head as I had already done an ATC of that song. But, with this one, I just kind of thought of the contrast of winter and summer (which the song uses as a metaphor for the winter and summer of a relationship). "Long, cold, lonely winter..." Do I know what that feels like! We spent the last 7 years in a suburb of Milwaukee and the winters there are dark, dreary, cold, and cloudy. There is nothing like that first warm day when the sun comes out and all the people emerge from their homes. On those days, everything feels alright. I wanted to convey that contrast when I drew this journal page. The page is created with acrylic paint, ink, and watercolors. It was sent to bearnbabs in Virginia.

© 2012 by Mary Garcia

Hand Drawn Bird

I wanted to write my first new "art received" blog about this sweet hand drawn flamingo card that I received from Aiah today. The card was traded for a Hand-drawn bird swap on Swap-bot (http://www.swap-bot.com/swap/show/116306). It is a sweet pink flamingo combined with a stamped background. When I saw the envelope, the first thing that caught my eye were the postage stamps - "Polska." The envelope came all the way from Poland. I thought of my maternal grandmother, born in 1910. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Poland right before she was born in the early 1900s. I don't really know much about them but I do know that their last name was Parrish. They settled in Rockdale, Joliet. I remember visiting my grandmother during summers, playing canasta, and how spotless her tiny house was. Thank you Aiah for your card which came all the way from Poland and for letting me think about her today.

Here is what Aiah sent to me:

"Flamingo" © 2012 Aiah

And below is a scanned image of what I sent out for this swap. I titled it, "Wildbird." We live in the Austin area and as you may be aware of, last summer there was a terrible drought in Texas. The state suffered from a heat wave and wild fires which raged for weeks. All of this lead to a water shortage and restrictions. When we moved into our little house the front yard was decimated from the heat and we couldn't do anything about it. When the winter rains came I was surprised and happy to see that the grass recovered in the yard and grew in quite nicely except for in the front. Instead of grass we just got weeds. Icky Texas weeds that burrow their roots down deep, spread out horizontally across the grass and produce little sharp burrs that stick into your hands when you try to dig them out. So, we did what any other good Texan would do, we cut it and pretended it was grass. Well, being a Wisconsin native, I just could stand it so long and this past week, on my hands and knees, I dug and pulled and removed every single weed from the front yard, leaving nothing but bare dirt and in the process exposing every fire ant, grub, beetle, and spider - - a fantastic day for the birds who waited patiently for the bounty. So, when I went to draw this card I had these little brown and yellow-ish birds in mind, as they were the ones who sat by, watching me work and then had themselves a snack. I drew this with ink and used watercolors to color in the bird and stamp ink along the edges of the card. This card was mailed out to KatarinaNavane of Athens, Ohio. I hope you like it.


"Wildbird" © 2012, Mary Garcia

Time flies when you're having fun...

Last Blog check in: November 5, 2010. I issue an apology. To you and to myself for abandoning this blog. It was a simple enough idea - - work out of the drawing lab book. Problem is, the book was borrowed from the library and it had to be returned. I tried to borrow it again but lost my enthusiasm for the project. I moved on, the book moved on, the blog well, fizzled. But, I have not fizzled on creating, making, trading ART.

So, I'm reinventing my blog. And am going to try to feature what I make and what I receive. I swap on Swap-bot, through Flickr, live trades, and through Yahoo groups like: ATCHandDrawPaint, ATC_World, and ArtistTradingCards. From Swap-bot I've begun to branch out from ATC cards to art journaling, zines, and other various projects. So, I'm going to try to stick with it and hopefully you will all stick with me as I feature what I'm making for these trades AND what I've received in return. And, maybe a few things thrown in there that aren't for trade. We'll see how it goes. I hope y'all like it (oh - - almost forgot to mention - - I've also moved to Texas since my last check in). Here's a little Texas spring for you:

Lab 11: Cheater Blinds

I did a second lab this evening, skipping over Lab 10 (because it's late and all of the coffee shops are closed). In this lab, you draw from old family photographs (preferably vacation photos) simple black & white line drawings. This is called "Cheater Blinds" because you are doing a modified blind contour drawing, drawing without looking at the paper for a minute or two and then looking at the paper once in awhile to make sure that your drawing isn't "overlapping too much." The author suggests that you move your hand at the same speed as your eyes when you are drawing.

Here are my first few attempts next to the original photograph:

After drawing the outline with a fine-point permanent marker, you are to go back over the drawing with a finer point permanent marker and add in details, including shading, facial features, and texture. The drawings are to be simplistic and not-too detailed. In the first drawing of Tabitha, I added too much detail to her lips by adding fullness. I toned that down in the next drawing of Gideon. After a few drawings in my sketch book, and feeling more comfortable with the process, I drew a few more on Bristol for ATC cards. Here are those drawings:






Simon's eyes are particularly challenging, as they were in lab 9. After a few attempts, I figured out that instead of being oval-shaped, his eyes have an upward curve on the bottom lid, as well as the top. I tried to reflect that in the ATC card.

Lab 24: Scribbly Drawings

Well, I've been jumping around a bit in the book, trying different sections, but trying to work through each section in order. Today, I went to the "Inspired by Children and Childhood" section and tried my hand at "scribbly drawings." Just as the name suggests, "scribbly drawings" are drawings that you scribble. Using a ball point pen, the idea is to first just scribble on a page for a minute or two, relaxing and trying different scribble designs. Here is my scribble page:

Next, you are instructed to look at something and draw it, using scribbling to create the image. The instructions state that this is not supposed to be a contour drawing. To avoid drawing the outline and then filling it in, the author suggests to start from the middle and go outward.

On my first try, I think I did an exact contour drawing:

Try again! I took a look at an old picture of my husband and myself. This picture, from 1997 is from before we were married. I was 23 years old in this picture:

Well, what do you think? Did I capture the essence of the photograph? I tried to complete these drawings without lifting my pen off the page, thus the connecting lines. Here are a few of my sketch book drawings:

I took these drawings and re-did them, a bit differently. This time I tried looking less at the page to create the one of my husband. I actually like his a bit better. I think the second one of me is too "cultivated."

And, I couldn't resist trying one of the little stuffed penguin that Tabitha loves so much. Here it is:

Self Portrait Stencil

Today I'm veering away from the Creative Lab and working on a different project that I ran across. It's a self-portrait/stencil. I've made stencils of this type before, but never using Photoshop and I must say that using Photoshop as a tool is A LOT easier. The stencils that I've made involved just taking a picture and deciding for myself what to cut away. I was originally inspired to create these stencils by the artwork of Andrea Rogers, a Flickr friend of mine. Her stencil work is amazing! Here are two examples of what I've done in the past:


So, I thought I'd try this doing a Photoshop tutorial since doing the stencils from a regular picture is very difficult - - deciding what to cut and what not to cut. Kudos to Little Black Kitty for putting this together. So, what I did was to first find a decent picture of myself. That's easier said than done - - I think once you become a mom there really are no longer many pictures of yourself since the mom is the one behind the camera, usually. But, I did have a few that I took while fooling around with the Photo Booth application on my Mac. But, even then, not all pictures work well with Little Black Kitty's method. Most of the pictures that I had didn't have enough light on my face, I think, to make my features stand out. But, I did finally settle on this picture:

So, after fooling around with it in Photoshop, this is the image that I had to work with:

I printed the image on regular cardstock. I didn't take a scan of the "virgin" stencil, but here it is after playing around with it a few times:

And, finally, here is an image made using the stencil and StazOn ink that I applied with a sponge paint brush:

I do like the ease of using Photoshop, but I think that the detail was clearer in the stencils that I created. Of course, I could have veered from the Photoshop image a bit to give some more definition in my face, but I wanted to see what it would look like if I just cut all the black off. It's dramatic, but maybe a bit too dark? I think that I need to work on the definition around the eyes a bit more. There were white parts in the eyes of the photoshop image that were lost due to the fact that they were entirely surrounded by black and were therefor lost in the middle. But, still, I worked with this stencil and here's my ATC card:

Using the stencil, I applied the StazOn ink on plain newsprint paper. I like using newsprint when I want something to look a bit rustic - - I think it softens up the image. I then applied some stamps using dye-based stamp ink and also acrylic paint on the stamps. I chose a stamp of a non-descript cursive background, peacock feather and a stamp of a mandala. Using stippling brushes, I brushed on color in specific spots on the card. The card still needed something and I thought that defining areas of my face, as if applying make-up might work out. So, using colored pencils I defined my eyes and my lips. Finally, I used Inkadinkado blending chalks as if applying blush to my cheeks. Finally, I finished off the edges, bleeding it onto the front of the card a bit with more StazOn ink.