June ATC Challenge - Zetti

What? Zetti? I never heard of it! Google it! Oh wow! Not my style but truly a challenge. That was my thoughts on the next challenge. If you do a search for the term Zetti, a ton of remarkable art shows up. You can spend hours sifting through and get the feel of the art form.

Well I was intimidated to try which means stretching myself. Oh man. This is going to be hard. So I broke it down into small steps. First came the quote. I remember reading the quote or partial quote on Gisela (Towner? can't remember her last name!) It was a quote by Mark Twain:

She was not what you would call refined,
She was not what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that kept a parrot.

Well this quote reminds me of my daughter Maddy. So I found a picture of her and scanned it. Made a bunch of copies and printed it out. Two elements done.

After I glued her onto the card stock, I was off and running. Sketched in the parrot and started coloring. I think that was my favorite part. I love color!

My daughter caught sight of what I was doing so I had to make some extra for her! Small price to pay I suppose!

Happy Solstice!

Thrinchies!

I am putting up a second post within a months time. I know, scary right?!! This group decided to stretch it's wings and try new types of projects. I joined this one and obviously didn't finish on time. But they are a great group of woman and are not beating me up over it! So the additional trade the last month was called a thrinchie. I had to google for info. It's like the trading cards but 3" x 3" and the basic theme was spring. See the others here: http://heartisttradingcards.blogspot.com/

When I work on new pieces, I find myself being pulled in the direction of playing it safe and make the same type of pieces. It's okay I guess as it is my style but I wanted to bust out a little bit. So I fused white fabric to peltex and colored it with neocolor crayons. I used a paintbrush with water and blended the colors. Then I stamped a funky flower in the center. Immediately I hated the piece.

So I did what I usually do. I put it off to the side and ignored it. I was cleaning up my studio and ran across my stamps and thought that would be cool! I used my hand cut leaf stamp and stamped in lime green. Then went back over them with dark green. Then a commercial tree stamp was used in dark blue ink over the top of the whole piece. Very nice! The pale green stripe is a ribbon sewn down using the machine. I hand sewed the gold washer with red thread. The edges were done in a dark red on the sewing machine.

I love them and of course did a crummy job of photographing them. They are way more vibrant in person. Also never use a shiny surface to photograph pictures. Bad idea!

Gustavo, Georgie and Fib

I finally finished this piece and named it after my daughters three African fighting frogs. This piece has been in the works for over two years. I would get excited about it, work diligently and then hate it. So it would be put away until I would find it again while looking for something else. Up on the design wall, critique and then figure out what was going wrong with it. The last round was the fact I needed something in my underwater landscape. Enter the frogs.

Closeup of one frog

Here is another closeup

Final finished piece

I really love how this finally turned out. There are so many design techniques and materials that went into this that my hand would go numb typing them up for this post. Let's just say I am extremely happy with the results! Maybe I will enter it into the Celebrate Spring call for entries.

On to my next adventures. My one goal for 2013 is to finally put together a website. Another goal is to start entering my pieces into shows. I need to get back to art again.

Cucumber ATC trade - Cool As . . .

I decided on this little guy because the theme being cucumber meant that you could use all the colors in a cucumber which includes the orange flower! This project started with a sketch of the frog. I used acrylic paint to add color but it was too flat and needed some dimension and texture. I added details using colored pencils. Still kind of flat looking.

Referring back to pictures of the frog, I realized he was kind of shiny. Light bulb moment meant time for the glossy accent! I am glad I bought another bottle. I really love playing with this product! Looking good but still lacking the skin texture. That was solved while digging through my fabric markers for another project (which also includes frogs!) and I found my Puffy Velvet Pen! I haven't used this in a long time and it is supposed to be for fabric. Well rules are for breaking sometimes and I colored in the top half of mr. frog with it. It dried quickly. I love not having to wait. Hit it with a heat gun and wow! I nice rubbery type of texture. But what about the bumpy texture. So I added some dots all over the top and hit it with the heat gun again. Oh yeah!

Here is a side view to help explain what it looked like. Bet you want to reach out and touch it!
It rained all day yesterday so my cards bowed. Sigh.