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!

The sketchbook challenge

I have been sketching, I just haven't been taking pictures and uploading. I have to do things when I have a moment of free time here and there. So I am doing uploads and such at the moment with this free time. I have posted these to the Highly Prized flickr group already. Not sure if the tag worked but will see!

I posted two sketches already and here are the rest. I decided to try a zentangle. Wasn't sure what it was so I goggled it and found some examples and a quick tutorial which I can't find again. Sorry. This was great fun to do since I had time to kill while waiting for the kids at swim practice. Putting them on the swim team has forced me to have to find things to do to fill my time while waiting and I have found more time for art so this is a definite bonus. Anyway, this one was the theme of peacock of course:



The rest were sketches of some underwater sponges, corals etc. Not exact but for shape and color. I have this piece that I have been working slowly on for over a year and these will make great reference photos.

Progress Report

Sorry I have been a little late in publishing. I wanted to show you an update on an experimental piece I have been working on. I took a picture of a water lily surrounded by leaves and was thinking to myself "how can I recreate that in fabric and paints."
First I sketched out the design with watercolor crayons and then blended with water. They dried back way too light. So I decided to mix aloe vera gel in with setacolor dyes and paint into the leaves and the water. I loved the look!





My next step was to use colored pencils to recreate the plant life growing underneath and shiva paintstiks to add more shine to the water. I added more detail and depth to the leaves by using ink and colored pencils. Then I added round, flat beads in various shades of brown, green and yellow to create the plants growing around the lily. I hand quilted the leaves to add more dimension and shiva paintstiks in yellow and green metallic to create more shine. The lily was created using moleskin fabric on one side and a simple white cotton on the other. I made two sets larger and two sets smaller. After turning them inside out, they created this puffy, almost realistic looking lily! I just love happy accidents. I am now investigating ideas for the center of the lily. I will post progress on that later.



This is my piece for the going green challenge. We need to create a 4" x 6" postcard from only materials we had on hand. My card is made from fabric scraps from another piece. After trimming the piece to size, I realized that they would make a nice little postcard. The colors were so wonderful. I started laying the fabric strips together until I found a composition I liked. The "brown fencing" is actually from my potato bag. I want to add more thread painting to create tall grasses but alas, my sewing machine decided to stop working. Cleaned it all out, put it back together and now the bobbin casing will not stay where it is supposed to! I will have to borrow a machine to finish or do it by hand. Bummer.