Hugs and Kisses

GPP Street Team challenge this month is to create "love letters"--to be exact, the letters "x" and "o"

---inspired by some of Michelle's hand carved stamps, i cut out some stencil letters in a "gothic" sort of font and used black ink on red cardstock to create both positive and negative images.  i outlined some of the letters and then stamped text here and there...

Whole lotta creative goin on....

While i didn't work on any of my "home" themed projects last week (well, not directly, but I have been researching the techniques I want to use on my Hearts at Home art quilt and we did go see a few more houses this weekend), I have been creatively busy.

With Valentine's Day less than a week away, I am scrambling to complete several of each of my two designs for this year.

Being a BIG BIG fan of Tim Holtz and all of his products, I just had to create a log book to keep track of all that I have and all that I want! It's still i a work in progress, but I like the way is turning out! More to come---

Cover showing tabs....                                                                                 ....page showing stamp pads etc.

And my latest obsession--"zentangles"--if you haven't tried them, you should! There are lots of examples and tutorials out there! The are so simple and so relaxing! I have so many ideas for this artform!! Definitely more to come!

Body Beautiful

I knew when I decided to do a "Creative Everyday" challenge for myself, that the idea was neither mine nor was it new. I'd heard the phrase many times in the past couple of years. For the hell of it, I decided to google the phrase and see where it would take me.  To my sheer delight, it led me to Leah Piken Kolidas blog Creative Everyday. She IS the creator of this challenge and provides encouraging and motivating space for others to be creative everyday--in whatever way being "creative" means to you.

With only a few days left in January (my head is still spinning from this fact), I signed up to be part of this community. Leah offers themes each month that you can use or ignore at your will--with this month's being "body." I chose to interpret this theme through visual representations of plays on words...

fairly self-explanatory...

"Body Language"

This page started as an idea to do "Body of Text" but subconsciously changed to "Body Language" after I stumbled across several old books in various languages that I had purchased ages ago to use for backgrounds.  When I put the books under my art table to be packed up, I didn't realize they would find their way into today's art---

 

"Body Type"

ok--so I am mildly obsessed with the written word as a design element. I can't help it--it just looks cool. 

in the same way that the universe directed me to my multi-language books, the measuring tape background paper just happened to be in the mess of stuff on top of my art table and i couldnt resist the symbolism it added--after all, how is it that we harshly judge our body types than with a tape measure??

The rest of the numbers game

Well, here we are, on the last day of the month (OMG!! Really? a whole month of the new year is already gone?? Where did it go??) and I am happy to say that I completed   a page for every day--sometimes they were two-page spreads, and a few times i did several pages at once to catch up--but I did it!  Will I be doing this again for February?? um....well...no...lol....but there will be more in posts to come on February's goals!

For now, here are the remaining three pages inspired by my facebook peeps and the numbers they chose---

Miss Emma chose 114--completely random, just like her.  I chose a fabulous "dark" photo of her and used black and red to reflect her style.

I'm sure you can figure out the Krisha's number for yourself....I helped myself to her facebook profile photo for a "yin-yang" effect...

and my buddy Kraig (who I haven't seen in almost three years! We really need to get together!) offered up 647. At some point, back in the day, I called him K-dog--so it had to become part of the page...while Kraig is as far from urban or grunge as you can get, I do like the feel of that in this page.

Thanks to everyone who inspired me with a number! You helped keep me motivated!

Part II....

Day 4 was 420 provided by Muse Angie...

Day 5 from my scrapbooking buddy, Cassandra. Her number was 352:

and day 6 was from my good buddy Jen, who knows me quite well and chose a number I would have chosen for myself--the magickal number 13!

I still think the edititor is jacked up, even with the "upgrades"--curse you blogspot! LOL!

Number Inspirations

I am very much enjoying my "CED" book, but after just 11 days, I was already tiring of "theme-less" pages. I took my need to my facebook peeps and requested seven "random" numbers to be the inspiration for the next week's worth of pages--and they did not let me down! I

have only one number left to do (tomorrow), but below are pages inspired by my honorary muses and the numbers they provided.

(The first and second pages of the week will have to be posted later as they are on a memory card I left at work--

DOH!)

So day three's number was provided by my wonderful girlfriend, who a year and a half ago celebrated her birthday on 8/8/08----888 was her muse number:

(UGG! I am remembering why blogging annoyed me so much!!! I will have to have a separate post for each image as I have now lost images and text three times and this tiny format for creating posts is starting to grate on my nerves. WTF.)

Houses

**************January 17 update

Thank to everyone for the wonderful comments on these pages!! The color scheme is a result of a very limited color pallet--my "mini studio" only has 12 bottles of paint, and the only primary is yellow! I used magenta, violet and purple for my houses, and the magenta and yellow created some orange--

It's been a long time since I've had color theory and design classes, but i have discovered that a 4-color analogous color scheme is quite dynamic because it also includes a complimentary color scheme--try it out with yellow, orange, red and violet (which is what mine is with the magenta representing the red) or maybe green, blue, violet and red....

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And two pages for the GPP Street Team Crusade 36:

http://michelleward.typepad.com/how_cool_is_that/