A Special Request

My daughter's friend asked if I would send her a postcard with her favorite quote. How could I refuse someone who calls this her favorite quote?

Holy Dooley! I just Can't Stop!

I mailed two more Aussie slang postcards to my daughter at college. I'm not sure if she'll actually hear any of these expressions when she's there, but they certainly make for interesting and fun artwork.

Illustration Friday: Time

Here is my first attempt at the Illustration Friday challenge. This is a quote by Jeremy Irons that I messed up by accidentally adding in an extra word. Oops. I'll let you guess what the extra word is.

Artfits in Action

Artfits is the name of the altered book club that meets at my house twice a month and gives us an excuse to get together and play with art supplies. We've elected Casey our official photographer and she snapped a few action shots this week.

Here is an overview of our very crowded, very messy work table. Of course, we did make room for the yummy snacks that you can see off to the side. (It's a wonder we don't accidentally dip our paintbrushes in the chip dip!) You can see Kerri painting a page in her altered book.

Annette and I opted to work on our homework for collage journaling class this week rather than on our altered books. Here you can see Annette looking through magazines for images to clip and use in her collage journal. I'm pasting down some images in my journal and thinking about those chips just to my left. I bought an 8 1/2 x 11 journal for class which is larger than what I normally work in when I alter books. I'm surprised to find that I really like this larger format a lot more than I thought I would. I might even try an 11 x 14 journal the next time I buy a journal. Who knew?

Here's a picture of me and my burnisher, which is actually a plastic pot scraper that would normally be used in the kitchen. It's what our instructor, Judith, recommends for burnishing down collage images and I agree it works pretty well.

This is a picture of the pages that I did during our first collage journaling class. Judith brought a bunch of art books and magazines for us to clip images that appealed to us. We were supposed to do this activity quickly, acting on emotion, and compile a large stack of images to use. Next, we "blindly" pulled a random image from our stack and glued it on the spread. Judith asked a question after each pull which we could choose to answer in the journal or elsewhere. The only rule was that each image we added had to touch another image in some way. The random pull aspect was a fun way to get started and took the pressure out of having to make choices. As Judith said, "It's just paper and glue!"

Intersections: Collage Journaling and Creative Performance

That's the name of the class I'm taking with my friends, Cathy and Annette, that starts tomorrow evening. The course description says "The variety of collage and writing techniques are intended to stimulate risk-taking in private reflection and encourage a metaphoric approach to making meaning." Good. I need a little stimulation in the risk-taking department. Especially when it comes to journaling. I'm OK with the visual part, but not with the words and writing part. I really need some help in that area. The description also says "The last 3-4 weeks of class will focus on using the journal work as a foundation for work intended for the public." I can't wait to get started and totally throw myself into the process of collage journaling and creative performance.

My art bag is packed and I'm ready to go!