Parade The Circle

Everyone loves a parade—especially one that celebrates the arts. On our most recent Artfits field trip, Annette and Cathy and I headed over to University Circle to view the free community arts parade presented annually by the Cleveland Museum of Art. International and national guest artists joined Greater Cleveland artists, families, schools and community groups in a spectacular display of bright costumes, giant puppets, stilt-dancers, handmade masks and colorful floats. It was another beautiful day in Cleveland and the parade was truly a visual extravaganza.

This costume was stunning and swirled so gracefully down the street.

A fantastic giant puppet with hair spilling out like a fountain of color.

What could be more fun than another giant puppet?

Two giant puppets!

I think it's obvious that I adore colorful giant puppet creatures.

There were actually about 2,000 people who marched in the parade including this group who painted themselves blue!

It was another fabulous, fun-filled Artfits field trip. If you’d like to see more photos, click here to go to the Artfits blog or here to check out Flickr group photos.

Support Group For Artists

Everyone should have an artist support group. There's nothing better than hanging out with like-minded souls who understand why a new set of sparkle pens is enough to make your day...who are content to doodle with you in silence or brainstorm ideas for your latest project...who are ready to ditch housework in favor of field trips...who inspire you to try new techniques and explore new ideas...who never get tired of talking about art or making art. I'm fortunate to have found just such a group that we call ARTFITS. We get together every other week and spend several hours together working on individual projects such as altered books or journals. We also venture out on field trips such as sketchcrawls, art shows, and studio open houses. Since some of us work together, we even spend lunch hours doodling, sketching, or journaling.

I highly recommend finding or starting your own artist support group if you don't already have one. All you need is a place to meet and a couple of people who like what you like. If you don't have a space where you can work, consider getting together to share ideas and show and tell. Surround yourself with creative people and let the fun begin.

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!"