Picasso Dogs

It was fun to start out the week with a very relaxed , fun exercise out of Carla Sonheim's book "Drawing Lab" called Picasso Dogs. It got to be addicting! I did a whole bunch and I am just sharing a few.

Playing around in my moleskine

So my husband and son decide to take off for a little bit, and my daughter occupied on her game, I decided to get my new Watercolor Moleskine out to play. I grabbed a back issue of Smithsonian and found a picture of these whooping cranes and drew it out and painted it.  I didn't have any creative playtime at all yesterday-I broke my cycle  :( So today I HAD to do something, even though I didn't really have much time!

Been Playin' allllllll day

Well, most of the day anyway! I did some other Citrasolv Papers the other day and put them to use today!  I normally do NOT do any kind of landscapes........but these papers are SO perfect for this!
Once I paired it with some other items it sort of became an assemblage of sorts-and I love how this turned out :)

"Enchantment"
6x9 in size
Collage/Assemblage
Prepared papers, metal elements rusted with paint, machine stitching

Plugging Away........

on this assemblage, that is!  I got sick last week and was out of commission a few days-simply had no energy to work on anything art related.  But now the creative juices are running wild so I am back to work. Its in a drying stage at right now, and once its dried its back to work to add a little more :)

in the mood for hearts

In the spirit of Valentine's Day coming up, I was drawn to hearts today! I got my Gelli out to play!
I also played around with some Cedar Canyon Rubbing plates, and some Penscore Foam too!
Before I got started printing, I heated up some Penscore and pressed it into some various textures. I think my favorite is the old cheese grater :) I found that my embossing folders worked really well too! I especially LOVE the Tim Holtz ones put out by Sizzix!

Then onto printing (I used Deli Paper).  Like I said, inspired by hearts today :)

My daughter, the chicken whisperer

My son went out and found this young rooster near our coop...........crazy thing!  It was trying to get in the coop with our chickens.  Anyway-we think someone threw it over but being we are in city limits its not allowed..........so we threw it back over the fence. We don't want to be responsible for the cock-a-doodle-doos in the early morning hours :)
My daughter has this thing for the chickens. They LOVE her-its so crazy! She pets them and they are very relaxed with her. She spends alot of time with them. She cried because we could not keep him.

UPDATE: So the "Rooster" actually ended up being a Hen! Hubby actually found an egg that it layed. So I guess we are keeping it after all! HaHaHa

Loving me some rusty goodness!

I started this piece quite a while back.....maybe last year sometime. But then I drew a blank. A few days ago I was rummaging througy my assemblage junk and found it. Suddenly inspiration resurfaced! So starting yesterday I began working on it again.  So far here is my progress! I made alot of headway on it today and so far I am so happy with it. Once its completed I will take a better photo, where more of the actual color shows up better!

Today's splurge.....

Its been close to a year since I had a donut. I have resisted FAR too long. I have been EXTRA good, watching alot of what I eat. Donuts were on my big "Do Not Touch" list.  But I made myself draw them first-thats a good idea, right? Hmmmm.....I wonder how many miles I will have to run to get rid of these. I guess I shouldn't think about it :)

More Citrasolv Fun

So after doing those other pages I took a break, not planning to do anymore. Except, I couldn't keep my mind off it~!So what did I do? I did more, or course!  This time I painted the Citrasolv onto the pages , closed the magazine and let it sit a while.  Before I closed the pages, I threw some stencils in between the pages.  Here are a few of my favorites!

My house smells like Valencia Oranges......

....all thanks to Citrasolv!  I have long wanted to play with Citrasolv and National Geographic Magazines, but could never locate any Citrasolv locally.  So I finally bit the bullet and ordered some.

So glad I did! It arrived a couple days ago and I have been dying to try it out. So I dug out a few pages of some old National Geographics to mess around.  I found that the more recent issues worked better (like over the past 10 years or so). I did try a magazine from around 1999 but found that the Citrasolv had to sit on the page for longer before it started to make any kind of difference.   Here are  a few pages from my efforts today. I grabbed a couple of stencils (wish I had taken more with me) to play with-hence the circles :)  I took the advice and played with this stuff outside where it is ventilated. Once they started to dry I brought them in-but the smell is strong. At least it smells pleasant :)  I can't wait to play with this stuff more-and try out some different things.