Time is drawing nigh (boy, how often do you get to say "nigh"?!?) for me to put the Sketchbook 2012 project in the mail, in time for it to travel with all the other sketchbooks to various locales around the country.  I thought it might be fun to share some of the layouts with you... I hope you like them. (Keep in mind I may end up adding to some of the pages, tweaking them just a bit.) It has been a departure from my traditional "signature" style of collage, and it's really been fun.  

(BTW, clicking on the images will open them up in a larger window).  

A lot of the cut out images came from paper samples from an xpedx paper show, and were very carefully cut out (note Rocky Racoon's whiskers above left).  

Same with this page spread... the flowers on the left were cut out and applied over a very busy page that I made even busier by writing all over it, and on the page on the right.  How cute are the little bumble bee men on the top of the right hand page?

This spread is a little goofy, but it's meant to be humorous... the bike and the wording "slow your roll" were recycled from a bicycle catalog.  I prefer the spread on the right... I love the ampersand and the pink flower to the left of it.  

In this spread I love the porcupine, and trust me, he took forever to cut out!!!  Those quills are sharp! :D  

I absolutely LOVE paper and the quality of the samples from companies like Finch, Appleton, French and Domtar are superb!  Both the paper quality and the image quality are absolutely first rate in my opinion!

I love this spread... the face on the left is just so cool, with the colorful image of the world superimposed...   The flower on the right side was another of those really labor intensive cutting jobs!  

This is a bit of a silly layout... have you picked up on the repeating stripes that appear on a lot of the pages?  The stripes came from a printed catalogue from UofM's School of Public Health that was really nicely done.

more images placed in no particular place... just for fun!

The cougar images that appear here and there are from Domtar's line of papers called, appropriately so, "Cougar".  It is a gorgeous paper that takes ink just beautifully.

I really like the spread on the right page... the colors work really well together. The spread on the left made me think of the movie Babe, which is one of my all time favorites!  Babe... "a little pig goes a long way".

This is one busy spread... the two little old ladies in the bottom left are my great-grandmother and her sister... they reportedly loved nature so I put them outside! :D

next to last pages...

The back cover is on the left and the front cover is on the right. I think the  front cover in particular needs some love! Perhaps I'll have to make some sort of title for the book that mentions how much I love letters!

I hope if the traveling Sketchbook Project 2012 comes to a city near you that you'll take the time to go see the books!  

Is a really neat way of sharing your artwork with the world... here's some more information on the project, hosted by the  Brookly Art Library:

 

Join the community. The Sketchbook Project is a collaboration that unites a unique community of creative people from across the globe. Exchange tips and techniques, share visual inspiration or just make a new friend.

Share your story. The Sketchbook Project is an opportunity to express yourself to a global audience. Participants can upload a bio and share future projects, personal links and stories with other creative people.

The Digital Library travels far and wide. With hundreds of thousands of visitors and climbing, the Digital Library is an amazing platform to share your work with a wider audience. Choose to have your book professionally digitized and we'll give it a home on the Web.

The Brooklyn Art Library is your home. Our storefront exhibition space will archive your sketchbook and make it available to patrons from all over the world. We're open every day, so please come and visit us soon.

After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view.

I thought I'd share preliminary pages from my sketchbook, which still needs a lot of work in order to be completed... (The large expanse of orange on the left is the inside of the cover of the journal)...

Here's the first page of my sketchbook... if you click on the image, it will open in a larger format...  This is in someways the most random collage work I've ever done... there really is no rhyme or reason for how it's put together or what images I chose to use... I simply used whatever appealed to me at the moment, given what I had on hand...

 Next spread:

This little book needs to be completed by the end of January, if I want it to go on tour with the rest of the journals, so I have to get busy...

I'll keep you informed of the progress...  It's a really neat project and I'm pretty excited to be a part of it... usually I'm scrambling to finish things two days before the deadline, but not this time! 

Now, go make something!

The color was put down using Golden liquid Acrylic paints with some Super Loaded Matte Medium added to it, which helps keep the paint from getting sticky, and leaves a great surface on which to write. The word JOY was written with acrylic ink and a folded pen, and the white letters were written with a gel pen.  There's some metallic marks on the page which doesn't scan in well at all, and the little spotted areas were made with a rubber type of shelf lining that leaves that sort of impression.  Pretty nifty, huh?!?

Not all my journal pages are this well put together, if you know what I mean, but I sure would like them to be! And truthfully, I could do more to "dress" this up, but I'm not going to mess with it any further... 

So Happy New Year, friends!  I hope you have set some gentle resolutions for yourself, the kind you can keep with JOY in your heart and the kind that will help you learn new techniques and grow as an artist. 

I like to use elements in green and red and white or cream, that may or may not even have anything at all to do with our typical or expected Christmas images, simply for a little variety and something unexpected. 

On the first envelope, I used a strip from a vintage dictionary, glued down under the hearts, and intentionally chose the words "merry" and "merry making" to use on this Christmas envelope.

 If you look closely, the middle envelope has a dark green strip on it that is a scrap left over from some painted tyvek I used for a completely different project.  

And on the bottom envelope, I used a scrap of handwriting from a 100+ year old German journal (it's a little bit hard to see, sorry).

 It's not exciting, but it is unique... and in this world of mass produced products it's kind of nice to put your own signature on your own work, no matter how small!

Now, go have yourself a very 

It is my current favorite way to explore the web and find tons of new things to look at and learn about... just what I need, I know... I'm already pretty scattered as far as things I love to do!

This is from my bulletin board "Four-legged friends" and it was originally posted at Gibson King.

How darling is that?!?

This little gem was originally posted at Your Daily Dose.  

Seriously, could this be any cuter?

And this very pretty and unusual advent calendar treatment is from Teresa Collins.

Really nicely done, right?!?

So these are just a few of the finds on Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board where you can post or "repin" images you find that you like.  It really is a terrific way to find beautiful images you might not otherwise happen upon, and you know how one thing can lead to another and to another and to another, right?  I just wish I'd been the one to come up with this outstanding idea!  

Now, go  something and have fun!

This little bouquet of flowers came from my garden yesterday where I was working with my husband to do some cleaning up and replanting of potted perennials... it's quite precious to me, especially since it's the last one I'll have from this year's garden.  Pretty much all of July was so blasted hot this year, that I lost enthusiasm and didn't water the garden like I should've, so from then on it's looked kind of dismal.  Perhaps that's why this little bouquet tickled me so!  

I hope your day is wonderful and thank you for stopping by! 

This is a journal page I did a little while back, made up of colored gesso, dress pattern pieces, stenciled images, painted tyvek, and a magazine image. 

So, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?  Do you ask yourself the same kinds of questions? 

It's a question worth asking yourself... the late Steve Jobs expressed it very well when he said:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

 Too cool! SUCH a nice visit!!!  

We played three hands of Gin Rummy, & Cait won, it was a tough loss for both Tim & I.

Bagpipe man, circled in red, below...

This is SO charming!  And I have no idea who did the work or why, but I sure do appreciate the talent! These two "bank customers" definitely brightened up my day!

After taking an absolutely terrific workshop recently from Jacqueline Sullivan, I've been trying new things in my journal pages, and I thought I'd share the results with you. 

 (This is a photo of Jacqueline, showing some of our backgrounds).

This is the early stages of one of the pages.  The first thing we did was to paint the pages with black gesso and let it dry.  Then we covered that with a layer of diluted Golden Absorbent Ground, and built up layers on top of that, using Golden acrylic paints and various acrylic inks.

Here is the same page many layers later:

(Honestly, this page is not quite such a shade of baby poop green!)

I can't really say if I'm happy with this page or not, I kind of feel like it's still a work in progress.  But I've enjoyed the process, and I guess that's what is really important.  I've learned some new skills and am trying some new techniques, and most of all, I've had fun doing so.  

This is another page that has very little writing on it at this point, and I have absolutely no idea where it will go from here, but this page I'm fairly happy with just like it is.  

(Unfortunately, the color reproduction is not necessarily accurate.  In the steps from scanning the artwork to posting it, and then taking into account different browsers and different monitors, I doubt what you see is exactly what I see; but you get the idea, right?)

So I'd like to encourage you to go get your journals or some watercolor paper, and just play.  Try something new today, and if you don't like it, remember you can cover it up with gesso.  If you still don't like it, add a new layer of paint or pastels, or paper.  

  (And let me know if you've done something you're happy with, ok?!?)