Leafygal

More Exposure!

I am fairly overwhelmed at having another  artwork honoured, by the Gluebooks this time.
My Ivory and Sepia page spread is currently featuring as the homepage art.

I am scurrying to finish the Fat Book swap so I can sent it off to the US and I'm dying to get my copy of the book back. I've finished the designs over the watercolour backgrounds and had them copied so here they are.

Watercolour Collage

Yesterday was an orgy of artworks for me.
I have made a new sheet of watercolour backgrounds for the Fat Book Swap.  They look fairly "Lairy" at the moment, but hopefully once I start adding things over them they'll tone down  a bit.
I pasted the existing finished ones onto card ready for cutting up and embellishing. Experimented with attaching little tags using decorative brads

Also finished some more glue book pages

"Ugly is only skin deep" (Rust), Chocolate Indulgence,Tasty Ideas

(Magenta), Perfect Tan

More Gluebooks

I've been having a lot of fun doing the colour for the day for the June Gluebooks challenge.
After loading Red to the group and getting some very nice feedback our scanner gave up the ghost.
On Saturday I  bought a new scanner which also copies, prints, prints or scans from slide or 35mm film and does the dishes (I wish!!)
The scanner is brilliant and will get a good workout.
I've also added a photo album to this weblog.
Here are some of my gluebook efforts.  See if you can guess the colours!!! :-)

Golden Moments,  Do you Blush Passionate Pink?  Vivid!  Imagine,   Drought ,  I lost my Feet...(Green)    Fragrance Icon (Lavender)    Bubble Bubble Bubble,  Too many Cooks (Silver), Objects of desire (Grey),  Vibrant Violet,  Little Black Dress

Catching up with friends

Last Monday was a Public Holiday for the Queen's Birthday and we finally caught up with our dear friends J & R.  Sister Pru was here as well.
We have all been very busy lately with all sorts of distractions from the business of living and J & R have had a move into their new home as well as an elderly & grandchildren to keep up with.

We lunched at the very lovely Julian's Restaurant at the Bellarine Estate Vineyard between Drysdale and Portarlington.
Most delightful food, superbly presented and reasonably priced.
Each item on the menu was paired with a glass of estate wine, a lovely way to try them out.
We will be back!

Sooooo Excited.....

Just found out that my Red Daisy page from  my altered Book has been chosen to feature on the Altered Books Homepage today.  I am sooo excited and encouraged to think that it was deemed good enough to be "up there" with the artists who have been doing this for some time.

I've also had some cheering responses to my Red Pleasures Gluebook page. For June we are being given a colour each oay to represent in the gluebook.
I've been keeping up to date and have done  Golden Moments,  Do you Blush Passionate Pink?  Vivid (Orange)   Imagine (Aqua),   Drought (Ochre)   I lost my Feet...(Green)    Fragrance Icon (Lavender)    Bubble Bubble Bubble (Blue)  and am just about to do Violet.

It is great fun using up junk mail and catalogues that would otherwise get thrown out unused.  It is also a very quick thing to do once you have some pictures and words cut out and stashed away.  The journal I'm using is a cheapy spiral bound A5 size from Safeway, but if this proves to be my thing I may invest in one with more sturdy pages so I can use paint on them as well.

Sadly our scanner has decided to give up the ghost and I can't send any more pages at the moment so everyone will just have to wait!!

Gluebooks

The gluebooks group are setting a new page theme each day.
1st June was RED, 2nd Yellow and 3rd Pink
I have started my book with the red page. I don't think it is all that successful as I don't yet have an extemsive collection of cutouts to use, but here it is anyway.
Hope to do yellow and pink on Monday

Used cutouts fom junk mail catalogues and some background wrapping paper and watercolour pencils to fill in.

Artistic endeavours

I think I've worked out how to scan and massage my art works.  Now I can publish them here and in my arty group files.
These are the collages that emerged to embellish the watercolour backgrounds.
(Here are the backgrounds I did earlier, just to remind you!)

Finished works are going to be sent in to a Fat Books swap from the Artexplorations group.  This means that I will receive back a bound volume with a copy of every participant's work - still awaiting final number but it will be over 50. So exciting - the first time I have been involved in such a group event.
"Aunt Pamela" - collage, wax crayon, stamps,hand lettering, gold gel pen, black ink.
This started from a printout of a clip art picture My printer wasn't printing red and the resulting colour was quite interesting. I added more imperfect prints and enhanced some with colour crayons. The words were found in a catalogue and seemed to finish it nicely.

"Dust to Dust" was cut from a decoupage paper sheet and embellished with gold inks, Watercolour pencils, stamps and another catalogue word sequence

"Shattered" developed from a coloured piece of card with a pale blue and white stripe through it. I decided that it would be interesting to "shatter" it and that led to the final result. Hand lettering was done with silver and white inks and background had silver and gold triangular shapes added.

"Pterodactyl"  - lots of fun with the background using wc pencils, wax crayons, gold and white inks.
Main image was stamped onto rough paper and further images stamped direct to the sheet. White and gold inks on the image.
I like the rather dark and mysterious effect.

"Gardening Angel" - I added a sliver of one of my mother's precious paper serviettes to complement the  watercolour, then added the angel stamp just because I had it!  More playing with the gold pen (I like this!) and some hot pink ink.  Title done in Page plus and printed out.

The colours reminded me of the beach and I found this Picture which started  "La Dolce Vita" 
I was in to cutting things apart and did this to allow the background to show through. Added beach hut stamp and turtle. The film titles came from the Astor Theatre's 6 monthly Poster which I saved when the current one arrived.

One thing leads to another...

Following on from Altered Books (AB's) and Watercolour Collage (now reincarnated as the group ArtExplorations,)  I have been seduced into yet more categories of artistic endeavour.

Flirting with mail art in the form of 4"x6" (inch) postcards,   Artist Trading cards (ATC's) and now Gluebooks...

"Gluebooks are a cross between art journals and collage. Collect the paper fallout from your daily life, and turn it into art!"

Gluebooks are described by Lisa Vollrath  as
"... basically of collage journals. They do incorporate other types of artwork like drawing and painting, but for the most part, the basis of the gluebook is---surprise---gluing things to the pages. Everyday things, mostly---flyers, receipts, tickets, fast food fallout. These things are the building blocks of the day's artwork. The visual becomes the description of the day, rather than the written word. There tends to be only minimal writing done in these books, but visually, they do tell a story."

Artist Trading cards are much smaller - the size of a playing card in fact and can incorporate the whole gamut of artistic expresssion.

I'm slowly getting my studio organised so I can flit from one format to the other as I have a little time to spare.  Looking forward to sending pics of my work, although progress is likely to be somewhat slow!!