In the Studio at last!

 I was so excited to get a few days to play at my art table.  My art club is doing a monthly swap this year with altered cabinet cards/post cards.  I had this postcard of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with their wild bunch.  I sent this one to Sara and she wrote back, "I did not know they had posed for a photo.  They look like bankers..... wait, they were "bankers".....robbers of banks!"  The "wild bunch" label is the thing that triggered my image of them in party hats.  The cap is from a Miller Life and reads:  "High Life".  I'm sure they thought they were living the high life.......very short life, as it turned out.

      I also worked on Sara's art journal pages.  There are five of us from our art club living in the Tulsa area.  Well, were five of us.  Sara and family moved to Minneapolis due to her daughter's health.  I miss her terribly, but we keep in touch through emails and art exchanges.  Sara and I have been working in art journals for a few  years now and always wanted the art club to get into this obsession with us!  ")  This year the five of us decided to do our own collaboration with art journals.  Each one sent the others pages to be done for their art journal.  We have until this fall to finish these pages......well, before the holidays begin with Thanksgiving.  I finished the ones for Sara last week.  This one features the butterfly.  I wrote the quotation from Buckminster Fuller in English on the purple page and then did a computer translation into French to write on the card that I tucked into the ruffled cheese cloth across the bottom of the page.  I had used this cloth to wipe up the paints on my craft sheet and decided to use it on the page.

 For this page I used three different colors of  acrylic paints to make the background.  I used black Staz On ink to stamp the alphabet at the upper right.  I also stamped circles and stars randomly on the page.  I love this quote that I wrote around a circle I had drawn on the page: "It takes a long time to grow an old friend."  John Leonard.  I had this clock face in a pile of stuff on my table and thought it was perfect for this page.  I also had a round tag lying there and added it to the top.  The white strips are the dividers that go between the postage stamps on the booklets that we buy at the post office.  I also added some black nail heads to the page.

The quotation I wrote on this page reminds me of my father telling us that there are two kinds of learning: "book learning and life learning.  Both are necessary, but life skills will get you through."  This one says:  "Much learning does not give you understanding".  I think raising three girls proved that to me!  I used black ink to stamp the moon at the bottom of the page and the circles randomly on the page.  I also stamped part of the alphabet at the lower right side of this page.  I added the pocket with the star on it and made tags with words/definitions to go inside.  I had stenciled stars on the background before I added anything else.                                                                               If you haven't tried art journaling, sit down, paint a page or cover it with pretty papers or just doodle.  Look around your table or desk and pick up a few things and glue them down.  Maybe you'll have one of those "aha!" ideas and a thought or quote will pop into your mind.  Add that to your page and you'll be surprised how well you like it!  And you're the only one that has to like it!!!