Wednesday Mashup & Gratitude

Think how snug it'll be underneath our flannel;
When it's just you and me and the English Channel!
In our cozy retreat kept all neat and tidy,
We'll have chums over ev'ry Friday!
By the sea!
Don'tcha love the weather?
By the sea!
We'll grow old together!
By the seaside,
Hoo, hoo!
By the beautiful sea!

I had the song "By The Sea" from Sweeney Todd stuck in my head (here's the track on You Tube) as I sat down at my table on Wednesday.  I have had a set of 4 6x6 canvasses from Michael's for months, and decided I had to use them.  It's a little scarey for me to actually commit to a canvas, but what are Wednesday Mashups for?  I stared at them for a while.  They were so white and pretty.  I didn't want to mess them up....  But then, I jumped in, covering them with matte medium and tearing off pieces of paper that were left over from other projects and gluing them on.  On the upper and lower left hand squares are pieces of paper from the modeling paste experiment a few weeks ago, and on the lower right square, some paper on which I tried out some reverse stenciling techniques with spray mists.  The mists I had used were green and blue, and that tinted my water turquoise, and the squares began to take on a sea like color.  BY THE SEA!!

 

I decided to go with that theme, and squirted on blue, light blue and green paint:

 

and spread it around with a credit card.

 and grabbed whatever stencils were handy (you'll recognize Balzer Designs' leaves), as well as some bubble wrap and the plastic mesh from yesterday's bag of clementines, and laid down darker versions of those colors. 

Then I cut some whales, anchors, lobsters, and fish out of card stock. ( I've had in my mind the beautiful graphic image Julie Fei-Fan Balzer posted of a lobster sign she saw in Provincetown.)

 I sprayed and painted the cardstock shapes over some newspaper (and saved it for a future project), and also glued down some shells and beads I've been saving, and here is my collage of paintings!

and some close ups:

I'm so happy with them!!  And to illustrate my happiness (and to use up the leftover paint I had on my pallete, I painted some more! I had a background in my journal that I hadn't known what to do with.  It looked like this - yuck.  But inspired by the challenge to use lavender and lace over at Anything Goes, I added a lavender vase, stenciled it using a lace doily (apologies to my grandma...), and paint-doodled some flowers and letters to spell out "Oh Happy Day!" to celebrate my good mood.  (Obviously, I still have those Wild n' Reckless sherbert colors in my head from Summer of Color!)  Because the sentiment is the main focus here, I will enter this happy design in Moving Along With the Times' challenge to make it sentimental, and of course all the work will visit Paint Party Friday!

On a personal note, as some of you know, my dad has been dealing with some health issues.  He seems to have a handle on them and is back to playing tennis and enjoying life.  Still, it has been a sobering experience and a reminder of how easy it is to take life for granted.  And all around me, the parents of my dear friends are struggling with some much more serious health issues, like strokes, alzheimer's and heart disease.  So I am dedicating my work today to sending out love for our parents.  If you're so moved, please stop and take a moment to be grateful for the people in your lives, like parents and other teachers, who have given you so much love and support, and who have taught you so much.  If you would like some inspiration, here is a video by Lama Marut about gratitude:

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Mashup Wednesday

This is what my studio looks like mid creation -- paint everywhere, pens flying, bits of paper, dirty brushes...  And then I clean up, and try to restore the space to a semblance of order.  I decided that one way to "clean up" is to force myself to actually use whatever is remaining on my desk, rather than putting it away and just forgetting about it.  What would happen if I throw it all together and see what comes out?  So yesterday, I had what I'm going to call a "Mashup Wednesday."  

Here's what was on my desk and spilling out of my scrap box:  I casually arranged it on a two page spread in my journal:

 

Seeing this all together -- the greys, greens and pink, reminded me of a picture of three bottles that I had cut out of a magazine and hadn't found a way to use.  Here's part of the picture.  The colors are not ones I would usually combine: 

 

After taking a picture of my "composition," I removed the scraps from my page and scraped paint and gesso around with a credit card using Americana Foliage Green, Plaid Folk Art Hot Pink, and Accent Country Colors Liberty Blue.  I was inspired by this video by Roben-Marie, and this one by Nathalie Kalbach,  both of which were featured in this Web Round Up post yesterday from Balzer Designs:

 

After scraping and painting, I glued down my scraps approximating the original layout and a put a secret journaling flap in the middle:

 

I added some pieces of old book pages and tried to figure out what to do with some green dots I cut out of a tag I had painted last week:

 

It felt like it needed more graphics - so I added some flowers, a silhouette, and more boldly colored scraps:

 

 But now I had hardly any light spaces for writing, so I made some "clouds" out of torn envelopes for journaling:

 

I realized that my "secret" journaling flap wasn't so secret if it had a had "See Inside" arrow pointing right to it, so I added "do not" to the arrow (Sam, this means you!).  I also added the tops of the bottles on the top left of the right side of the page:

 

Sadly, the cute kitten and the rams faces disappeared, but I know they are there.  My next reaction was to add more flowers:

 and leaves and doodles, and Julie's punchinella stencil, and some writing, and voila, a page was born.  Don't know what the left hand side will be yet, but I'll share it when it's done. Outlining the bottles and adding stitching to the silhouette really made them pop.  Thanks Ronda for that tip!

 

I couldn't resist altering it a bit in Photoshop to make a birthday card:

 

It's so true that we need the company of others, as well as time to ourselves, to find balance.  Finding the perfect blend of stillness and activity, interacting outwardly and looking inwardly, the union of opposites, make for a balanced and happy life.  

My "takeaways" from my Mashup Wednesday:

1.  using up is a good way to clean up;

2.  using whatever's in front of you is a great way to discover color combinations outside of the usual repetoire;

3.  letting the materials make the plan is kind of fun;

4.  the "end product" often doesn't look like the beginning and that's fine.

If you decide to do a Mashup day, please let me know and leave a link to your work.  I'd love to see it.

UPDATE -- Forgiveness is obviously very much on my mind.  Here's a great (very short) video about it.  Don't know why Lama Marut is frozen in such a funny pose, but the video is very good!

Thank you so much for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

So Much to Feel Good About

Dad and Freddie on Father's Day

This weekend was father's day.  My parents make a point of not celebrating what they call "Hallmark holidays," but, truth be told, my dad loves when we "recognize" him on this day.  And there is so much to recognize about him!  He was the child of Polish Jewish immigrants who came to the US (illegally I might add) in between the two world wars, with nothing in their pockets.  Moving in with relatives in Brooklyn, NY, they watched from afar while their village in Lodz, Poland, was decimated by the Nazis.  My dad raised pigeons on his roof, and was somewhat of a high school delinquent.  (He and his 4 best friends had a contest to see who could graduate high school with the lowest GPA!) But then, after working on the docks, he decided to turn his life around, and ended up graduating from Brooklyn Law School at the top of his class, as editor in chief of the law review.  He also, in his late teens, learned how to play tennis, starting a lifelong passion that has led him to successive Maccabi games in Israel as captain of the men's senior tennis team.  In July 2013, he will be inducted into the Jewish Athletes' Hall of Fame in Tel Aviv!  He has always seen life as full of possibilities. 

One of his greatest gifts to me is teaching me about the power of forgiveness -- view life's trials as lessons to learn from, and then let them go and move on.  To quote from a wonderful book, "A Spiritual Renegade's Guide to the Good Life," "We cannot be happy in the here and now if we continue to harbor grudges and remain full of bitterness, sadness, and anger about what others have done to us in the past."  My dad has lived this, and has always focused on what is good in life.  And we have so much to feel good about.

This phrase is in the song "It's a Good Life," by One Republic,  the subject of Scrapping the Music's challenge this week.  "We have so much to feel good about."  It's so true and I wish everyone would remember how much we have to be grateful for.  On this page, I altered 3 pictures of my beautiful daughters (my older one is not going to like the fact that it looks like she's wearing a burkha...), added lyrics from the song, and filled the background with "cadent," the Zentangle® that is the prompt for the Diva challenge this week.   Looking at this page makes me so happy that I am going to enter it in the Try it On Tuesday challenge too!  My girls are such a blessing in my life.  And not to leave out my mom, I doodled this over the weekend! I realized that "mom" upside down is "wow."  And my mom wows me all the time.

Albert Einstein said: "There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle."   I choose the latter!

Thank you so much for visiting and, hopefully, commenting. It means the world to me!

Bloom Where You're Planted

Another day, another challenge.  This time, from A Year in the Life of an Art Journal.  The challenge is to use the prompt: "Bloom Where You're Planted," and to use flower embellishments or stickers.  So here's what I did:
1. cover page with gesso and scrape it with the side of a credit card to get texture.
2. use that credit card to move around blue, white and some green paint for a background. 
3. use a circle stencil and a baby wipe to scrub away paint to reveal white gesso underneath.
4. think about using, but then reject, flower embellishments and go for drawing flowers with a Pitt Pen.
5.  paint the flowers with acrylic and Sakura Souffle pens.
6.  Mask off flowers and stamp some small circles using yellow acrylic paint on the stamp.
7. Add more circles with a white uniball pen.
8. Add the phrase with a mixture of my handwriting and letter stamps.

I loved working on this prompt because it fits right in with my yoga practice.  We so often look for happiness in external things -- a new job, new relationship, new clothes or tech gadgets.  These things might give us a jolt of pleasure, and then the sensation wears off and we look for the next thing.  But until we are content wherever we are and with whatever we have -- until we can bloom wherever we're planted -- lasting happiness will always escape us.  For a great video on this, check out one of my favorite teachers, Lama Marut.
Thanks for visiting!