Summer of Color Week 5

Hard to believe that there is only one more week left to Kristin's fun Summer of Color Challenge!  This week's colors are Apple Red and Yellow.

I created a skyline, following the steps in this post.  

I was inspired by the moody skyline in this pin:

Here's how my skyline looked after gelli print collage and free hand sketching:

And here's how it ended up after glazing and adding text:

I never would have thought to have apple red and yellow in the sky - thank you Kristin!  If you're inspired to create your own skyline, I hope you'll let me know!

I wanted to share some exciting news with you.  I was recently featured on the Create Mixed Media blog in a feature called "Living the Creative Life."  You can read part one here, and part two here! 

Thank you to Rice Freeman-Zachary for inviting me to tell my story!

Also, I was honored to be in the designer spotlight at Simon Says Stamp and Show for this flag, inspired by Sue Pelletier and Jasper Johns:

I am leaving for Israel for 10 days, and have a few posts scheduled for while I'm away.  I hope to be able to share some pictures of my trip while I'm there!  

Thank you for visiting! I hope you will leave me a comment to let me know you were here. I read and treasure every comment and will answer any questions as quickly as I can.

Summer of Color Week 4 and a Free Download

Happy Summer of Color Week 4!  Thank you Kristin for hosting such a fun blog hop!  The theme this week is pink and charcoal grey.  I'm departing from drawing faces with this watercolor of calla lilies.

which of course bring to mind this famous scene from the movie "Stage Door,"

Ah, the marvelous Katharine Hepburn...

I'll be taking a break from blogging to celebrate the long weekend with my family and friends.  Hope you have a wonderful first weekend of July!  As a 4th of July gift, here's a patriotic little fellow which you are free to download for your personal use!

With his stripedy top hat, he's going to make a visit over to Journal Journeys.

See you next week!

Thank you for visiting! I hope you will leave me a comment to let me know you were here. I read and treasure every comment and will answer any questions as quickly as I can.

Summer of Color 2013 Purple Lime

I'm just squeaking in with an entry into Kristin's wonderful Summer of Color challenge for week 3:  Lime and Purple!

I think it's very easy to get discouraged with all of the poverty and cruelty we see in the world.  After all, that's all we read about or see in the news.  But when I was in Guatemala with From Houses to Homes, I was struck by how many people are there to help.  There are so many opportunities to do service in the world - and so many people participating in those opportunities.  Seeing all that around me made me feel blessed to be a human being - to have free will - and to be able to choose to give back and help out.

We truly have magic inside of us, if we choose to tap into it.  Magic to transform ourselves and the world around us.  That is the subject of the quote this month at Color This Quote at Artists in Blogland:

Happy July!  Are you flying a flag of independence and freedom this week?  If so, what does it look like?  I decided to fly a flag of equality, and created this piece, which you can read about here.

Thank you for visiting! I hope you will leave me a comment to let me know you were here. I read and treasure every comment and will answer any questions as quickly as I can.

Summer of Color

The lovely Kristin at Twinkle Twinkle is hosting the Summer of Color again!

This year, Kristin is putting the weekly colors up to a vote, making it very interactive!

The first week color combo was citron and turquoise:

I couldn't resist trying out my new HANDS stencil from Stencil Girl in the background.

 This week, the color combo is orange and hot pink!

The words say, "and as she moved through the world, it transformed into a beautiful garden."  There seems to be a theme of a girl (is it me?) and she may or may not keep appearing...

If you want to get in on the fun, go to Twinkle Twinkle where you can vote on the color combo for week 3 and check out the colorful work of lots of amazing artists!

Linking also to Mandarin ORANGE Monday, and Make it Monday.

And ...  in case you missed it, here's my guest post for One Little Word! 

Thank you for visiting! I hope you will leave me a comment to let me know you were here. I read and treasure every comment and will answer any questions as quickly as I can.

Why Crawl Through Life When You Have Wings to Fly?

If you are coming from My Desert Cottage you are in the right place for the blog hop!  Welcome to my blog.  Pics of my studio, such as it is, are at the end of this post.  But first:
12 Hours of Yoga!
I woke up today with every muscle in my body aching.  Yesterday I participated in the Garden State Yogathon.   Garden State Yoga is is the studio where I teach, and the studio gathered together teachers from all the area studios for a 12 hour yogathon (YES - 12 hours!) to raise money for 3 charities.  My team raised money for Off the Mat and Into the World. The Yogathon was very successful -- we raised over $30,000 for three terrific organizations.  Here are some pics (that's me in the pink top!).

Let's Go Fly a Kite:  

Inspiration Avenue's challenge this week was to do a design inspired by "flight."  The question posed was what do you think of when you hear the word fly or flight?  My first thought was "Let's Go Fly a Kite," from Mary Poppins.  I know it's not a particularly profound or deep association, but I over the years, I have watched Mary Poppins about 30 times (I have 2 daughters - 21 and 11!), so a kite is what immediately popped into my mind.  I had been wanting to work more on auraknot for the Diva's challenge, and this prompt inspired me to create a kite from that tangle.   As for the saying, my yoga philosophy has taught me to look at everyone around me as a holy angel, sent from "command central" to either show me the way or, through difficulties, teach me a valuable lesson.  As my teacher says, once you see everyone around you as an angel, you're an angel too.  (Here's a video link for seeing the divine in your everyday life.) So "why crawl through life, when you were born with wings?"


Here's a beautiful butterfly that was on my buddleia bush yesterday - a reminder that we all have the potential for flight inside of us.

Love Comes in Many Colors:

In 2009, a young man, Codie Blake, came to live with us.  His mother had been our babysitter and my friend, and she died on December 26, 2009, of complications from breast cancer.  Codie has become part of our family.  In a few weeks, Codie will be getting married.  On Wednesday night, we met his fiance's family.  Like Codie, she and her family are from from Jamaica.  Meeting them inspired me to create this in my art journal:  "Love Comes in Many Colors."   Because indeed, it does.  One Year in the Life of an Art Journal had sun in their prompt this week, so this design will be visiting that blog, as well as Creative Every Day and Paint Party Friday.  I also reformatted it for a greeting card for Mojo Monday's sketch challenge.  Let me know your thoughts about putting a mixed media page on a traditional background... I'm not sure if it works...

Where Bloggers Create:

Karen, at My Desert Cottage, has created a blog hop party called "Where Bloggers' Create."  We had until July 14 to spiff up our studios and photograph them.  If you click on the links in the right side bar of her page, you will be amazed at all the beautiful studios.  And Karen's is amazing! I'm embarrassed to say that mine is not spiffy at all -- I just kept going from one project to another, so when I photographed it, it was a mess.  But I create best when I am surrounded by all my materials.  So here it is:

In all the little drawers are designs created from my illustration work.  You can see stencils spilling out from some of the open drawers under my table.  Most of the books are reference books in different styles, and I have a lot of books about Jewish history, art and symbolism since that's a big part of my licensing work.  A big clean up is clearly in order!

Finally, thank you to Scrapping the Music, for naming me the winner in Challenge #202.  I am very honored.  If you haven't done STM challenges, the next one was just posted and involves the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and/or a song your mother sang to you.  I highly recommend visiting them and participating.  Song lyrics are such great creativity prompts!

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

PS - Here's my itinerary at CREATE New Jersey, starting Wednesday, July 18 (how nice of them to hold an art retreat on my birthday!):
Wed. July 18, 9-4: Find Your Beautiful Self Portrait
Thurs. July 19: 9 - 4:  Mini Masterpiece Canvas Journal
Thurs. July 19 - 6 - 9PM:  Scribble Paint
Friday: July 20: 9 - 4PM:  Carving Stamps for patterning
Let me know if we're in any of the same workshops!

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.