Getting out the paints

Hungry for the feel of a paintbrush in my hand, I dug out a pad of paper and some acrylic paints and gesso. Inspired by Modgliani portraits, I did a quick of a woman with a super long chin, one of the things he did. Just for fun. Then painted it. Ahhhhh.... it's been too long since I painted. This old orange easel is one I got from my brother long ago. It's proving to be quite handy on the porch, where paints can dry and the light is so good.

Lodi group exchange

the Lodi Mixed Media group decided to have a pot luck finger food brunch and a card/gift exchange. So we each made one thing. We gave each item a sticky note number and the corresponding number went into the hat to be drawn to find out who got which gift. I got this lovely piece by Barbara Schwartz. It is drawn on denim. I love it. "Santa" is Vivian modeling a woven kimono covered ade with a Chinese newspaper. It is covered with packing tape. She made this more than a decade ago. It is an amazing piece of work.

Holiday post card swap

A group of artists who originally met mostly at Art and Soul have formed a splinter group of women who live close enough to occasionally make art together. We call ourselves California Art Girls. We had a post card swap for the holidays, suggested by Beth from the Santa Cruz Mountains. I'll post a few pics tonite (Christmas Eve) and more tomorrow as time permits, between taking things in and out of the oven. The table is already set for tomorrow's dinner, so I've got things under control. Here are some of the cards.

More Christmas

I got behind posting pics of Christmas post cards and other cards that have come in. Sorry, but time flew by last week with all the little life traumas caused by electronic and mechanical failures in my household. The cards are all displayed in a nice red basket, and I love to glance through them again and again. These are the last two that arrived, so I'm showing them. The folded paper tree was done by Nancy, and the hand painted trees are by Phyllis. Thanks gals. I love the cards. How many ways are there to depict a Christmas tree? About as many as there are pine needles on the tree I'd guess.

Senior Center Art Show

Some of us who do art at the Senior Center on Monday mornings, shared some tables to show and sell some of our art. Here are pics of Francis and Jean, me wearing Francis' hat, and the cake walk - just one of the events planned for the day. It was a fun day. Since we were so fog bound all morning and we started at 8:30 - we didn't have as many people turn out as we had hoped. But, we had fun none the less and most of us had some sales as well.

Holiday mail flying in and out.

It's such a treat this time of year to find so much incoming mail from friends and family. The cards photographed on my patio table in the sun are just a few of the lovely things I've received this week. The vertical pic shows the line up of cards I sent out this week, 65 of them. The card with Peace on Earth is the one I designed for this holiday season. The red and white stripes use the same image and stamp.

Christmas angels

There was a tutorial mentioned on one of the online groups I belong to. It was how to make a christmas tree from a book. I decided to do it. But, while I was doing the folding, I thought I'd make an angel instead. Here it is.

Envelope Book - cats

This is an envelope book I made for my friend Sally who is a cat lover. She has three of her own, the cutest funniest little tuxedo cats you can find. And she volunteers at a Cat Shelter every week. I've been thinking about doing a cat book for her for some time, and one day as I was thinking about recycling junk mail envelopes, I decided to construct a book for her birthday. Here are the pics.

An envelope book

This is one of the new envelope books I just made. It was a birthday gift for my friend Pat. It is constructed of used junk mail envelopes. I had some wonderful vintage birthday post cards I tucked in, as Pat loves vintage as much as I do.

Thanksgiving cards

I got these from friends Pat and Char from Folsom and in Fair Oaks. Thanks for my Thanksgiving treats, gals.

More holiday decorations

Here's the latest batch of finished oraments. The little stockings are stamped and embossed, then colored with watercolor. The birds are on Watercolor paper, collaged, painted with gesso, rubbed back and stamped. I've done these before and used them for bookmarks. Guess they'll look good on the tree this year.

Rubber stamps

i guess I've fallen behind in posting pics of my newer carved stamps. I tried the self portrait again. I like the first one better. Here are some others that I'll find useful. Particularly the little mail man.

rubber stamp carving

I don't think I shared a little something I learned about carving rubber eraser stamps. Or the plastic type erasers. I found mine stuck to each other sometimes, and could not figure out why. I joined the Rubber Stamp Carving Consortium online and asked the question if others had experienced the same problem. Immediately several people responded with horror stories of how their had stuck to drawers, or each other. Seems some plastics and rubber can react to each other and one melts into the other. Some of my white eraser scraps stuck to the bottom of a plastic waste basket by my desk. Stuck firmly. In fact, welded themselves to it. So, the word is, plastics and rubber don't play nicely together. Be careful how you store them. I'll have to go back to the messages I got to see what storage methods people were using that didn't present any problems.

By the way my friend Roberta is starting to carve. I knew she'd have to try it sometime. Check out her work and the rest of her blog. She has long interesting posts with lots of pictures. Here's an old pic of her at the art bunglow a few years ago.