Upcoming Index Card challenge on Daisy Yellow blog

I am excited to participate on this upcoming Index Card art challenge on Daisy Yellow Blog.  It starts this Friday – 1^st of June, but you can dive in any time later. You need to buy a pack of lined Index Cards, 3”X5” or 4”X6”, and create art on one card for 2 months (61 days – 61 cards). There will be optional themes given for each day. The idea is to keep making art, every day, in a simple, affordable, stress free way. Just doodling or complex art – no rules.

Here are my cards, already waiting to be explored and altered into endless possibilities. Such fun!

ATCs – my new artistic endeavour

I’ve heard about ATCs, but never really knew what it is, until Irene Raphael contacted me in February 2013 with an offer to join international group of 7 people and swap them every second month. I am always excited like a child about every new artistic opportunity, so I dived in, although working on such small scale (2.5”X3.5”!) was kind of scary thing to do. But I must say I really am in love with ATCs after making few of them. Our admin  - talented artist John Arbuckle, gives us a theme as a starting point. April theme was History, on which I did a series of Frida Kahlo ATCs, and June theme was Idioms – boy did I have fun with this one. My April History Theme. These were done as transfers on canvas, that was glued to the paper to make it sturdy. On top of the trasfers I collaged paper napkins with acrylic gel medium:

My June ATCs on theme "Idioms":

Left to right top to bottom: Get yourself in her shoes, It's a small world, Off the record, Get yourself in her shoes, Greening the mind, It takes two to tango.

Left to right top to bottom: Once in a blue moon, Feeling blue, There is something fishy about her, Out of the blue, Once in a blue moon, There is something fishy about her.

Left to right top to bottom: Start from scratch, In the heart of the moment, Start from scratch, On cloud nine, A bird in a hand better than two in the bush, In the heart of the moment, It takes two to tango, Walk the extra mile, Rise and shine.

Left to right top to bottom: 5 of them are "She is a flower-child", last one is "Once in a blue moon".

Additional ATCs that I made for swap on Trodden Path, with theme "Winged Children":

Collaborative with Jeanne-Marie Webb

I loved Jeanne-Marie Webb style of painting, so asked her if she would be interested in doing collaborative painting with me. So glad that she agreed! The idea was to create two identical pieces, one for me and one for her, then I sent her one, and began working on second one. I was curious how far would we go in our on directions starting with original piece? Here is the result we’ve got so far. I must say I really love her version and find it interesting that at this stage she chose night and I chose day. My progression is on the left and hers – on the right from the starting point in the middle.

Misty Mawn -- artist I admire

I rarely become anyone’s fan, and have no favourite actor or singer, but I can honestly say (and I even blush admitting it), that I am a big fan of Misty Mawn. I adore her artwork, and probably saved all images I could find online into my folder “Misty Mawn”. I just checked, it’s 192 paintings in that folder. Cheez, it’s almost stalking on my part. There are several things that amaze me about her art: 1. Subject matter: these otherworldly, angel-like girls, pure and innocent looking, right down into your soul. 2. Technique: layer after layer after layer, tremendous build-up of texture and absence of lines, only forms, and if you have seen videos on her workshop – you’ll know what I mean. 3. Light: her addiction to white… well… addictive. That amount of light in her artworks, that touches you with its innate purity, always makes me wonder if it’s reflection of her beautiful soul. There you go, I made a confession. Please do share yours. Some of artworks by Misty Mawn. You can check out her blog here.

Shopping tags - my favourite found objects

My affair with shopping tags goes on for years. It sprang from the love of shopping itself, of course. I would buy an item of clothing, and then would stare at its tag, rubbing it with my fingers, unable to through it into the dustbin. And so collecting began, without even thinking about what to do with all these treasures. There came a day when one of them was in my hands while journaling and so I glued it on. Imagine taking a "Homemade" tag off a jar of jam and pasting it into a journal page about your baby? Kids are "homemade" after all. Eventually I acquired many tags through personal shopping and from other people. Here is one of my boxes, full of them, sorted by colour, waiting to be incorporated into my art. Almost every journal page of mine has at least one of them glued in. I usually choose it for my artwork not only by colour, but by message, as they often have intricate logos and names with inspiring meaning: Rage, Instinct, Tango, Girls Rule, Dream Baby, Poetry, Free People, Phenomena, to name but a few. And it’s not only colour and message that is inspiring about shopping tags, it’s also texture – amazing variety of tactile qualities: fabric, paper, textured cardboard, plastic and leather tags. I would often take a shopping tag before even starting an art page, and its name would inspire the whole theme of my artwork. This journal entry is an example of background made of tags, black ones on the left, white ones on the right, whole two pages filled with them. They were glued, overlapping each other. Then I drew white and black grids in acrylics, glued photos and outlined them with red oil pastel. One square was overpainted in white acrylic and words written on it with black pen.