More Pages from My "Teesha" Journal

WOW! I just looked back at my posts and saw that I started my journal based on Teesha Moore's Fantastic 16 page Journal videos in May. It's closing in on September and I still have a page or two to go, but I just finished this two page spread and I love it! More to come!!

I've used paper doll clothing, faces from ball jointed dolls, eyes from fashion magazines and border papers from various sources: magazine pages, scrapbook paper, etc. The pages are painted with watercolor washes and then rubbed with pastels. The pen work was done with the black and white Sharpie water based poster paint markers that Teesha recommended. I found those at Dick Blick online. I even managed to squeeze in some rubber stamp fishies and the moon face from Artful Illusions.

"Just Like a Pill" Musically Challenged Entry

Having arrived at this point in my life without ever seeing some of the music videos that are being offered up as inspiration for artwork, I find them quite stimulating. A fellow Smeared and Smudged crafter, Kapree, has started a blog Musically Challenged which offers a new video to work from every two weeks. Additionally the Smeared and Smudged forum offers a monthly video in their challenge group.
The Musically Challenged video for the current two week period is Pink's "Just Like a Pill" and here is my interpretation. All of the work was done in Photoshop CS5. The hallway walls were created using a stamp from The Stamping Ground morphed into perspective and then flipped to create two sides. The floor is a pieces of a stamp from Lost Coast. The figure is constructed from several of the mix and match figures in the book/CD Manga Females Clip Art, a lovely gift from my friend Pam. The costuming is by me. Bits and pieces - light bulb, pill, pill bottle, and bodies are from the internet.

If you've just happened along here be sure to check out the Musically Challenged blog. Great fun!!

Day 28 of the 31 Days of Halloween

The living room is the fifth room of my cigar box dollhouse and is populated by Count Dracula and his many bats.  I know you can only see three but they are nesting everywhere - in the curtains, the piano, under the couch. They drive the dogs crazy so the Count must leave lots of bones around to distract Vlad and Bram.

I couldn't seem to find a vampire that wasn't cartoony or that I was allowed to use with other stamps so I fell back on my Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers faceless one and Pam drew this handsome vampire face for me. Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers is now a division of Stamp Francisco - they have scarfed up a lot of the early stamp companies and have an amazing collection of vintage looking stamps! The dogs and curtains are polymer clay. And be sure to zoom in on the detail photo and look at that cool coffee table - an internet find! All the paper furniture and figures have been fussy cut and layered with at least three layers for a bit of dimension.

I saw so many wonderful projects yesterday and many people who are expressing a little sadness that we are getting close to done. I still have a bunch of ideas, but I'm ready to get this house glued together and move on to other subject matter. Thanks for all of your kind comments!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 16

Seetharaman Skeleton is back with page 3 of the Monster's Ball faux scrapbook. The page features a double fold program and the music playlist from the back of the program. Believe it or not, this took all day yesterday and it was almost done before yesterday. If you're wanting to go digital to speed things up, it's kind of like getting into rubber stamping to save money on greeting cards. Just not going to happen!

The music play list was mostly nicked from a Tender Thoughts greeting card my hubby thought might be useful. It was! However Moondance by Van Morrison and Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival were in the movie "American Werewolf in London", a great Halloween movie but not for kids, and Eye of the Zombie is an ear-splitting trip by John Fogerty.

Stamps include a free digi from Stampers Best, Happy Halloween House, Martha Stewart's Dracula, chair, lil bird, Third Coast's desk, 100 Proof Press's bookshelf, chandalier, clock, band members, maybe window, Artful Illusion's grand staircase, skeletons, Stamper's Anonymous' program greeter, various and sundry things by Inkadinkado. I know I've missed a lot. Sorry all you wonderful stamp companies! The ballroom scene elements were stamped and scanned and then composited in Photoshop.

I showed two shots of the ballroom, one a photograph taken without enough light for any depth of field and the second using the PS file and warping it to match the shape of the first one. The difference in color is all in the printing.

Reading through everyone's posts yesterday, it seems like a bit of exhaustion is setting in. I know that I didn't think I would get this done in time and I see it's getting close. Hang in there, we'll probably get our collective third breath any time now!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13

The Monster's Ball, Page 2, Before the Ball. The "photos" for this page were fun. Two of the sets were purchased to go together, the pumpkin heads from Crackerbox Palace and the bathroom couple from Rubber Buggy Baby Bumpers. I got them when RBBB was a separate company and now they are a division of Stamp Francisco. The third couple is mixed - he's from Third Coast and she's from Zettiology. Her question, "What do we have in common?" was the fun part of choosing the mixed couples. Unfortunately, I never write down who makes background stamps so I just don't know. The bottom background was assembled from Stampscape stamps.

My question yesterday reflects my total nerdiness. I love collecting, in my head, unusual names, the longer the better. Seetharaman somebody or the other is one of the developers of Photoshop and I see the name every time I open the program. I thought that perhaps someone else had noticed it and would get a kick out of it.

Well, if you got here following the blog listings, you're all done now. Otherwise you should go check out everyone else's great projects!

A Birthday Gift for Pam

We had a late birthday celebration for Pam. I was inspired by the handmade gifts I got for my birthday to make this little altered board book for her. It was one of the 10 I had started after her last visit and the only one I had really gotten caught up with. It's fun to make a friend the focus of a project and to think of their personality as the start of each layout. Most of the quotes I found in Angela Cartwright's " In This House".

Playing to The Max

Several weeks ago I had come across a website called Eyethinking, http://www.eyethinking.com/index.php?album=pascal-habousha&page=4 , while I was looking for ideas for fairytale like characters. There was a Hansel and Gretel scene there, I think. Anyway I got caught up in the name, Eyethinking, because it comes close to describing how I work on paper projects. So after Jean left and before Pam got here, I rubber stamped the set of ATCs from some backgrounds I had made from the blue collage I did. (Photoshop variations created the different colors.) The brighter ones were printed on matte photo paper and the others on glossy photo paper. I had fun with the word play.

The painted background, the circus book pages and the drawing exercise were what I played with while Pam was here. I'm starting to really like the depth that even cheap acrylic paints add to a background.

Ken's Clown Book

I knew there was one more thing I had worked on in February but couldn't remember what. This is worked into an altered board book, Clifford, the Big Red Dog, which must have 850 pages I've been at it so long. I saw the Ben Hecht quote on a Facebook group, Art Journaling, and knew I had to use it for a clown spread in Ken's Clown Book. The project is probably six or seven years old with no finish time in view but occasionally I like to pull it out and play with it. It's one of the few things I've ever scanned that I couldn't correct all the color that the scanner added to the stamped work.

Two Journal Pages in One Day

My sister, Kate, is visiting for a few days and of course we are playing. This morning we set up a blog for her called Escape From the Library. There is a link in My Favs. Then we started art journaling. It was her first so she didn't get it finished but I did an amazing two in one day. The backgrounds are painted with acrylics and rubbed with soft pastels as usual but I did much more stamping on these pages than I have done before.