Halloween Colors Challenge at Simply Betty Stamps

After I saw this sexy "Witch Mercedes" from Simply Betty Stamps, I knew I wanted to play with her. I hurried over and joined the SBS Facebook group and although Facebook always stymies me I did manage to find my way around and snag this cutie. All of the work was done in Photoshop. The spider web and the creepy spider are from photos I've taken and the trees are PS brushes from Trees_by_Horhew.

Thanks, Betty, for "treating" us to this delicious challenge!!

Smeared and Smudged Rock n Rolla Challenge "Walking On Air"

Hang onto your hats - I've got a bunch of pictures for this one. The challenge here was to use Kerli"s Walking On Air video for inspiration. It's the July 2013 Rock n Rolla challenge on Smeared and Smudged. I made a booklet with 8 small collages. I had meant to use cereal bags to enclose them as I had seen in Cloth, Paper, Scissors latest issue of Pages but I couldn't get that to work. I liked and wanted to duplicate the translucent look of the cereal bags so eventually came up with frosted shrink art plastic.
Two collages were mounted onto the front and back of a little piece of muslin and the whole thing was sandwiched between two pieces of the frosted plastic which had been trimmed to size. I used ZipDry glue for all of the gluing. Then thinking how easy it would be for the plastic to get snapped apart, I laced the edges with ribbon after punching all the holes. Here are the eight pages:

The stamp here is one of Ike's fabulous digis. This one is "Vaguely Goth". Isn't it just perfect?

 The last and hardest part for me was lettering phrases from the song onto painted section of the plastic. Hand lettering never gets any easier! I made a cover for the booklet because when I hauled out the old shrink plastic, I noticed that the edges that had been exposed to the light had yellowed slightly. Now if I were really in an experimental mood I could throw the whole thing in the oven and see what happened. No, I don't think so!

Thanks for visiting!!

"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!!

Sharon's Fabulous 16 Page Journal ala Teesha Moore

This is page 2 of the journal. It had been sitting waiting for a light bulb joke and a rainy day. Fortunately, just before it started raining I remembered that either Pam or I had thought of the song title I ended up using. If you haven't seen Teesha Moore's series of videos on creating a fabulous 16 page journal out of one 30" x 22" sheet of hot pressed water color paper, I hardily recommend it. Finding colored paper for the borders and sticking them on is great fun! That comes after sloshing paint on all of the pages, which is the state I showed in a previous post.
What I've tried doing with the pages I'm working on is using BJD faces from various sources embellished with mostly human eyes, using paper doll clothes and drawing fashion-like legs to lengthen the figures. Teesha said she felt using paper doll clothes seemed contrived to her although she did it on one of the pages she demo-ed. Since I adore paper dolls I wasn't put off by that and am considering titling the journal "Contrivances".
I also am trying to use words from older children's songs or books or nursery rhymes, although I'm finding that a little more difficult to match to the figures. I'm not a huge fan of Create, Believe, Art quotes for every journal page I work on. I think the process of doing the lettering is probably the most difficult for me. Pam gave me a few pointers a couple of weeks ago but I'm still struggling. That said, this is the best lettering I've done so far out of the seven I've attempted.

April Projects for Smeared and Smudged.

Now that it's May, I'm finally getting around to posting the projects that went along with the April Guest Designer spot on Smeared and Smudged. I seem to revel in posting on the loneliest spots on the WWW and my blog gets high marks in that regard. There's not much to say about these other than that most of the work was done in Photoshop. Some of the five projects feature S n S's Goth Fairies digital stamp and I enjoyed using those very much.

Thanks for taking a look!

Junk Journals or Why just do it like everyone else when you can learn from every mistake in the book?

I rejoined Pam's Facebook group Art Journaling. One of the members, Patti Tolly Parrish, had shown some journals she was making out of her amazing GelliArts monoprints. She mentioned videos by Shannon Green about binding the journals so I watched those and Shannon mentioned some videos by Teesha Moore on her fantastic 16 page journal made from a 22" x 30" sheet of hot pressed watercolor paper so I watched those. All of which just sounded like FUN! In the very few minutes I've had on garden days and on those blessed rainy days when I couldn't possibly be expected to get wet since I might melt, I've been playing.
My first mistake was making too many signatures in too large a torn up hard bound book. Three signatures x seven sheets each x two pages per sheets x two sides per page makes for 84 sides of pages to get ready to journal on. I could have done the math first!!
The second mistake was using a shiny calendar for some of the pages. Not much sticks to it unless I rough up the surface.
And Shannon did say what glue to use but of course I had to try what I had which sort of made the pages curl.
But the great part is that it is so much fun and I have been able to relinquish control and just let things happen. Which is a major accomplishment for me! Here are a few shots of the sewn in signatures and some of the spreads I like a lot that won't require a whole lot more. Decorating the covers and the pages will come later.

This last one is the 16 page journal made from a sheet of watercolor paper. It's a nice break from the other journal as the pages are painted and need to dry. I'm going to follow Teesha Moore's instructions as closely as I can but I'm not all that good at following instructions. Always have to add something to make it my own!!

Garden 2013 - Episode 001

Even though I'm going to make this short and even though the photos are not top notch, who has time to take and edit photos anyway. We wanted to get some shots before April was over and the best light was long gone.

This is the long shot and shows the eight rows of four boxes each. There are four more to be built but we're not prioritizing that. All of the boxes have been weeded. Five or six of them were a bleeping 5 inch high carpet of some nasty little thing that detaches from its' roots and then has to be dug. The others responded pretty well to the hula-hoe and an occasional shovel for the errand dandelion or pigweed (that's a guess). We're trying something new this year: mowing rather than weeding the paths. The beds have about a 3 foot drop from the south side, where Ken is standing to take the photo and we have been flummoxed by the erosion during hard rains. This should help that!

The rhubarb bed. Some of the bigger plants need to be split but that's Ken's job.

We think this is the fourth year for the asparagus. It's completely wonderful! We've had three servings due to freezing weather and having to cover the bed. Last year we discovered it doesn't much like being covered so now we just eat whatever is up. Hopefully no more freezes but who knows??

One of our herb beds. The garlic seems very far along for so early. And last but not least, if Blogger will let me add another picture, are the peas. Two boxes of shelling peas, one of snow peas and one of sugar snaps. Two of the boxes needed the chicken wire and we just did that this week.