Feathered Friends

I love birds, and I must confess I own more than a few bird stamps.  I was inspired by StampingMathilda to get them out last week and create a few Artist Trading Cards.

Spritzed Backgrounds and Bleach

Here are a couple of Artist Trading cards I made on watercolour spray backgrounds.  I embossed the stamped images, bleached out areas for colouring and then coloured them using H2O's and pencil crayons.

Ink Catalogue

When I first started stamping, I stamped out samples of all of my ink pads in a sketchbook, so that if I was looking to match ink colours with paper, I would have something handy to quickly refer to.  Over the years, the sketchbook pages became overcrowded and an update was in order.

I recently finished that project, a 4" x 6"  book cataloguing all of my ink pads:

The cover is a postcard I picked up at the Vancouver Art Gallery this week.  It is by LAIWAN, and part of a display called "Everything Everyday", about the art of the everyday object.  (What you see on this postcard are Vancouver bus transfers.  The actual work containing the bus transfers is much larger, but postcards were also created for us to take.)  It somehow seems fitting to the exhibition theme that I'm reusing the postcard of the reused bus transfers.

Special thanks to Susan Raihala for the great tips on photographing cards.  I'm going to be giving it lots of practice, but I tried it here for this book and I'm very impressed with the results.

Happy Hallowe'en everyone!

Octagons Part 2

The theme of Octagons (see previous post) brought quilts to mind:

 

 

Coffee Time

This tree is a Spanish tree (what?  no difference?) viewed from a sidewalk cafe.

Octagons

One of the October themes for the Vancouver Artist Trading Card Group is Octagons.  Using a hand carved octagon stamp for a background, I created some stamped ATC's for fall:

Castles Everywhere

This Zentangle was inspired by the many castles we saw in Spain.

If you are a Zentangle aficionado, you will have noticed that I do not do my Zentangles in the traditional way, with a random "string" to define the various areas.   I prefer to draw an outline drawing (here a tower) to be filled with "tangles".