I love this guy's stuff on flickr.
His combination if drawing, collage and digital work is pretty awesome. I sometimes wish I was able to do the kind of stuff he does with digital with my work. (I should take a photoshop class.)
Yesterday I was listening to a piece by the Vitamin String Quartet, a remake of one of my favorite songs from my youth, and it brought me to tears. I’m happy to say that I grew up with Nirvana and Alice in Chains and a variety of other great bands emerging. I was a closet music fan, not telling my friends about my Ass Ponys tapes or Pixies CDs, afraid that if I went too far out from their mainstream box they might judge. I had one friend in HS with whom I talked about music, Melissa, she was a metalhead and when I found Facelift I immediately made her a copy.
I had one of those moments while listening to the VSQ where I realized that I create art in the hopes it moves someone in the same way. Every now and then I get an email from someone telling me they found my stuff on youtube, flickr or art journaling ning and that it moved them.
Here are some videos from my youth. The Ass Ponys still rock.
I don't read a lot of blogs as religiously as I read Connie, Paul, and Lisa's. Why? Well, they post a lot of eye candy photos and words that I find relevant to my life, you know stuff that makes me think.
Thinking is good.
Connie recently posted this little ditty.
It made me think.
In some spots I disagree and others I agree.
I look at my time as the most precious thing, well, ever. I don't have a lot of it. I've only got this one life. I've only got the time that has been allotted to me. When people come at me with hate and anger I choose to ignore them and shut them out.
I have learned to make liberal use of gmail's block function and the IP address blocking ability of typepad.
People who send me hate filled rants via email want to waste my time. I've learned the hard way that giving them attention simply feeds the beast and distracts from things that add meaning to my life.
Another person's rage does not add meaning to my life.
Another person's anger does not add meaning to my life.
Responding to another person's rage and anger detracts from my life.
I refuse to give someone who thinks only with hate, power over my time and allow them to detract from my life.
While it's not up to me to determine who I bump into on this journey, I do determine how I respond and ultimately I decide who I allow on my bus.
A week or so ago a youtuber contacted me requesting some more information about art journaling. I gave the info, and she ask for more. I direcrted her towards Art Journaling Ning. I don't plug the site enough but for those of you who don't know I started AJ ning about 2 years ago to create a free space where people could learn and share what they know about art journaling, pass techniques around in a safe environment. At the time it was the ONLY site that was dedicated to ONLY art journaling. As far as I know it is still the only site dedicated to only art journaling. Other sites have cropped up that cater to some aspects of art journaling but I think AJ Ning is the most complete and has the most members.
Anyway, Allie George signed up and immediately started to share her images. I'm glad she did. You see her journals are exactly what I see as "art journal." They are raw, have writing, have great images, collage and paint. You can tell she focuses on the PROCESS of creating the page and not on the idea of a pretty page.
So eff yes, Allie George.
Check out all her work on AJ ning here, and check out a few of her pages here:
I’ve been messing around with my transfer technique a little more. I printed off a few of my pictures with a color laser printer onto the sticker backing sheet. The color print was very delicate, where I touched the print it scraped very easily. That being said it made a very interesting edge on one of the images- I used my finger nail and scraped the image edge up a bit to make it uneven- very cool looking.
Again, large areas of color didn’t transfer as well as smaller areas and line work. Go figure that something that is actually MORE detailed transfers better. But the breaks that appear in a larger full color image are very very cool. They look like something that has weathered in the rain and had layers peeled off.
Any areas of yellow left the sheet stained. I’m not sure this will transfer to other images or not, I’ll try that out a little later. Blues and reds transferred the best, yellows stained the sticker sheet but still transferred.
The printer I was working with was a much better printer than the cheap brother I have at home, and I expect that the quality of the HP toner has as much to do with the crisp transfer as anything else.
This whole thing has me wondering about printing onto other slick coated stock- would I be able to do a transfer with magazine stock? I've had printing snafus with my work printer when adding address information to company stock materials. I wonder if I just over printed one of those pages if I could just transfer it?
This begins more experimentation and a search for slick paper stock.
These are recent journal entries and I've edited out some of the content.
Just as an FYI the Schlitz can has sold, in case you needed it for your dirtbag nasty beer can collection.
Lisa over at LifeUnity put up this post earlier and it resonated with me, in part because I’m going through some of the same balance issues but also because it’s a very real post and that is something I feel like the blog-o-sphere has been lacking.
Today Connie over at DirtyFootPrints posted this, and it also resonated with me. It’s also a place I’ve been in my head lately, thinking of what is “enough.” What is good enough? (more on this later.)
Aggression and sharks.
Or as my Dad used to say, “There are assholes everywhere and some of ‘em, most of ‘em, are out to get you.” Often times my Dad meant this about boys (ha!) trying to get in my pants and people trying to take my money, but this applies to the wild internets*.
Let me back up here.
A few weeks back I decided I was going to cut back on what I allow into my internet and life. Every time someone put up a post on facebook or twitter that made me feel icky I unfollowed or hid them from my view. After another week went past I’d go back and check and see if their tweets or posts still made me uncomfortable, if they did, I unfollowed, blocked, and or unfriended them. It’s been about 3 or 4 weeks since I've been doing this and frankly the quality of my twitter feed has gone up, I’m genuinely interested in what people I’m following and I’m not burdened by reading stuff that offends me.**
Why do I do this? No one has the right to make me feel bad, When I allowed people to suck up MY time with their drama I was giving them power over my life and allowing them to waste MY time. Additionally I can't worry that I'm going to offend them, clearly they don't care if they offend me, so why am I concerned about offending them?
It’s as if I gave them permission to crap on my good time.
So I’m done with it. The drama and the snake oil sales, done.
That’s another thing that is getting to me lately, the snake oil sales. If someone is selling you a promise to unlock your deepest inner power, it’s most likely snake oil. The only person who can do that is you. I’m wary of someone who wants to whisper into my ear and ask me to do stuff that makes me feel icky. I’m not talking legit life coaches, teachers, licensed therapists and social workers who have been to school and trained to make you push your boundaries. I’m talking about the arm chair quarterbacks that want to tell me what to do when they haven’t put in the hard work themselves, the do as I say not as I do crowd.
I have made my way so far by listening to myself, going with what I feel is right. It’s why Art Journaling Ning is free and will always be free to join and enjoy with paid classes for those who are interested. I see this whole thing as living real.
The other day at work I was about to toss away the backing sheet from some address labels. I looked at it's slick surface and thought about the fact it had already been through a laser printer and that in the past I'd stuck sheets missing a label or two through the printer and that the toner sort of flaked off those areas. I heard about a collage technique in which you cover each collage piece with gel medium, let it dry and then use a sticker sheet to cover the pieces and finally adhere it with an iron. So, I wondered, "What would happen if I ran this empty sheet through a laser printer, with the image reversed, and ironed just the TONER onto a sheet of paper/art journal page?"
Well it turns out you get the best damn toner transfer I've ever seen. Crisp, clean. clear, and nearly 100% transfer of the toner to paper. I haven't tested this on an art journal page but I'm sure the transfer will work just as well.
Here's what I did:
Alternately if you want to grunge this up, peel the sticker paper up when the toner is still hot, if any is still slightly stuck to the backing, it will stretch the toner out and distort your image/words. Then iron it again to get it stuck to the page. Let it cool and peel off the backing, subtle distortion.
This will NOT work with injet or ink based printers, as the ink will just bead off the sticker backing.
The sticker sheet can be used many times, but I found that after a few runs through the printer that the transfer was more and more grungy. I also found that large areas of black did not transfer as well as images with more lines and white.
I will be saving all the address label and sticker backing material frmo here on out, this is the BEST transfer technique I've ever used.
Here are some of my test pages and one page that is 100% from transfers.
Around the time of my birth every city in the NorthEast decided it would be a great city beautifying project to plant oranmental trees around their cities. Think about it- pretty flowers it the spring, green leaves all summer and no fruit to clean up in the fall. It's a win right?
Except for people like me. I'm allergic to the little babies show below, the Bradford Ornamental Pear. Pretty white flowers with a shit load of pollen. So cheers to city beautification, I'm taking another claratin and washing it down with my morning coffee.
They sure do make a pretty picture
I have a thing for grungey thing. Bits of paper, paper that looks like it's rolled around in the street and been rained on. Rough brush strokes. Stained paper. Smudged ink.
Take a look at this artist's work. Look at the rust, smudges, weathering. It's what I like.
I've been wordless lately, taking in art, looking, intensely at the things around me. I finally started to organize my random collection of rusty broken bits in little plastic bags, all stapled to a gessoed board. As of now it's a way to collect the pieces, but I'm thinking it's a neat way to organize it too. Show off the random bits.
I think about copyright a lot. Usually in terms of copy “wrong.” You know when someone does the wrong thing with someone’s images, design or workshop materials.
Quite a few years back I was at a craft fair and I had already bought a ton of stuff when I got to a booth with the most amazing lamps. The seller was chatting up some people while my friend and I looked at the lamps. They had her photography on the shades. Each shade was one of a kind and totally unique. They were amazing. When she finally turned her attention to my friend and I, she made a face, and said in her most condescending voice, “Can I help you.” Now she judged me on my appearance, I had hot pink hair at the time and was dressed, well, not particularly well, but I’d saved my pennies before that trip and could have afforded one of her lamps had I wanted one.
Her attitude toward me was not nice, but before I could realize she was being a jerk I exclaimed that I felt the lamps were really cool, very interesting to look at and I bet they cast the best shadows. She melted a bit, but then I said “How’d ya do it? Won’t that plastic melt?” Which I really meant as “it’s really super cool” not as a “tell me your secrets so I can rip you off.”
She took it the wrong way and she went even colder, but explained it was mylar and wouldn’t melt.(We could debate that, but his isn’t about that.)
I made a mistake and she’d pre-judged me anyway the whole thing went pear shaped from there. I walked out feeling awful. I have a thing about people stealing other people’s craft designs, and don’t do it. While I was young back then (it was over 14 years ago that this occurred) I still had a firm policy of never ripping people off.
What brought this up in my head was this article over on CreateMIxedMedia by Rice. It got me thinking. I rarely use photos in my art journals but the other day was looking for texture inspiration and realized I should be shooting more photos. So I started to throw my point and shoot camera in my bag and started to snap more pics. Here are a few:
