This one is quick.

Sketchbook so far…. from Bethan Heslop on Vimeo.

I'

m a sucker for a typewriter.

DSC_0477
Originally uploaded by Sketchbuch

we can all dream of going to a place where we draw pictures and people give us fruit. life would be good then huh?

I really like how this lady chronicles her life with her art journals.

book 20 (oct 1993 – apr 1994) from womanonfire on Vimeo.

So Ive outgrown Windoze MovieMaker. Actually I had always thought it sucked giant hairy dust bunnies but it wouldn't let me edit into the format that I wanted for the classes. So I'm looking for something new. I first headed over to cnet  read some reviews on video editing software. I was surprised that the corel video studio was higher rated than the adobe software. Mostly becuase of the crashing issues. In their review they said that the Corel was slow, but I'm not noticing that at all. If anything now that I've learned how to use it, it's much faster than MovieMaker.

The other software I'm going to try out is the Adobe video editing software. The only issue with it is that if you don't buy it, the trial version put a watermark on the final video. 

I've tried a few others, what have you tried?

(Also check out the video about the Ning group below!)

well folks I have been drearily under the weather today. It's been abysmal. I think I've only been awake for a few hours here and there. I wake up, sip some tea or ginger ale and then fall asleep again. I'm feeling slightly coherent for the first time in well, all day.

Would you believe it's taken me most of the day just to get the paragraph above from my head to the computer? Man I'm beat.

In art journaling news: The Ning site is up and it's starting to get really neat. If you are interested in art journaling or journaling in general head over to the group, join and check it out. There are a few free workshops up already. I'm well into working on 2 paid workshops on 2 types of bookbinding as well as making recycled scrap covers for lots of book projects. It's going to be SUPER awesome. There are no other words to describe it but super awesome. Jonathan Manning (AKA @artisticbiker) has set up a really great tutorial on making marbled like paper with spray paint and man is it ever cool. I can't wait to use it as a book cover!  There is now a forum to discuss prompts, stenciling techniques, and a lively discussion about art book vs art journaling.

I'm excited, can you tell?

The other thing I'm excited about are podcasts. (I know how 2007 of me) Ricë Freeman-Zachary has been putting together some of the most wonderful podcasts. She is interviewing some wonderful artists and many of them art journalers! (Squee) She just put one up with Kelly Kilmer and it's divine. You can find it here, but you can also download it off iTunes for free. I just downloaded the entire library of Ricë's podcasts to keep me company during my hellish commute. Additionally if you find her on iTunes you'll find a whole host of other creative types with some good stuff too! (you'll also find an artist I love but whose voice grates on me like nails on a chalk board)

I've not been art journaling as much because I've been fighting off this cold for about 3 days, but I shot a few pics of stuff I had been working on and I made some wrapping paper last night. Every year I make my wrapping paper out of recycled materials. I scrounge kraft paper and newsprint out of boxes at work, flatten it and bring it home. Normally I sit infront of the TV with my sharpies and a few stencils and doodle out a few sheets here and there. We gave up cable this summer and my LCD tv is about to become my monitor (not totally kiding as it's been sitting, unused for close to 3 or 4 months now) I needed some paper fast for my secret santa gift for work. So I banged out a 2 part stencil. First layer-  rays radiating out from the center of a star. Second a big star. I used silver spray paint for the rays. Then I put the star over the center of the rays and hit it with a layer of red, then a spot of silver, then a spatter of red again. I wasn't too perfect about anything as I wanted to let the silver over spray a bit. I call it my bad ass wrapping paper. Perfect for men, women, kids and totally cool, even hipsters drunk on PBR will like it and want to wrap their thrifted gifts with it's awesomeness.

See it here:

 The pic isn't that great, I took it in a dark room, so you'll just have to trust me on it's total awesomeness.

Another thing that I've been experimenting with, something I havne't done in, well ages, since high school is adding photos to my journal. I usually avoid it because I want to avoid the look of, well, a scrap book. Yeah, I said it. I'm no scrapbooker. I don't want people to think that my art journals are scrapbooks with paint. (hangs head) I like scrap books when other people make them, but they aren't MY thing. Does that make sense? Anyway I got this Pogo for a Christmas gift and I'm in love. It's so freaking awesome I'm taking pictures of the dog, the couch, my morning commute (break lights all the way) I'm printing pictures like crazy and I'm loving it. OMG the pogo is the shit. 2×3, business card size, you could attache these thing to anything with the peel and stick stuff on them, ATC, journals, scrap books, The possibilities are endless. So I had to do it.

I did a self portrait when I got to Maine after an interesting and mostly uneventful drive. Then I STUCK it in my travel journal. Yup. It's there. I added a drawing and some gesso and here it is:

And you know what? I love it and it doesn't look like a scrapbook at all to me.

So this part of the post is a reactionary tale don't go further if you aren't in the mood for a good old fashioned rant.

Continue reading →

Designers seem to love the moleskines. They should try the handmade versions for better paper and covers and less hype.

Moleskine Sketchbook Completed from able parris on Vimeo.

Another sketchbook video. This person has them dated and numbered and has loads of videos up on vimeo.

book 8 (26 sept 1990 – 19 dec 1990) from womanonfire on Vimeo.

Tonight my Mom asked me what I'd been doing with the die-cuts I'd made the last time I was here. She's looking for ideas for how she can use the die-cuts to make cards and posters. I sheepishly told her I was using them in my art journal as collage elements. Then, she did something she hasn't really done in a long time she said, "Do you have any pictures up on your blog?"*

I then shared with her some of my art journal pages, things I share with you guys on a regular basis but not so much with my family (well Chris gets to see them all the time.) Growing up my family was mostly always supportive of my art and other activities. They instilled in me, for the most part, that I can do anything. It was more the other people around me that made me fear I could not. People who would ask me, "What are you going to do with an art degree?" "How will you make any money." "Is there money in that?" "Don't make the mistake so and so made, they got a degree in (something not at all related to art) because they loved it, but now they live in that shithole over on such and such road." Seriously if you listen to all the critics out there you'll never get anything done in your life. The critics they eat at your ambition take away your drive to succeed and make you feel awful. There will ALWAYS be someone out there to look at what you're doing and putting it down. There are a lot of negative people out there.

Sometimes you can't help but to listen to them. The critics, once you hear what they have to say it's stuck in your head, on repeat. Like a record scratched on the worst part of a song, doomed to play the same crap over and over. Your stuck until you decide what to do. Some of us need to get angry to get past it. Some sad. Some of us need to hit the bottom to figure it out. Some of us never make it out.

The real question is what do we do once we get past those critics in our head? Those of us who have started our artistic journey and are moving forward what do we do? Do we put others like us down, call their art shit to build ourselves us or do we reach out and pass out our tools and knowledge to bring others around us up and forward with us? We each have a choice to make.

• What choice will you make? 
• (you could use that as a journal prompt)

This is not to say that once you take a walk down the artistic path that you'll never replay those critics, sometimes, even those of us who have had amazing supportive parents, loving supportive partners and crazy artistic friends get bogged down into the crap of critic mindedness. It's maddening to do what you love and to hear that thing in your head say, "This will never amount to anything. You'll never amount to anything. And you'll never make any money."

What I do when I'm feeling like this is I write it down. I get it all out of my system. Then I go fold some paper. Take a walk. Play with my dogs. Cook an amazing meal. Do something not art related. Take a break. Then I go back and obliterate it. Gesso it collage it. ink it. get rid of it. Sometimes I've written it down torn it up and collaged those pieces back into a page. Then gessoed over the top of that. Then painted. The idea was to get rid of it all. get it out of my head and move on.

Here's the thing, you can never move into the positive side of life if you continue to put others down to build yourself up.

The conversation with my Mom really left me with a feeling that, yes, I can do this, this Ning experiment, I can do it. You see I've had questions about it, worried it would fail. Worried it wouldn't take off and questioned what I was doing with it. But that simple 15 minute long conversation with my Mom really made me think, "I can do this." Part of that conversation was about how the internet community is a powerful thing. One person has an idea and another builds on it, until it's this huge thing, like the snowball getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the mountain. WE just need the right temperature, mix of snow and speed on that snow ball, and soon enough, it will be huge.

And it will. It will be friggin' huge.

*Yes, my family, coworkers and most of my friends know about this blog. I don't hide my internet self from my real life self, because it's all the same.

*Drum roll please*

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For Prize #3  Susan C Brown won with this comment:

For Prize #2 John won with this comment: