wood stork
Originally uploaded by steev-o

Love these ink imakes of the wood ibis. Great stuff.

Sketch001
Originally uploaded by mike.juxtavision

Holy shit. damn. I love this guy's work. Everytime I look at his flickr stream I'm blown away. His work is slightly creepy, ever so weird and yet it draws me into look more closely.

I've been wanting to get a pochade box, also known as a thumb box for awhile now but they are … well beyond my price range. We have a variety of great thrift stores in the area and I needed a couple of new shirts for work. I stopped by found a couple of shirts, decided to wander the book aisle to look for art books.

They had no good art books so I wandered the housewares aisle just looking, and in the decorating section, which is generally a pile of useless shit I found a wooden mini wine bottle box with nice hinges and clasps. I also found a medium sized cigar box. I grabbed both. I spent $8 total. Both are made of wood, but I may collage over the top of the cigar box, though a cigar box pochade is a classic.

I've looked at a variety of videos and plans for making my own and I have a rough plan for what I'd like to do with my 2 little boxes.

I watched this video about the pochade box:

I also looked at a bunch of blogs but this one stood out as the best.

I need..
Originally uploaded by Miss Ellie-Lou

I love the idea of making a list of what you need for the day in your journal. Great idea.

Where last weekend and last week were completely artistic weeks this week has not been. My mind is set on the idea that when people visit it's SUPPOSED to be on the weekend not Monday nights! So when my grandmother and father came back through to crash on my couch my mind thought "weekend!" Then I had to slog through a whole week at the DayJob. Every Spring we schedule our days off at the DayJob. Instead of a single full week I had scheduled several random long weekends, and thankfully for me, this Friday is one of the days I'd scheduled off. My DayJob schedule is weird this week too, but thankfully today marks the start of my long weekend. Boy am I thankful!

This weekend is full of good art stuff too which makes it even better. First off, I'm being interviewed on Artistic Biker's UStream tonight, I go on air around 9PM Eastern Time. If you HAVEN'T tuned into the broadcast before you are missing out, Jonathan puts on an art show. It's not about technique as it is a 2 hour romp through his art journaling journey. He talks, his daughter makes art with him ( I love this, she's cute as a button and she's making art.) and people are chatting about art. He'll tell you the type of technique he's working int, where he got the idea and then as he works talks about the art. It is a great UStream and it happens EVERY Thursday night (you know unless kids are being born.) and it worth every minute you spend watching it. 

Saturday the 3rd Connie of DirtyFootPrints-studio.com is posting an interview on DirtyFootprints-Studio.com it's about art journaling and how I got into it and all that fun stuff. Check it out on the 3rd.

I got one of the best compliments I've ever gotten from friend and fellow artist Jane McDonald, who compared my recent portrait work to that of Alice Neel. If you have known me for any period of time you will  know that Alice Neel is a huge influence, inspiration and hero of mine. So the compliment is very meaningful to me and made my day. 

What I love about all these artists is that our art is so diverse and so different from one another and all great in their very own way. (Jane should post more of her art) I love browsing through all of the flickr streams, twitters and blogs of these people. I get the most inspiration from these artistic people far and wide who spend so much of their own time trying to inspire and motivate people to create more art.

Lily's Thyroid Surgery
Originally uploaded by MrtyHrrs1

Another great journaler on flickr. Mrtyhrrst combined screen printing, brushing ink over the top and painting with work done in illustrator. Great stuff, very inventive and definitely something you should go look at.

Rhomany does a lot of cool stuff and this is just one example of her cool work. She does a B&W drawing of a girl, adds a swirl in the background, then layers on some image transfers from magazines and ties it all together with some watered down acrylic paint. Adds oms words and voila! Great stuff!

This is a pretty simple page in an old art journal. The paper is strathmore cold pressed 140lb watercolor paper stitched into a leather cover.

On the left hand page I glued down a scrap of art paper, it's the orange triangular piece on the top of that page. I wrote on top of it with a waterproof fabercastell pitt pen in black. I wrote around it with the  same pen. After the pen was full dry I washed over the top with some transparent watercolors. I didn't like the color so I added some watercolor crayons to intensify the colors.

At this time of my life I was writing brief little nuggets about my day. I'd write a couple of sentences and then turn the page, or block it off. After the page had dried I again added watercolors to add the color to the page.

On the right side I was dealing with some intense personal stuff that I didn't want that person to read with ease as I worked on the page in the common area of our apartment, so I darkened the page with a wash of black watercolor crayon.

I used Leeho 2 way glue to hold the paper to the page.

Pasos pesados (Heavy footsteps). 9-20 Junio, 2010.
Originally uploaded by sharonNYC

SharonNYC is another person on flickr I've been looking at for a long time, she's got this particular style of art journaling that is specific to her, muted colors, earth tones, bones and flesh. I love it. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else.

The first part of the twitter hand experiment went awesome. I got mass amounts of hands to draw and I put a few on canvas. I'm looking for more hands to draw. I've set up a flickr group so people can post their hands there as well. Pics can be tweeted @lessherger or put directly into the group. I'll also post my drawings and paintings to the group.

I can't wait to see what round 2 brings.

Also for a similar project check out 200 Portraits on flickr. You can send her portraits to work with.