Smiling Face Collages Go to Nigeria

Last week in our Portland Artist Group meeting, we created smiling collaged faces to send to women in Nigeria through the Women for Women International Program. This organization helps women survivors of war to rebuild their lives. Whitney Ferré at Creatively Fit organized the project. Check out her blog post. There is still time to make your face collages and mail them to her.

Giveaway to Celebrate Three Years Blogging

To celebrate the third anniversary of my blog and say thank you to all of my readers, I'm giving away this collage and stenciled piece that I created in Judy Wise's "Stencil Your Family" class a couple of years ago. It's unified with an encaustic layer of wax. Judy helped me start this blog and gave me lots of encouragement.

The stencil was created from a 1940's photograph of my mother fishing off Florida's east coast. It's called "Gone Fishing". She made a pretty good catch with a fish that size!

Make a comment on this post and I will put your name in a hat. Friday, April 30th, I will pull a name from the hat and post the winner's name. If I do not have your email address, you can contact me at ppmcnamee@gmail.com. Join in the fun and celebrate this anniversary.

Keeping a blog helps me chronicle my artwork, creative adventures and travels. Along the way, I've made friends, learned a lot and enjoy the exchanges and inspiration blog-land offers.

Accordion Book Faces

Last weekend, several friends spent a wonderful time journaling on Guemes Island. One of my at goals for 2010 is to improve my skills at drawing and painting faces. Judy Wise encouraged me to make an accordion face book. I collaged, stamped and drew on the background, copied faces on tracing paper to learn proportions and then painted the around the faces.

Painting faces takes lots of practice!

During the year, it will be fun to experiment with different techniques to become more adept at depicting faces.

Art Retreat on Guemes Island

Last weekend, a group from Seattle and Vancouver, BC invited me to their art retreat on Guemes Island, north of Anacortes, Washington. It's always fun to create with like-minded friends, share ideas, art and a wonderful time together. Thank you Gwen for inviting me! Now I have a new group of art friends and created these journal pages at the retreat.

I wanted to experiment with clear gesso. It covers acrylic paint and water soluble Portfolio oil pastels really well. The clear gesso tooth allows you to add other layers of paint, writing, etc.

I used a stencil for the cityscape, added collage city scenes, covered it all with clear gesso and painted the clouds and moonlit sky on top.

Here's a group photo

all of us creating up a storm

The Red Farmhouse where we stayed

This is a wonderful place for an art retreat with plenty of room for six to nine people, a fully equiped kitchen and two long tables for work space. It's a close walk to the beach.

How to Make a Visual Calendar

A couple readers asked how I make my visual calendars. The first two visual calendars I kept were created collaboratively with other artists. The 2007 calendar used a monthly format.

The 2008 calendar used a weekly format.

I prefer the monthly calendar in an engagement book format. I find a calendar template or use an existing calendar for the year. The pages measure 8x10 inches. I use Photo Shop to split and re size the calendar to fit the pages. This takes a little time but the daily boxes become big enough to add art, collage, draw or write in them.

Crop the calendar first to split it into two sections and move to new 8x10 pages. Next, use edit, transform, scale to re size the calendar to the page size. I leave extra room on the inside page edges to allow for binding into a book. You can erase the month name and put in your own text with a favorite font.

I put my artwork on the pages between each month and coordinate it to the season. If the scans do not fit, I re size them to fit the 8x10 page.

The covers are made and the whole calendar is taken to Kinko's to get it coil bound for about $5.

I use the same technique to make the calendars for my travel journals. It's fun to add collage elements before leaving home to get a jump start on creating a trip calendar. Adding text in the language of the country you plan to visit adds to the adventure.

With summer vacations coming up, it's not too late to make a travel calendar.

2009 Art Journal Calendar

The past two years, I participated in collaborative Art Journal Calendars. I like to collage, sketch and write daily in my calendars. At the end of the year, I have a visual journal review of my activities, inspirations and dreams come true for the year. For 2009, I made my own art journal calendar using my artwork between calendar pages.
Here are the inside cover pages. Each page measures 7 x 8.5 inches so it looks like an engagement calendar.
For each month, I print out a calendar 14 x 8.5 inch paper. I space the calendar halves in Photo Shop to allow for the center binding.

I also include a list of art goals for the year to keep me focused on projects, mediums and accomplishments that I want to achieve.
I take the completed calendar to Kinko's to have them bind the book with a black, coil binding. Now, I'm ready for the New Year. Have a creative, happy, healthy and prosperous 2009.

Flora Drawn and Collaged Nature Gathered Challenge

The layering of paint, collage and line drawings interests me lately. Here is my interpretation of our Nature Gathered flora challenge.

Back from ArtFest

The ArtFest theme this year was Forest Walk. I made this PhotoShop collage for my journal before the event using photos taken the end of January at Play along with the
handmade little creature in the middle that someone gave to each of us.

Anahata's Mixed Media Mandala workshop inpired me to have fun with gold foil, paint and doodling.

I collected a variety of plant leaves from Marianne's garden on Vashon and used them for gelatin prints in Dorit Elisha's workshop Nature Imprinted. At the end of the day, we made collages with our prints.
Theo Ellsworth's workshop Mystery Play Inside inspired imaginative drawing- what he calls imaginary performance art. He led us through several exercises to deal with the inner critique. The drawing below represents my secret language drawn with eyes closed and translated later with eyes open using my imaginary detective.
This drawing uses the awkward hand to explore the inner-child out on the playground. His way of delving into and exploring our imaginary world offers a deep well of creative inspiriation.ArtFest offers the chance to see old friends, make new friends, learn new techniques, feel the creative energy and the bounty of imagination in all the inspired projects from each workshop. It's creative adrenaline for my art.

Collaged Calendars

I'm really enjoying my 2007 collaged calendar. The visual images bring me right back to the experience just like a remembered fragrance. I include copies of my art, drawings, photos, covers of books read and notes. The borders highlight words that express the month. It's a great way to catalog time with friends and family, accomplishments, see progress made, journeys taken and new directions being formed.

Art Journaling

Art journals challenge me to write and observe what's happening around me. A couple of weeks ago I took Randi's two-day workshop. The first day we took photos and the second day we painted backgrounds using her "inspiration and techniques for art journaling on the edge". Check out her new book "Wide Open".

Attached are three art journal pages that I made. The first is from the photo class. New to digital photography, I love the 2x3 wallet-size photos to use in journaling. Who knew that you can go to store kiosks and have prints made in an hour from your camera disc. Some store even take orders online and you pay when you pick up the prints. Welcome to the 21st Century, Paula.

The second journal page includes a variety of techiniques- stencils, spray paint, fabric, transfers, tape and the mini-photos. Layers intrigue me and add an element of mystery. How did she do that? The thrid page is from LK Ludwig's class at ArtFest 2007 in Port Townsend. We doodled, added torn images, silhouettes, lines and writing.