Rain, rain, go away...

Winter is back here, which means rain every day.
I hate when it rains in the city; traffic gets completely crazy; my commute goes from 40 minutes to an hour and a half; and the lack of sunshine really makes me feel blue. On the other hand I know rain was desperately needed all over Guatemala, drought had really affected the harvests and this is not good for any of us.

This is an ATC for a 1:1 trade at AFA. The background has tissue paper, black and white ink. The girl is an altered image from a magazine, I added gesso and painted with acrylics on top.

Ballerina

Second painting from my life drawing class.
Watercolors.
16"x20"
I was sitting in a weird place because she was leaning forward and I completely misjudged the size of her head, it looks too small.
I got an issue with the shape of the blanket, a friend asked me if she was the "frog ballerina" because she was sitting on a lilly pad...

Inspiration Tags

I created this tags for a swap at AFA where our amazing hostess is putting the tags of 12 artists into a tag book. The main theme of the book will be art and inspiration.

The top picture is the front of my tags; I started with some watercolors, next I wrote some words I feel a strong attraction to : dream, hope, enjoy, create, life, art; I splattered some gold acrylic paint and ended with the image of the woman's face with black marker.

This is the back of the cards, it's pretty much the same as the front minus the woman's face and the phrase Art is Life written with white ink and shadowed with black marker. I cannot wait to get this amazing book back!

Mermaid Redo...

I have found out that a lot of time when I don't like a piece of art it'll get more interest than a piece I'm particularly proud of. Point in case, the mermaid fiasco I wrote about two weeks ago here...I didn't like what the end product turned out like and I decided not to include it for the Pick-a-Theme swap @ iATCs. Well, you can color me surprised when it got asked in a trade not 10 minutes after I posted...and even more surprised when after I agreed to trade it I got positive comments on it...Anyhow, it was too late to back off the trade and I had to create a new mermaid card for the PAT.

I used collaged papers, acrylics, a mermaid transparency and black and white drawing ink on this one. I'm done with the mixed media cards for the PAT, I have to work in the hand-drawn cards now.

Orchids

Mom's birthday today! I have been working on this for the last week.

20" x 17"





Watercolor on watercolor paper.

Pink Rose

Lately I've been in a creative mood, I woke up this morning with a great desire for painting something. I'm way behind in lots of ATC trades, but I felt the need to work on a larger scale.

I browsed through my garden pics and I found this rose; the colors are completely different as the real rose was a darker pink and white.

This is going as an extra gift in a package I sent on Monday, I hope the person who gets it likes it as much as I do :)

Ballerina Watercolor

This is the latest painting I've finished on Saturday classes, it is a 11"x15" watercolor.
I started the drawing last weekend, worked on the first layer of paint during the week, and finished it during class yesterday morning.

There are still some things that are a bit wonky and I need to fix on the basic shape:
*the arms should have had more of a curve in them.
*the back is too wide, she was a really skinny girl in real life.
*the forehead should be larger, I drew the hairline too low in that part.

All things considered, I'm pretty satisfied with this one, especially with the way the colors turned out. Since the other students in the class are working with oils, we'll keep working the same pose for the next two classes; I'll have to choose a different position to create a different piece.

Alice...

One of the first cards I received when I started trading ATCs was with an Alice in Wonderland theme, and it is one of my favorite themes so far. This one is for Amerasu over at iATCs for the July partner swap.

I'm thinking I should take a pic of my Alice collection and show it off, there are really amazing things in it :)

Home and Heart

Ok, last piece for the Mixed Media PAT over at iATCs - well at least until I get done with Mermaid #2- This one is for Shelly, and her theme was "Home is where the Heart is". I went with a whimsical style for this one, trying to make it fun and colorful.

*I started with a piece of fabric, the light blue with color circles on top, I read somewhere that you can add some sealer over the fabric to make it stiff and to avoid fraying. I had it already prepared and it saved me time.

*I sketched the shape of the house on top and added a couple of hands of gesso.

*I used my acrylics to paint the walls with bright yellow and the roof with a combination of red/orange/yellow.

*I outlined the house, roof and the shape of the heart with black ink.

*I added bronze dimensional paint inside the heart...I dropped the card face down on the floor when I was cleaning up, picked it up again and waited for it to dry before I can fix the boo boo.

*I added some white acrylic around the color circles in the background.

I'm still considering on adding a border with the same dimensional paint around the card...not quite sure yet.

Mermaid Fiasco

Yesterday I told you about how sometimes when I play with collage and mixed media I'm in for a bit of a gamble...sometimes it pays off, and sometimes you get this:


Meet the Mermaid Fiasco... This poor card started its life as a paper cut, which I was quite happy to try. I searched high and low for a piece of black paper and couldn't find any in my whole stash, quite brilliantly -yeah, right...- I decided to use a piece of blue paper.

I then started to work on cutting the design, which turned out to be quite time consuming and difficult at times.

I finally finished and started on the background, scrunged up white paper over cardstock and covered with blue metallic paint. I added the paper cut and it got completely lost over the background, I thought that I could outline it a bit and started adding white and black ink until I got to a point where I just had to step away and admit that this time I was way over my head... I'll have to start from scratch for this little beauty...ugh...

Portrait of a Fairy

Ok, so this is what I picture the portrait of a fairy looks like ;)
This one is for Deb.

*I started with a vintage playing card that had a character from one of Jane Austen's books -I cannot remember which character though-.

*I gessoed over the image, added light peach and purple squares of tissue paper all over the rest of the card, and finally rubbed a bit of metallic blue paint over it.

*I painted over the original image with my acrylics and added two butterfly wings from a rub-on I had lying around (I think I need to seal them though, so I can make sure it doesn't peel off)

*I ended it with acrylic blue squares and rectangles outlined with black and white ink and some pieces of metallic paper on top.

I like to play with collage and mixed media a lot, granted it does not always comes out as I had earlier planned...check in tomorrow to see what I mean.

Mixed Media Butterflies

One of these is going to Anita in iATCs, for the Summer PAT. She is in my Mixed Media group and she asked for butterflies, so I started working on one and ended up with two :)

Here's a short walk through of how I made these:
*I used some watercolor paper as my base, and did a quick wash with yellow and red watercolors.
*I altered the images from a greeting card, it was a blue butterfly with the 2 yellow smaller butterflies on the corners. The image was too large so instead of wasting half the image I did 2 ATCs from it.
*I first added a watered down gesso coat over the images- I just wanted to give some tooth to the paper so I could add color on top.
*Next was a very translucent coat of metallic paint -blue and yellow- over the entire butterflies' bodies.
*I added the inside details with acrylics, white ink, and black ink.
*I finished it up with a transparency -text on one and music sheet on the other.

I worked on more ATCs during the weekend, and a larger project from my figure drawing class. I'll post them later on during the week.

Queens!

These are my latest ATCs for the Flower Queens/Fairies Swap at iATCs. I had to work fast on these ones because they are due on August 3rd, I need to get them out of here by Monday to make sure they'll arrive on time.
These are done in watercolor paper, I applied a first layer of marker, went over it with my Prismacolor colored pencils and finished with white drawing ink.

A New Addiction

After a couple of weeks of constant rain the sun finally decided to make an appearance, we have had two wonderful days of sunshine and they have been greatly appreciated. I finally had a chance of taking pics of the latest blooms in my Mom's garden and they are just fantastic. Our pomegranate tree is full of fruit which soon will be ripe enough to eat and all the rose bushes are blooming.
Take a look at my new addiction ;)

I have always had this attraction to knitting and sewing, but for the life of me I cannot knit nor sew a button.
A couple of weeks ago comes my Mom with a new hobby she is going to try, using a knitting board. I instantly jumped on the idea but had to wait for her to complete her project first, a salmon scarf which she finished but then work got in the way and my project was pushed in the back burner.
I finally decided I wanted to give it a try so I looked online for instructions on how to use a knitting board and started trying it out with the yarn I had recycled from an old sweater. It is not the most beautiful scarf ever; to be true I'm not sure I'll ever wear it, but it let me get a feeling for the knitting board. After finishing that one, I got this brown yarn and started working on a complete piece which I finished last weekend.

My favorite part is getting different effects by using different stitches, this one is a ribbing stitch and it made the scarf quite warm and full. It was quite a fun and fast project to work on and I can see more scarves and different stitches coming during the following months.

P.S. The latest issue of Art Trader Magazine is out and is full of great stuff, click on the cover and enjoy all the cool articles and art in this edition.

Markers

Ok, this one was a bit of a challenge, for this swap over at iATCs I could only use markers. I hadn't joined but I was doodling on some blank pieces of card while waiting for some webpages to upload -my internet has been ssssslllllooooooowwwwww lately- and I came up with a couple of ladies.

I decided to try my hand at markers and started coloring the details, the hair, the backgrounds....and then I realized that in my big box of El Cheapo markers there weren't any markers suitable enough for coloring the skin, I wasn't going to let this stop me for joining this swap so I used a trick I picked up from another fabulous blogger (who I have lost in cyber space...cannot find her anywhere), I colored over an empty plastic bag trying to get a nice puddle of ink and then I used a brush and some water to pick up the color like watercolors and applied it to the card.

A couple of things to think about:

* Make sure that your previous colored areas don't get wet because the water might leave a mark on it.

* My paper was not fit for watercolors...so I had a hard time telling the right amount of water to use -the paper soaked too much water and looked darker before it dried completely. I highly suggest using watercolor paper.

* This will obviously not work with permanent markers -so put those Sharpies away! they need to be water based for the technique to work.