Some artwork from the Art Journal Tangents and the Fun Color Challenge

As I said in my previous blog post, one of my largest inspirations in my art journal is Daisy Yellow. 

In August, Tammy had another month of inspirations, by posting weekly her Art Journal Tangents some creative things we could do with art and paper. One of the weeks, she cut up file folders and folded them to make accordian books. She then had 12 small surfaces on which to put something artistic. In no time at all, she and many of her creative followers did exactly that.

I struggled though. What, in my mountain of supplies would look good on this? And since one of my possessions is the remnants of a package of multi-colored file folders, which color should I even get started with?

Then I saw a picture on Facebook. This was of another long-ago Olympic torch bearer. Not quite as long ago as the one I'd seen in the magazine, only from 1960. But that's still a long time ago, longer ago than my lifetime, and I'm a Grandma. The other neat thing about the torchbearer from 1960 is he was from my hometown, and probably went to high school with my mother as he was only a year behind her in school.

So, I had to do something with that picture. I printed it out and put it in my art journal, hoping to figure out what. I also already had found some scraps of inked paper with windows punched in them, and thought I should put them in the art journal too.

The inked paper with the windows reminded me of Prompt 2, and the Olympic torchbearer reminded me of Prompt 9 on Daisy Yellow. What's more, they both also reminded me of the color red because my high school has that not too politically correct mascot shared with Washington DC's football team,, the Redskins. And that, along with Tammy's Art Journal Tangent, inspired this art creation. I am still trying to figure out what to put on the very last page, but I've found a few more red things to put on there recently.

September, Daisy Yellow has a new weekly challenge. It's called the Fun Color Prompt Challenge, and requires that we use one color and one word to create small pieces of art that would fit in the accordian books she taught us how to make last month.  So I came up with this.

The color choices we had to work with were in the first week were grapefruit, peach, vermillion, citron and lemon. The prompts, from which we were to choose five, were forest, mysterious, flip -flops, album cover, doodle and Willy Wonka.

I chose to discard the mysterious prompt, because nothing came to mind. But here's my take on the rest.

1. I stamped a citrus forest with the first tree stamp I could find.

2. I attempted to draw lemon yellow flip flops on a pink background as I had seen in the Sandals logo my church was using all summer. (They went to a new logo this week in preparation for a new sermon series this weekend). In the logo, you can clearly see two yellow flip-flops resting heel to heel to form an S. My second artwork is my best attempt of four at recreating this.

3. I drew a textual element from one of Don's album covers. Vermillion is red-orange, but I didn't have anything that color, so I used red and orange. The text reads "Incense and Peppermints, Strawberry Alarm Clock."

4. A pink (same pink as in Prompt 2) doodle. This one is significant because when I was recently meeting with some other women business owners, most of whom are still in the startup stage ( at least 16 months behind me), I used a similar doodle to explain to them that you do not start a business and become successful on a straight path, but rather you have some success, make a few wrong turns, fall back and then rise above that, over and over again. 

5. A lollipop on a peach-pattern paper background. I knew I was going to cut out pieces of candy from a collection of paper called "Sweet" for the Willy Wonka prompt. I ended up cutting a lollipop right off the cover. I thought I was going to paint the background with my only paint color, which is paint. But working on this last piece of artwork last night, it was late. I did not want to break out the paints and wait for them to dry. I remembered another collection, I don't think it even has a name, had the peach-colored paper in it. I think the design looks kind of like Oompa Loompas too.