tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23213211412603454842024-03-18T21:12:56.313-07:00Granddaughter, GrandmotherEllen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-90419187265779201092014-09-12T14:32:00.002-07:002014-09-12T14:32:46.643-07:00Finishing my yellow accordian journalLast post I shared two small accordian journals made from file folders, a creation inspired by the website <a href="http://www.daisyyellow.com/">DaisyYellow.com </a>(fun stuff there for art journals). Since then, I have modified three of the five creations on my yellow jouran, and added a few more on the back side of it. The yellow art journal is now finished, and I even found a way to incorporate it into my larger art journal.<br />
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Here's what I did.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR1hyphenhyphennOXuKnVjKOLvXYldx-dKp8c3FPvk2mhLoiwt3WirFgLmC3STUid0SVsz-OzGfFy2uuhR-hCXhp462BULLL_Md8k2nBaF7qVfjZO_SybBY0R8oPd35X4xoWxDAa5sQUlvSqa4wlZ1n/s1600/001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR1hyphenhyphennOXuKnVjKOLvXYldx-dKp8c3FPvk2mhLoiwt3WirFgLmC3STUid0SVsz-OzGfFy2uuhR-hCXhp462BULLL_Md8k2nBaF7qVfjZO_SybBY0R8oPd35X4xoWxDAa5sQUlvSqa4wlZ1n/s1600/001.JPG" height="90" width="320" /></a></div>
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I added a citron wash to the citron forest. I added a lemon wash to the yellow flip-flops, but then I cut some flip-flops from yellow pattern paper and glued them on my poorly drawn ones. I added vermillion wash to the red and orange record album logo. I added the washes with water color pencils and a water brush. I also added a little peach-colored paint to the peach-colored pattern paper with the Willy Wonka theme.<br />
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DaisyYellow.com's Fun Color Prompt Challenge for week two was colors sepia, lavender, tangerine charcoal and sky, and things house, wave or surf, torn paper, tulip and color wheel. I took more liberties with the challenge this week. I hope they will forgive me.<br />
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I started with a photo of surf, and a hint of sky. I added a little more sky blue into the water, which was initially an attempt to write "somewhere" on the page like I did on a photo of this same beach in my regular art journal. I also doodled blue waves around the photo, similar to what I had done in the art journal.<br />
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Next, since the technique produces the desired color, I turned to the technique of tinting a photo sepia on a computer. The photo is of me, standing behind my house. Mine is the one with the bushes. When a photo of tulips showed up on Facebook, I knew it had to be in there too. I also knew I was going to use one of my many quotes, and I was going to "burn" the edges of it by adding black and brown ink. (Charcoal the edges by adding mostly black?)<br />
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But how was I going to incorporate the lavender and tangerine color prompts, and the torn paper and color wheel thing prompts? Then it dawned on me. Use the color wheel tool to help develop the color scheme, and use the decades-old technique of tearing pieces of paper on the page to add texture.<br />
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That really only worked on the sepia photo, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the tulips. See, if I had to do the color wheel to pick colors to match the beach photo, I would have had to have picked red. And that just didn't work.<br />
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But in between sepia and lemon yellow (the journal's color on the color scale, you have orange (tangerine) and yellow orange. A few scraps of cardstock to accent the sepia photo, and one striped scrap to accent the charcoaled quote fit the bill.<br />
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That left lavender to accent the tulips photo. Fine. It had four of the next five colors on the color wheel, with red and pink representing two shades of the same color.<br />
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That left me with only four prompts. Once I had the message explaining the liberties I had taken (instead of Tammy's Fun Color Prompt Challenge, mine was the Color, Technique and Tool Prompt Challenge) I still had one leftover spaces. But that worked well for me.<br />
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I used the blank space to glue the small yellow art journal to the main art journal.<br />
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Since there are only four prompts on the back side, nothing is covered up. I still have room to do more to the page if I so choose.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-48094764804665957592014-09-06T13:03:00.003-07:002014-09-06T13:03:33.242-07:00Some artwork from the Art Journal Tangents and the Fun Color ChallengeAs I said in my previous blog post, one of my largest inspirations in my art journal is <a href="http://daisyyellow.com/">Daisy Yellow. </a><br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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I chose to discard the mysterious prompt, because nothing came to mind. But here's my take on the rest.</div>
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1. I stamped a citrus forest with the first tree stamp I could find.</div>
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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.</div>
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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."</div>
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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. </div>
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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. </div>
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Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-16944717847343524212014-09-06T12:35:00.002-07:002014-09-06T12:35:40.716-07:00Some artwork from Daily Paper PromptsMy favorite place to find prompts for my art journal is <a href="http://daisyyellow.com/">DaisyYellow.com </a>The owner of this site, Tammy Garcia, is a talented and inspiring artist. She's had plenty of inspiration on her site lately.<br />
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<b>The Daily Paper Prompts</b><br />
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Technically, these ran July 1 through Aug. 31, but you can start and finish these anytime. I'm still working on mine,<br />
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Technically, you are supposed to use one prompt for each page. I've got a few of those. I will post at least one of those another day. But, not all of mine are one prompt per page.<br />
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On these two pages, I incorporated prompts 2 through 12. For the most part, I used my watercolor pencils, which can create very interesting subtle effects when you apply water to them. Some of these prompts I took rather loosely, but the prompts were:<br />
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2. Windows: Cut holes into paper and let other paper show through the window. I cut a logo out of some scratch paper, and then used it to color the yellow square shown here on the top page.<br />
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3. Drips: Very subtle here, but at the bottom of the top page you can see that my watercolor pencils were applied with enough water to make them drip.<br />
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4. Flowers. I drew them in the top right side of this page for the prompt, and leaves on the bottom of the right side. I later drew more flowers on the second page.<br />
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5. Linear: I drew four very straight lines on the top page. I used the same scratch paper from Prompt 2.<br />
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6, Certificate - That left a great box to certify something, especially with the "gold medal" from Prompt 2 already on it. I certified the page was already a complete mess, but I wasn't done yet.<br />
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7. Leftovers - It's hard to see on the blog, but a portion of the now very colorfully-edged scratch paper is glued to the bottom of the top page.<br />
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8. Faded - Cut paper into four pieces. Put some color on each piee and do something to make it look faded. I drew more flowers with the watercolor pencils and applied the water brush to these. Since I was running out of room on the top page, I glued these to the facing (bottom) page.<br />
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9. Game - This prompt is key to another project I'll post after this one, which then inspired yet another project. But for this page, I found a picture of 1936 Olympic torchbearers in a magazine, and decided the Olympics were the perfect game to represent this prompt.<br />
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10. Stitch paper - This is perhaps the most loosely interpreted prompt, because I don't have thread for stitching on hand. So I perforated the torn edges of my photo with a needle anyhow, then glued some fiber to the other page.<br />
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11. Ogee Pattern - This is my second year going through this same list of prompts with Daisy Yellow, and the first set of creations from them are in the same journal. I went all out with a few ogee patterned pages in 2013, but this prompt never has been my favorite. So, I drew one row of ogee pattern at the top of this multi-prompt spread. Later, I added a border sticker that I thought looked a little like a small scale version of it.<br />
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12. Use a circle sticker - The blue one with the crown<br />
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And that was enough, I think. I moved on to new pages for each prompt I've done since then. But I didn't completely leave these prompts alone.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-55403488859467868912014-04-27T13:01:00.003-07:002014-04-27T13:01:40.378-07:00LightI am probably one of the worst bloggers out there, and of my three blogs, this one is probably the least focused of them. Today, I'm posting for the first time in almost six months, I'm going to say something at least six of my seven followers won't particularly expect or necessarily care about here, but I'm hopefully going to get some visitors who do, and I may be wrong about the followers.<br />
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Anyway, today I am going back to something I had a bit of when I started this blog, which is to try and be the kind of grandmother my grandmother was for me. (She was still alive then, and I myself had just become a grandmother. Now I'll soon be a grandmother of four!)<br />
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This particular post is only loosely connected to that. I am studying a book called Nurture at church. The chapter of Nurture I finished reading today encourages us to leave a strong spiritual legacy to our own children, which will of course be difficult for me, since I did not raise children. I am thankful though that Don has done that for Holly and Josh, and I am going to publicly thank Holly right here for sending him a letter a few weeks ago acknowledging her gratitude for many of the things Don did as a Dad. It wasn't easy for Don, being the non-custodial parent and living so far away from them, so it's good to know what he did was appreciated by Holly. And I think, deep down, it is also appreciated by Josh.<br />
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I HOPE, even though we are still far away from both kids, I can impart some kind of legacy, both spiritual and otherwise, on my grandchildren. (Holly and Josh's children.)<br />
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But the rest of Nurture talks about connecting with younger women who aren't necessarily our biological or even otherwise daughters. I don't have a deep connection with any such woman, but I hope I have been an encouragement to some, like Holly and my cousins Jodi and Wendy and a few young women at church. I also hope that my writing has been a blessing to women I haven't met. And that's what I'm hoping for the rest of this blog post. You see, in last week's homework for Nurture, we were asked to compare lights in our home to the spiritual aspects of light. The three women (out of seven normally there) who attended last week felt I should share my answer with others. So here it is.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lights in our home allow us to see when it's dark --- Jesus is the light that enables us to see through the darkness to the truth. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">LED lights (among other things) tell us what time it is --- the Holy Spirit is the light that tells me it's time to serve God. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some lights, like the ones on my curling irons, waffle irons and regular irons, tell me when those appliances are ready to be used ---- the Holy Spirit is like a light telling me I'm ready to be in service to God. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My cell phone lights up when I have a phone call - through God's word and prayer, I am in communication with God. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My cameras have flashes (a kind of light) on them, which illuminates the photographic images I take with them. Jesus, "The Light" is the image of God, and also we are also made in His image, so we must be light to the world. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My Cultivate group came up with two more: </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ultraviolet light cleanses, just as Jesus' death and resurrection (this was the week after Easter we studies this) purifies us, and lasers can cut things, just as Jesus can take the things out of our life that are not good for us. </span></span><br />
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<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-14672335588397672452013-11-18T22:10:00.000-08:002013-11-18T22:36:30.632-08:00Stepping out in faith<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://oneyearartjournal.blogspot.com/">One Year Art Journal</a> isn't a spiritually focused blog, but quite often its prompts put me in touch with my spirituality. The Nov. 15 prompt is "What Do You Want Right Now?" and the second "booker" prompt is to use rubons. Well, it just so happens my most recent rubon purchase is some spiritually focused ones I bought about a year ago, to illustrate my grandson's baptism on a scrapbook page. I also had a few much older rubons that are like fake stitches.<br />
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The older rubons came off fairly decently for their age, although since they are white, I am not sure how well they show up in this photo. They are on the left side of the page, which I had already created a striped watercolor background on.<br />
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The newer rubons were more of a challenge. Big chunks of all three stayed on the backing, no matter how much I rubbed. So, I decided to fill in the gaps with some gold Stickles. Not perfect, but better. The top rubon is a dove, the bottom one, which largely stuck to the backing, is a cross. In between is a quote "Let The Faith In Your Heart Be Your Guide."<br />
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It is this quote that inspired the rest of my journaling. As One Year Art Journal and several other inspiration sites prompted, I picked a One Little Word for the year, which was "Content." At the beginning of 2013, I thought I'd have plenty of good reasons to focus on the portion of that word that means "being content with what you have." (I also was focusing on some of the other meanings of the word, but that's not part of the point of this entry.) I ran out of unemployment in April, so I was bracing myself for what I thought (correctly) would be a rough year.<br />
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But things started looking up in May. I started my business, Pen Porter, that month. Seeing as I invested nothing but the cost of registering my business, it's been profitable. Not quite as much as I'd hoped, but then in August, I got hired to manage the Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce part-time. So there's another little bit of income, and it's more than I thought it was going to be. So that's good.<br />
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On the somewhat bad side, I've decided I had to split my income off from Don's. I won't go into all the reasons why, but if you know me, you might know why. But the up side of that means I now have some freedom to spend some of my income as I see fit. There's a million things I want, far fewer things I can get.<br />
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And then there is a challenge to reach beyond myself. My co-worker, Bob Hernandez, inspires me to this in many ways. He is working at the Chamber strictly as a full-time volunteer, but invests a lot in me both timewise, and financially. He would like to see me "pay it forward," although I can only do so on a limited basis now.<br />
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But Sandals has always challenged people to reach beyond themselves. For the past six weeks it specifically has done so through its "Reach" building campaign. This campaign asked us to look beyond ourselves and let God move in our church. Sandals also has a holiday gift giving ministry.<br />
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It gave me a lot of pleasure to invest in two gifts for a 13-year-old girl, and to commit a small amount of money over the next two years to the building campaign. I feel like I am a part of something significant, that will reach far beyond myself. I've blessed a young girl, and I've helped my church bless many others through the building campaign.<br />
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The journaling at the bottom of this page explains "In the past few months, I have moved from being simply content to feeling blessed and looking beyond myself."<br />
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I know this is exactly how God wants me to feel. And therefore, it's what I want for myself right now.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-44578048773796035662013-11-18T21:43:00.001-08:002013-11-18T22:37:07.526-08:00Journaling some of the fall holidaysI know only post sporadically on this blog, mostly my art journal pages. Some of the pages I share on certain Facebook groups instead. But for <a href="http://oneyearartjournal.blogspot.com/">A Year In the Life of An Art Journal</a>, it often works better to post them on my blog. This day's story also references a page I did inspired only by some Daisy Yellow prompts and the proximity at that time of Veterans' Day. <br />
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I more recently finished pages inspired by both the Oct. 30 and Nov. 15 prompts at A Year in the Life of an Art Journal. Here's my story about the Oct. 30-inspired page. <br />
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Oct. 30 was in honor of Halloween. The first prompt was "Scary," and the second was to create stripes, like the Wicked Witch of the East's striped socks. Remember her from the Wizard of Oz? She was the one crushed by the house at the beginning of the movie. All you saw were the striped socks peeking out from under the house.<br />
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I'd already painted one of my art journal pages orange because of a Daisy Yellow Daily Paper Prompt gone wrong. Then I saw some Zentanglish stripes on Pinterest, and copied them to the best of my ability. But then the page sat there for about two weeks, not anywhere near finished in my mind. I knew that my "scary" orange and black page would somehow focus on Halloween. But Halloween is not my favorite holiday, so I wasn't sure how to finish it. So, I moved on, working on some of my favorite inspiration sites via other pages in my art journal. Quite recently, I came across prompts in Daisy Yellow DPP "Ransom Note," and another prompt in Emily Falconbridge's 52 Questions, which is a series of prompts she published in 2009, but I only discovered at the end of 2012. The prompt in 52 Questions was "What Is Your Favorite Holiday?" My favorite is Easter, which is not a holiday I'm thinking a whole lot about right now. Instead, as I thought about how I might incorporate ANY holiday into an art journal page, my mind roamed from Halloween (this at the time unfinished page) to Veterans' Day (a holiday I had already recently incorporated into another page, below) to Thanksgiving (a holiday I like almost as much as Easter, and will no doubt feature in the journal soon, but not yet.)<br />
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Halloween won out when I remembered that I had purchased some really cute Halloween stickers last year to scrapbook my grandson's first Halloween. And Daisy Yellow's DPP "Ransom Note," (create a ransom note with mismatched stickers brought it all together. I decided I'd use the "scary" stickers, the skeletons and the ghosts, on the page. I also wanted to use some of the gazillion "candy" stickers I had left. So, with a little bit of imagination, I came up with the idea to "kidnap" my least favorite holiday, and warn the world that if they want it back, they must give me candy. I can be pretty diabolical, can't I?Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-50093924780662316832013-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:002013-08-17T14:13:17.612-07:00I have no regrets, but I do make mistakes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the art journal challenge blogs I read regularly is A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. It's getting a little neglect these days, because unlike the challenges I work on daily at Daisy Yellow Art, this blog is only updated with a new challenge twice a month. Most recently, it was updated with a challenge to journal about regrets, and to use thick paint (it actually recommended texture paste, but I don't have that) on the page. There is a photography challenge you can do with or instead of the art journal challenge. This time, it was to photograph your least favorite beverage mug.<br />
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If I still had it, my least favorite mug would have been my once treasured Daily Press 50th anniversary mug. But I smashed that thing into the Daily Press's trash can just before we moved to Riverside. And that made me think of the "cracked" page I had created, just waiting for some prompts that would actually involve journaling. You can learn about the process and other prompts that led to the creation of the background <a href="http://portergandg.blogspot.com/2013/08/finishing-up-icads.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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My orange paint is definitely the thickest of the two containers of paper paint that I own. It was created by mixing water with a powdered pigment. Because I had left it open overnight not too long ago, the paint is now thicker than it used to be, which simply means I'll have to add more water before using it for "normal" purposes. No problem. I hqve had to do that with just about all my acrylic paints as well, even though all but one of them eventually got to the point where water or no water, no more paint was coming out. But the orange paint is in a large enough jar it doesn't have to be squeezed out. You can dip a paintbrush right in. I did, and added a liberal dose of the thick orange paint. Since the first coat of the paint on this page 1) Was applied before the jar of paint thickened and 2) Was dabbed onto this page with an index card that was already wet from a freshly applied tea stain, the new coat is quite a contrast to the first coat.<br />
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Once my new paint was dry, I tackled the journaling. As a Christian, I've learned not to spend too much time thinking about my regrets. Repentance of sins means to acknowledge you did something wrong, then move on and trust Jesus to help you do the right thing next time. That even has been the focus of a series of sermons I've heard at church recently from First Peter. I merged the thoughts of several verses in Peter and elsewhere to create this reminder to myself of how I should live. <br />
Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-18230824540925862422013-08-17T13:52:00.000-07:002013-08-17T14:16:22.594-07:00Finishing up the ICADSI didn't quite make 61 ICADs when I was participating in the Index Card A Day challenge at Daisy Yellow Art. If I had done the challenge "correctly" I would have made one of those little cards every day, and thus would have had 61 at the end of the two months.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ICAD 41 before I added stitching</td></tr>
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This ICAD, shown here in its initial stage, was one of the last, and takes advantage of prompts from the last list for ICAD and the Daily Paper Prompts that Daisy Yellow Art is now expanding one day at a time. (There will be 61 of those eventually as well, as they started Aug. 1 and will run through Sept. 30)<br />
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From the ICAD prompts, I first used "teabag." I dragged a wet used teabag across the card, a technique I think is partially responsible for the marbled look. That list also had "paint drips," which meant painting orange paint onto the wet card. At that point in time, I had worked my way through the first six Daily Paper Prompts, so I decided that for Prompt 7 "Leftovers," I would begin by adding some leftover paint to my Prompt 5 "Linear" creation. I wasn't sure for several days what I would do after adding the paint, but <a href="http://portergandg.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-have-no-regrets-but-i-do-make-mistakes.html" target="_blank">here </a>is how I finished the page. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeTmhzbRqIW_HQM4Bm9-YCak2Bp0HAxXEHC7Uei9TS69oSGtcmxYir4yrc7Qlg9NrDPaXglzWWrIeFeGyoPhuevBv6Gh_H-r8mkalP5LPCyfMgmmtSgLLqvX_PR85iCQn5ndHmr8ZmPCHU/s1600/IMG_0864.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">x<img border="0" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeTmhzbRqIW_HQM4Bm9-YCak2Bp0HAxXEHC7Uei9TS69oSGtcmxYir4yrc7Qlg9NrDPaXglzWWrIeFeGyoPhuevBv6Gh_H-r8mkalP5LPCyfMgmmtSgLLqvX_PR85iCQn5ndHmr8ZmPCHU/s320/IMG_0864.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DPP 5 Linear, before modifications</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Linear, when I had added leftover paint and scraps for DPP 7 Leftovers.</td></tr>
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A third item on the last ICAD list was "Ogee pattern," which is not exactly like what I drew in ICAD 41 above. (I just didn't draw it right). My Ogee pattern color scheme was actually inspired by something other than Daisy Yellow. My Kleenex box has a more true Ogee pattern in similar colors. <br />
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Since Daily Paper Prompt 8 was "Faded," I decided to use it on this ICAD. To do the "Faded" technique for that days prompt, you must draw a pattern with neocolors (if you have them) or watercolor pencils (if, like me, that's all you have), then spray them with water. (This is one wet ICAD!).<br />
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There was one more prompt on the ICAD list, "Looks like fabric" I used paper that looks like fabric. It's a scrap that has been in my scraps stash a long time. I knew that scrap was there, but didn't know it was the perfect size to cover a 4 x 6 index card. When I figured that out, I decided the fabric paper should be a background, so I cut the "ogee pattern" parts out of my ICAD in progress, and glued to them to the fabric paper I had already glued to a new index card. Some of the scraps leftover from that also made it to the combination 5/7 Daily Paper Prompt page. <br />
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I wasn't quite done with the ICAD prompts, but that was all of them I used on this card. I had combined one word on that list "celebration" with staple collage on the previous week's list. I used elephant, doodles galore and concentric circles on one last ICAD, and that was the end of the ICADS for me.<br />
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However, Daily Paper Prompt 10 called for "stitching." Again inspired by the Kleenex box, I had wanted to add white stitching to this ICAD. But I couldn't find my stitching needles. I wasn't going to let that slow me down though, so I decided I could just glue the thread onto the page, and work with it to reasonably follow the contours of the Ogee pattern.<br />
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I have mixed feelings about that addition to the card. I was just using plain glue from Dollar Tree, so it was kind of hard to work with. The thread (dental floss, yes I am on a tight budget) didn't contour as well as I had hoped, and the glue came out in a thicker line than it should have. As i was working with this floss, there were a few times where bits of the Ogee pattern tore off, leaving rough white patches in its place. And ultimately, the floss didn't completely follow the curves of the Ogee pattern. But now the last ICAD is done!<br />
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I ended up with 42. After I purchased my current art journal, I noticed I already had a similar, but smaller book. It was the perfect place to glue each and everyone of my ICADs. I'll have room for some more of them next year.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All 42 ICADs in their permanent home</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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But I wasn't quite finished with Ogee patterns. That was the technique for Daily Paper Prompt 11. (Both it and Daily Paper Prompt 3 "Paint Drips," were repeated on the ICAD list. Since DPP was created last year, it's the ICAD list that does the repeating.). I used the same color scheme as on the ICAD detailed above, and also repeated the Faded technique from DPP 8 on this, but left off the tea stain, the paint and the scrap of paper that looks like fabric. I think I did a slightly better job drawing the Ogee pattern though. It's a tough one!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Ogee pattern inspired page in my art journal. </td></tr>
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<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-33530676186362582802013-08-02T20:47:00.001-07:002013-08-02T20:47:20.803-07:00On the bright side<br />
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It's just the name of an ongoing art journal challenge I participate in called A Year In The Life of An Art Journal. Challenges there are only twice a month, on the 15th and the 30th. The July 30 challenge is to do a journal page inspired by "On the bright side" and to use yellow.<br />
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My art journal largely follows prompts from other art journalists' blogs. Even so, Book 2, my current journal, is shaping up to be a book about the many good things in my life. So I could have just added yellow to a number of pages, but this one seemed to benefit from it the most. I'd already done all the journaling but the yellow (the words and the clouds) for a page about my dreams. Since then, I realized one of them, and was able to check that box. The other two are fairly realistic dreams as well, although #3 will take me a while to realize.<br />
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Adding yellow ink all over the page made it just look a little sunnier. And really, sometimes when it's super hot here in southern California, the sky almost looks yellow. Thankfully, it hasn't been that hot lately, except on my page.<br />
<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-36669615653901452972013-08-02T20:40:00.001-07:002013-08-02T20:40:38.252-07:00Back to (almost) daily art journalingI didn't create a bunch of pages in my art journal during the months of June and July because of the little index cards I was working on for Index-Card-A-Day, a challenge at <a href="http://daisyyellowart.com/" target="_blank">Daisy Yellow</a>. But now she's moving on to something kind of new, the Daily Paper Prompts.<br />
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This is my second summer/fall joining in the DPP Challenge. I finished my "introduction" to Daisy Yellow, Jump Start Your Art Journal sometime during August of 2012, and then basically moved onto some prompts she was in the process of posting, one a day. I finished behind schedule, but there were others on the Daisy Yellow Facebook page who started the prompts even later than I.<br />
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This year, except that I started today and already did the first three, I am on schedule. Since it's still only Aug. 2 here, I will respect the concept of Daily Paper Prompts being something you follow daily, one a day, in order, and I will only post my first two. Besides, the third one is more of an excellent background, so I'm waiting to see what gets posted for Sunday. Although the concept of Daily Paper Prompts is one "creation" a day, I think the rules allow for one day's creation to be layered on top of an earlier days. I know I did a bunch of that last year.<br />
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But here's my first two.<br />
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Prompt 1, Rainbow. I've already slightly goofed on this one. The prompt was to "paint" a rainbow, and I had an overwhelming desire to draw my rainbow crocheted potholder instead. Besides, I did sort of paint a rainbow last year. I already had something less than a "rainbow" of acrylic paints by the time I started the Daily Paper Prompts, so in Book 1 there's a rainbow of black, blue, purple and red. Now, even with having bought one new paint, I am down to two colors of paint. This year, I did want to do something different. Maybe I'll watercolor pencil paint another rainbow, but not right away.<br />
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Prompt 2, windows. My windows are cutouts of some random doodles I had in Book 1, which may even have been inspired by a later prompt in 2012. The left side window also has journaling, "From now on I am just going to do what makes me happy." The newspaper clipping is from a road race I was in, but I believe I'm ahead of everyone in this photo. <br />
<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-53693439565508888312013-07-13T22:08:00.003-07:002013-07-13T22:08:48.629-07:00Another week of ICADS<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;">This week, I continued my participation in Daisy Yellow's "Index Card A Day" Challenge. It's Day 42 of the challenge, and I have finished 28 cards. </td><td style="text-align: center;"> </td><td style="text-align: center;"> </td><td style="text-align: center;"> </td><td style="text-align: center;"> </td><td style="text-align: center;"> </td><td style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJD4QD44mJIaRpkqrwzM1N47qATqOb4FBoDHIWjsR03ayDksz3Nv1XDb-nGhw3CrwHVZb97bGAUCaSeY3KRXM27VCHBbrtWgjgqzRXwLuLH9EotKHC6riEiS64A36zKQYEaQHUWIMgRcik/s1600/IMG_0849.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJD4QD44mJIaRpkqrwzM1N47qATqOb4FBoDHIWjsR03ayDksz3Nv1XDb-nGhw3CrwHVZb97bGAUCaSeY3KRXM27VCHBbrtWgjgqzRXwLuLH9EotKHC6riEiS64A36zKQYEaQHUWIMgRcik/s320/IMG_0849.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="right"><td class="tr-caption">The prompts "draw your earrings" and "psychedelic" inspired a renovation to an existing card.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZUvrLe9_KMAjDjoHpFgHh249xvFUzmRO72ECHZRuu_J3E2AEETEVkypKkNKrsy3C0DaFf4ZBkkYeV4ohBDAjNvMIWbhqpE13A3Yixy2KttvDbT7Nxg62zw3Io4in8K_skuCdVOumQcsk5/s1600/peace+list.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZUvrLe9_KMAjDjoHpFgHh249xvFUzmRO72ECHZRuu_J3E2AEETEVkypKkNKrsy3C0DaFf4ZBkkYeV4ohBDAjNvMIWbhqpE13A3Yixy2KttvDbT7Nxg62zw3Io4in8K_skuCdVOumQcsk5/s320/peace+list.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is how my ICAD looked before the renovation. The above version is actually inspired by five prompts, as this one was inspired by "grocery list," "nail polish" and "peace sign."</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I decided to make a backgammon board with brown and black pieces of tape, as backgammon board and washi tape were prompts this week.</td></tr>
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Prompts of mosaics and leaves inspired this card. Then the wind blew real leaves onto my just-vacuumed floor.<br />
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There were two more prompts on Week 6 of the Daisy Yellow ICAD challenge that I did not do, which were "graffiti" and "stream of consciousness." I'm still thinking of ideas for them, so we shall see. The Week 7 prompts are also posted now. But Tammy had some extra, personalized prompts this week. We asked for, she gave. Mine was rainbow, fruit and collage. I decided some old Sweet Stack paper needed to be collaged. <br />
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<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-89573438883237343162013-07-07T12:30:00.001-07:002013-07-07T12:33:46.932-07:00Adding things as I goSince my last post two days ago, I haven't made much progress on my ICADs, but I have changed the appearance of two of them some.<br />
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I added a lot more stamps to my most recently created ICAD. And, because of the lighting differences the two times I photographed them, it also looks like I somehow bleached my card in between.<br />
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Then I followed the first two prompts for ICAD this week - Draw your earrings and psychedelic. I am grateful for the first prompt, because it also prompted me to organize my jewelry drawer, and while I was at it, a portion of the huge mess that is my scraproom. I drew my most psychedelic earring. However, because the pink post has broken off its other part of the pair, I then threw this earring away. Pink, blue and purple didn't look quite psychedelic enough to me, but the peace sign I had drawn for another ICAD two weeks ago did. So I cut out the earring from the ICAD it was on, and glued it to my older ICAD. That also helped with this week's weekly prompt, "textures." I like the texture of the wadded up grocery list, which was splashed with pink nail polish and whiteout before I drew the peace sign on it. Also, two layers of index card gives some texture, right?<br />
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ICAD stands for Index-Card-A-Day, a challenge issued by <a href="http://daisyyellowart.com/icad/" target="_blank">Tammy Garcia of Daisy Yellow</a>. The goal of the challenge is to create art of some sort on 61 index cards, either following a list of prompts or not. I'm pretty much following the prompts, but because I keep doubling, tripling or in this case, quadrupling up on them, I don't have the 37 cards I should have yet. The card with all the stamping makes #25. I probably won't end up with quite as many as I "should" but I'm sure that's OK.<br />
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<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-24408698383214217092013-07-05T20:02:00.000-07:002013-07-05T20:02:04.897-07:00The artist in me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here are the first 20 cards I made for Index-Card-A-Day at Daisy Yellow.<br />
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And here's the last five. I am far from the most creative art journaler on an index card. In fact, without Tammy Garcia's prompts, I would have very little idea of what to do with these index cards. But I've come up with some creative spins on her prompts, I think. Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-28396399999365870492013-07-01T20:17:00.000-07:002013-07-01T20:19:22.823-07:00Pinterest and challenge blogs combine for two<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I create a little bit of art almost every day, drawing inspiration from several challenge blogs - especially Daisy Yellow and A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. My two pieces of artwork created yesterday are inspired by both.<br />
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The current A Year In the Life of An Art Journal challenge was to create a page with the theme "Put Your Feet Up," and to create what looks like a beverage's "ring" on the page. And over at Daisy Yellow, host Tammy Garcia's now half-way through Index-Card-A Day challenge.Although the weekly challenge at Daisy Yellow this week is to use neutral colors, it's also to use tea or coffee on a page. <br />
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At Pinterest, there's a much brighter and better example of what I tried to do here. Unfortunately, Blogger isn't letting me post anything from Pinterest, nor from Flickr. So I can't show you the original. Wouldn't know whose it was, since it was on Flickr. <br />
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When I saw this quote, I knew it was perfect for the A Year in the Life of An Art Journal page. So, I tried to replicate what I saw there. The Pinterest page looks like watercolor pencils transferred with water color pens, but brighter. I knew mine would have to have more subdued tones, so I filled one of my water pens with tea, and stepped back to see what happened. Two pages I like. Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-13808451753175965862013-06-30T15:12:00.000-07:002013-06-30T15:12:37.592-07:00A week of painted cards<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have been busy creating cards this weekend for ICAD, mostly yesterday and today. So, I'm posting them all on Facebook in one swoop, and sharing a little more about each one here. They're not posted in order here. Because the weekly prompt this week was "paint," I chose to use my big jar of peach powder paint for five of them.<br />
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This was actually the last one, inspired by a cartoon i found on Facebook today, and the #8 ICAD daily prompt, "Happiness."<br />
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I've had a pillow since I was in high school that inspired this one - also Prompt #6 for the week, "your name in block letters." <br />
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Two years ago in the spring, when the weather was much cooler than today, my husband and I visited Joshua Tree National Park. This is very similar to a picture I took there. It's inspired by Prompt #5, lizard. <br />
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This is close to Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce's logo - inspired by Prompt #4, logo.<br />
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I don't like this card at all. It's inspired by prompts 1 and 2 for the fourth week of ICAD though - owl and lyrics. I thought the card was copying color, which would have showed the yellowness this old hymnal really has. An owl has to sing something with the word who.<br />
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Before I looked at the second prompt, I attempted to draw an owl.<br />
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This may the most technique-focused page, although I made it up. Inspired by prompts 3 and 4, peace and shopping list, I glued a real shopping list to the index card, splattered nail polish and whiteout over that, and drew a peace sign in several colors.<br />
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Now, ready to begin Week 5. I have a good idea for the first one, and maybe the second one, but the rest are kind of stumpifying.<br />
<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-202876306732057042013-06-21T21:49:00.000-07:002013-06-21T21:49:11.442-07:00Give it your all<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I enjoy running, and belong to a running club. Consequently I receive a magazine with all kinds of advice about running. While it may have been helpful, I loved the images of runners within for a much different reason. They make fantastic additions to my art journaling. <br />
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My latest contribution to the Index Card A Day Challenge combines both interests. Because whether it's running the streets, running my business or art journaling, I am interested in transforming potential into performance.<br />
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These runners are in the 1976 Olympic Marathon I have never run a marathon, nor has 75 percent of the membership of my running club. The 25 percent that has run them would be lucky to finish around 3 hours and 20 minutes. The best of these runners probably finished in more like 2 hours and 20 minutes. So, while they aren't sprinters, they, like all Olympic runners, were designed for speed. They definitely run with everything they've got. But then so do my marathoner friends, and I'd like to think that I do when I run a 5K. And I would like to think I give all that I have to other things I do, although I know in some areas, that's not ture.<br />
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But whatever I do it's good advice. For me, and for you. Once you realize that you need to do what you were designed for, and you give that everything you've got, your winning season starts now. So make he most of every advantage, and go run.<br />
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Art journaling is probably not what I'm designed for, but when an idea comes together, I will run with it. This idea is "found poetry," which is collecting words and phrases from a magazine and assembling them into some kind of poem. If you squint at the blurry lines, you see my poem says what I've said here. Not a bad found poem!<br />
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Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-20175893325692537552013-06-16T17:48:00.001-07:002013-06-16T17:48:56.784-07:00San Diego, more ICADs and one full-size journal page<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
One place I have enjoyed visiting on a more than annual basis since moving not too far away is San Diego, California. During the two years my cousin lived just west of there in Coronado - and especially in the year my aunt and uncle were there too, we visited more than once a year. But now they have both moved - my aunt and uncle back to Exeter, and the kids to Nebraska. As of today, I haven't been back down south since then. In fact, it has been almost a year. Since Wesley's birthday was celebrated in Orange County in 2012, it was Bradley's first birthday that we last visited San Diego. </div>
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But soon, Don and I will be headed south - almost that far. My brother is getting married at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas on July 4. We don't know about anyone else, as my parents' hotel is considerably farther away, but our hotel is the Day's Inn a few blocks from this same beach. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYODuhBe_FTva8jEXO23lQVAQBZgPgh9zyKenasd33H84oUjbu_fQdoeEX3ALD10Xv5oJhjyEXV47ZsobAvZG81K9q9WArLUn4U5FgZBpIuPJ3whnf0NNWML6Tp6pz4CYgVQCQeoVtdKoJ/s1600/IMG_0795.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" cya="true" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYODuhBe_FTva8jEXO23lQVAQBZgPgh9zyKenasd33H84oUjbu_fQdoeEX3ALD10Xv5oJhjyEXV47ZsobAvZG81K9q9WArLUn4U5FgZBpIuPJ3whnf0NNWML6Tp6pz4CYgVQCQeoVtdKoJ/s320/IMG_0795.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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And so, I had to make an index card celebrating the past visits to San Diego, and the near future visit to, um, San Diego County. </div>
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I am glad that even though we are in poverty, we can go to the beach. I did a real art journal page about where I would go if I were rich instead. This one was prompted by A Year in the Life of An Art Journal, but it was fun to give that some thought. If i were rich, instead of the beaches of southern and central California, and the fun/work trips we make to Hollywood on a regular basis, I would fly somewhere. It would probably still be to a beach, but far enough away no one could come there and say hi to me. So probably, some deserted tropical island.</div>
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The topic of "city or map," one of the prompts for the ICADs last week, inspired this creation. This is my own little part of southern California, specifically the area between my condo and the City Council chambers. Don and I, along with a Cal Poly student who was on the "planning" project Cal Poly had volunteered to help the city with, drew a similar but larger map on June 4 (minus the cute sun.) Then on June 6 the Cal Poly students presented a much more polished presentation to the City Council. Our city is supposed to be working on a general plan, but it of course, doesn't have the money to do so. So, it's working with a non-profit organization (Reach Out), Cal Poly Pomona and many residents to get some of the ground work done by very unconventional means. </div>
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These are a few more ICADs I've made in the past week or so, following prompts at Daisy Yellow.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-64888065951434280162013-06-06T14:20:00.002-07:002013-06-06T14:20:51.096-07:00My princesses<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For days 4 and 5 of the <a href="http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/" target="_blank">ICAD</a> (Index Card A Day) challenge, I focused on my granddaughter's love of princesses, and specifically, a conversation Holly and I had in which she was trying to convince Abigail that princesses wear pants. Well, at least Jasmine does. It was also noted by someone else on facebook that Ariel wears a similar outfit, but fins. Then when "crown" came up as one of the prompts on ICAD, and a couple of other ICAD posters followed their own beat and drew their own mermaids, I decided I could draw both Jasmine and Ariel to represent the "crown" prompt.</div>
Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-71824411443688671532013-06-02T19:31:00.000-07:002013-06-02T19:31:46.379-07:00ICAD 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My ICAD (see <a href="http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/">http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/</a>) for Day 2 is more technique-focused than most of them will be. It also is one that took a more convulted path to its own inspiration.<br />
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First, the technique. I found it at <a href="http://artangeloriginalart.blogspot.com/2010/11/mixed-media-crumpled-tissue-technique.html">http://artangeloriginalart.blogspot.com/2010/11/mixed-media-crumpled-tissue-technique.html</a>. This is a new blog for me to discover featuring a talented artist named Angie. Not sure what her last name is. She has the perfect description of this technique there, so I won't post it all over again on my blog.<br />
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But that's not where I originally found the inspiration.Although every art journal (and now ICAD) of mine is inspired by some sort of prompt this ICAD mimics an art journal page that was inspired by three different blogs.<br />
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First, I am going back into the archives of Emily Falconbridge's <a href="http://embers.typepad.com/e/2009/06/52q-26.html" target="_blank">Life Is Art</a>, which inspired a similar artistic journey into minatures back in 2007 when I did the Deck of Me. I'm not going quite that far back though. This link is to Week 26 of her "52 Questions," which is a year of artistic prompts she blogged iin 2009. The question that week was interesting "What would you write on your walls?" I think she had a guest blogger that week who didn't own her own home, so she wasn't free to do with her walls as she pleased. I am, but most of my walls are covered with furniture, photos, wall hangings, etc. Don<strike> is a hoarder </strike>likes a lot of stuff, so for that and other reasons, it's best we leave our walls plain white.<br />
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So, although inspired by that prompt, I took scrapbook paper that looked like old kitchen wallpaper, glued it to my art journal and then wrote about the wallpapers we had in my childhood home, and also about the wallpapering-paneling project my first husband and I had planned but never got around to.<br />
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Then I found the <a href="http://oneyearartjournal.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">current (May 30) prompt</a> on A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. Interestingly enough, that prompt is also about walls, in this case the kind you put up yourself, even if you've never built a home. (It kind of reminds me of a column I wrote when I was 24 about accidentally kicking a hole in my cheap apartment wall, but wanting to tear walls of hostility completely down.) I don't think I have walls of hostility in my life right now, but there are other psychological walls I could, but would rather not, write a book about. It was this blog's host, Rachel Whetzel, who recommended the crumpled tissue paper technique listed above, as a way of creating texture on a paper "wall." And so, I added that to my wallpaper journaling. I wasn't sure what I was going to add on top of that though.<br />
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Until the next day, when Tammy Garcia at Daisy Yellow jumped the gun on her ICAD Challenge, and posted a whole bunch of prompts a day early. Some of the one-word prompts she posted to inspire us this first week in June are repurpose (which I am doing with the tissue paper, which was originally purchased around Christmas to help with gift wrapping), wallpaper (WOW) and paisley. Just so happens my "wallpaper" scrapbook paper came in a pad from Target (years ago) that also had a paisley pattern. Perfect! Oh and there's one more on Daisy Yellow's list, calligraphy. I don't really no how to do that, so I wrote fancy writing. The art journal page explains how my house and walls are too chaotic to be anything but white. The ICAD used the same papers, same mist and same crayon, and the same journaling pen - but to simply say ICAD 2013. Although this is Day 2, it will be the cover for my (hopefully) 61 ICADS when wer're done.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-48571369606662646742013-06-01T08:27:00.002-07:002013-06-01T08:27:43.229-07:00I can ICADDaisy Yellow (Tammy Garcia) has her fellow art journalists keeping busy. In 2013, she usually gives us one prompt with six items, and challenges us to use all six in a single art journal creation. But in June and July, she's giving us weekly prompts, and a list of eight other prompts each week, which we can use daily. And she has no expectation that we will use any of them, as the challenge is simply to create art every day. Oh, there is one more catch. It needs to be on an index card. Thus it is ICAD, or Index Card A Day.<br />
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Here is the <a href="http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/" target="_blank">full story</a>. You will have to scroll down through at all the ICAD entries to see the prompts, but right now as I write this, there's only one day of ICAD entries.<br />
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And here is my first ICAD. I actually followed three of the "daily" prompts (zebra, Candyland and faux stitching) and the weekly prompt to use colors of the rainbow.<br />
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I was also inspired by <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:3710&page_number=36&template_id=1&sort_order=1" target="_blank">this very simple piece of artwork</a> I found on Pinterest.<br />
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I have ideas for two more ICADS, and I have intentions to add one a day to this blog, with hopes I can continue after that. The reason is that each of my next two prompts are inspired by items on the daily list, but each also by other artwork, in these cases, some of my own recent art journal creations that I have not shared yet. So, to fully share my creative process, I plan to blog.<br />
Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-23211211321343656442013-05-10T09:14:00.002-07:002013-05-10T09:14:53.030-07:00Celebrating yesterday with art<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, there are country roads outside of Los Angeles if you look long enough. This blog and picture celebrate my reasons for being on one of them on May 9, 2013.</td></tr>
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First of all, I want to tell you more about the picture above. I drew it. It's a leaf and a country road, with "drops" of rain coming down in ink and haiku poem that states "Liglhtly falling rain - while leaving Los Angeles - on a long country road." Some of it was inspired by Prompt 6ix 19 at one of my favorite art journaling websites, daisyyellow.com. Some of it is inspired by what I did yesterday, which is seal a deal with my new businesses' fourth client. I will explain how the two tie together, and why the poem even makes sense, more towards the end.<br />
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The name of my new client is 24 Carrots, a catering company and restaurants in Irvine. (I was talking to the owner and writing for three other business owners before the business became official on Monday.)<br />
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I haven't been scrapbooking much lately. It's partly because, after I had all of my photos finished for 2012, I just hit a creative wall. It's partly because after I had all my photos finished for 2012, my wallet also hit a creative wall, and lost its ability to generate the random amounts of cash I "need" for more scrapbook supplies. It's partly because my financial situation is, or at least was, a whole lot more serious than that joke.<br />
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But for maybe the past week, I've had a happier reason. I decided at the end of April that the time had come to start Pen Porter, the business I have thought about starting for almost 10 years. So, as of May 6, my business is now official! What I do is public relations, and for the most part that means helping my clients get stories published about them in various southern California media outlets. <br />
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I won't be saying too much more about Pen Porter on this blog, most likely. This blog is about family and some of my hobbies. My business and my hobbies, especially my paper crafting hobbies, don't usually mix. There's a little more crossover between business and my love of cooking, but cooking has its own blog that I maintain even more poorly than this one.<br />
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Besides, at the end of April, I started two more blogs that are more related to my business. I started them both while in class at University of California-Riverside Extension. That's possible because my class at UCR is social media. One of the blogs is to be used for class assignments. I believe I first started the other one, and for some reason decided something had to be changed on it, which I at least at the time couldn't figure out how to change. So I started a second one, and began using it for class assignments. <br />
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But I'm really quite happy with the first one, so it has become the blog I will use to tell the world what is going on with Pen Porter. And that's the blog that will probably get most of my blogging time focus for the forseeable future.<br />
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I suppose, once class is done, I will use my other new blog to tell the world more general stuff about public relations, as that's the topic I'm an expert in. But probably only if I don't feel more like blogging about paper arts or cooking, which I'm also pretty good at too. <br />
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Which brings us back to this paper art. We had to go to Irvine to meet with the owner of 24 Carrots. We were done with the meeting at 4:30 p.m. Although you generally go places in Southern California by taking the freeways, the ones leading directly from Orange County to Riverside aren't the best place to be that close to 5 p.m. So we started out our trip in search of alternatives.<br />
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A freeway you want to avoid like death during the rush hour is California State Highway 91. It's evil! It also is the most direct way to get from Irvine to Riverside.<br />
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However, Jurupa Valley is north of Riverside. The 60 Freeway runs through Jurupa Valley, and the 91 does not. So, even for someone like me who lives at the very south end of Jurupa Valley, the 60 Freeway can be a logical alternative. We've done that more than a few times coming home from Orange County. We also frequently use this freeway to get back from Los Angeles, as it is more direct. The 60 Freeway starts in Los Angeles, so it's a straight shot to Jurupa Valley, although it too sometimes must be avoided in the Los Angeles area because of excessive traffic there. It literally is faster to take surface streets.<br />
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However, to get to the 60 Freeway from Orange County, you have to go north quite a ways. This normally can be done on Interstate 5 and the 57 Freeway, which aren't evil like the 91 Freeway. But they still aren't much fun during rush hour. Several times during our trip, we decided there was too much traffic heading in the direction of the freeway, and pressed on with roads that avoided it. <br />
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At one point (in Brea), we stopped for dinner. While we wer there a quick, but hard downpour made everything wet. You don't see too much of that this late in the year, but we've had rain several times earlier this month. I think there is a rule that it has to rain in May, but that's a whole nother story.<br />
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When we were in Brea, we were already so far north that we were on the same streets (Lambert, Brea and Brea Canyon) that we had been on less than a month ago after a trip home from Los Angeles. We had left Los Angeles at 5:15 and were supposed to be back home that night for a 7 p.m. meeting, but we were about a half hour late. It would have been worse on the 60 Freeway.<br />
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When we went from Los Angeles, we had decided to get on the 57 Freeway from one of the exits off Brea Canyon Road, then we took the 60 to Jurupa Valley. But this time, the 57 still had too much traffic, so we kept pressing on the side streets.<br />
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By the time we got to any streets we could have taken directly up to the 60, I had figured out that one of the streets turns to another street, and that street would have taken us so close to home there wasn't any point on getting on the 60 Freeway. Although the 60's traffic was probably OK, we decided to take the road anyhow.<br />
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And we are glad we did. Because after lots of driving through suburban Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, that last road on the map became a country road. With scattered farmhouses and lots and lots of cows! Having grown up on a farm, I love cows! But I don't usually expect to see them on drives home from Los Angeles, or Irvine!<br />
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And so, I came home thinking about the rain, the cows, and how the road we were on is also a way home from the second largest city in the United States. We had made it all the way home from Irvine without touching the freeways, and could have done the same from Los Angeles. That's something to celebrate in itself, and so I made art to do exactly that.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-69284717551296184982013-03-23T16:18:00.001-07:002013-03-23T16:18:07.116-07:00Christmas in Colorado<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm still working away on an exciting week, the week we spent with the grandkids. I can't file that into "the past" until I have it scrapbooked, even if it is taking me three months to get everything scrapbooked. I will move on, I will catch up, in part because when I get to the 2013 photos I'll be taking a new and a little faster approach. But for now, enjoy my creativity. <br />
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<br />Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-89330073522722483572013-02-22T23:51:00.001-08:002013-02-22T23:51:30.702-08:00Just for fun<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is absolutely nothing earth shattering or pithy about this blog entry, just that Tammy Garcia, host of the Daisy Yellow blog, asked everyone who entered her Prompt 6ix 8 challenge to post it on their own blog as well as Facebook. (Otherwise it would have just been on Facebook.) I guess I'll go ahead and tell you how this came about. Prompt 6ix 8's list was chandelier, sunflower, Magic markers, polka dots, joker and list.<br />
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Back int he summer or fall when Tammy was doing the No-Frills Paper Prompts and/or the Daily Paper Prompts, I came across one that said "learn a new word" and another that said "Use a playing card." So I learned the word Farceur. (on an obnoxious Fox News show) It means "joker." Another one of her prompts said "draw a chandelier." Now back when I was doing her "Jump Start Your Art Journal" prompts, which I used over the spring and early summer months of 2012 to get myself started in this hobby, she said "use a chandelier." That one I used a photo I took of the chandelier at the Del Coronado hotel in Coronado. The more recent one I drew a chandelier from that photo. I think it was the same prompt, I'm not sure, that said to draw concentric circles and wavy lines with polka dots.<br />
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Also, if she isn't still doing it, for awhile Tammy was posting random lists on her blog, all of which she had recorded with a beautiful art journal entry. I tried to follow this inspiration for awhile, and on the back side of the page with my hand-drawn chandelier, I had a pretty nicely illustrated list of fruit.<br />
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That probably wouldn't have been my first choice of "list" art journal pages to cut up. At least one of my other list pages is borrrrrrring. That's when I stopped following the list inspiration.<br />
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But 6ix 8 needed a list. It also needed a sunflower and a joker. It already had polka dots, and it already had wavy lines and polka dots drawn with a marker. So I drew the sunflower and the joker. Then I cut out the list from the other side, glued a small scrap of paper into the hole and glued the list, now wrong side up, onto the "chandelier" page. To the other side of the scrap, and to the edges of that side of the page of paper, I glued a scrap of pattern paper. It's from the same collection (an old DCWV stack called Sweet) as I had used when I made the list page, so it looks nice and added some strawberries to the fruit that had been illustrating my list before.<br />
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I don't even know if that all made sense. But at least now I can say I blogged about it.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-54464236627442352902013-02-16T14:08:00.000-08:002013-02-16T14:14:36.083-08:00Drawing, painting, collaging, stamping, etc.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
In FIT Tuesday several days ago now (a Tuesday night service combined with small groups at Sandals), we were asked to identify things that we do that do not give glory to God and things we do that give glory to God. Interestingly enough, "drawing and painting" was on both lists.</div>
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I have to say, I enjoy art (which in my case is generally paper crafts, such as scrapbooking, card making, and art journaling) sometimes to the detriment of things I am called to do. Such as housework, homework and my volunteer activities with church.) But as you can see with my blog, while my art probably does not dishonor God, most of it is random, not spiritual.<br />
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I mean the last art journal page I did was focusing on that crazy thought I get once in awhile, that I ought to take up farming for a living. In the case of my last page, my idea was even crazier - growing palm trees out in the desert so I could visit Palm Springs every day. Would be fun, but would be too much hard work and how does a broke housewife living near Riverside get the money to start a farm anyhow?<br />
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You know, like everything else, that crazy art journal page started with a prompt. In this case, it was Prompt 6ix 7 at Daisy Yellow. Use the six things she says. Argyle. Great, I have several scraps of argyle. Garden, science, resume, sketch and balloon. OK, I will use my balloon stamp and a card sketch. But how am I going to get science, resume and garden into the page? OK, back to my fantasy of being a farmer. If I would have been a good farmer, I would have studied agricultural science in high school. Then I could add gardener to my resume.<br />
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But wait, that argyle paper has B sides. The brown argyle's B side is a ledger print. OK, farmers have to deal with ledgers a lot. And the green argyle paper has a graphic of a palm tree with some text about a hotel in Florida on it. I have never been to Florida, so I will just cover that part up with what's left of the brown argyle. But I have been to Palm Springs. It's close enough to commute if the job is worthwhile. So, OK, I will be a palm tree gardener. At least on paper.<br />
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While I like my crazy pages, I also like those that are all about glorifying God. One of my other favorite artist journal prompt websites, A Year in the Life of An Art Journal, inadvertently I am sure, is helping me to produce a few of those. It's inadvertent, because there is nothing spiritual about the website, except maybe a few other Christians who are contributing their work. The prompts I have seen for 2012 and 2011 have sometimes been so unspiritual I've had to pass. And she's talking about using Harry Potter as the inspiration for the 2014 prompts. Not sure at all that would work for me!<br />
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But 2013 (at least so far) has been all good. The 2013 prompts are focusing on mugs. That's right coffee mugs, tea cups, things to hold beverages. So, for two of the three official prompts posted so far, I have focused on one of my mugs, a red mug with roses on the front and a scripture verse on the back.<br />
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<a href="http://portergandg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-spiritual-dimension-of-being-content.html" target="_blank">Here</a> is what that mug looks like, and what I did with the A Year in the Life prompt posted a month ago.<br />
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The prompt posted on Friday called for using a favorite quote, and suggested using a photo of your favorite mug printed onto book paper. Doing that takes a little bit of digital wizardry. Since the design team members, and the one regular member who has already posted her page did not incorporate "mug shots" into their pages, neither did I.<br />
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They all used quotes though. I was especially inspired by the work of design team member Amy, who had taken a picture of her cup for a different part of this challenge, and had then created an art page with the art on her cup. Her quote is "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Her page focuses on having had to move from Oregon to Idaho sometime back, and she's now feeling planted there in Idaho whether she likes it or not. She also put her ZIP code into the art page. That really resonated with me, as I feel planted in 92509 (Jurupa Valley). And I already had the quote "Bloom Where You Are Planted" in my art journal.<br />
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I toyed with redoing the page that quote is on, as there are some aspects of that particular page I do not like. But I do like much of that page, and I also really like the facing page. So there was no way to do this prompt without destroying something I already liked. So, I moved on to a new page near the end of the book. (I said February, but with some recent redos, I now think I will finish Book 1 in March.)<br />
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So, what book should I copy? Then I remembered. My favorite mug came with a book. So maybe I should copy a page from it. That page would, as they all do, have a scripture on it. And I seriously like quoting scripture more than I like quoting random quotes, good as "Bloom where you are planted" is.<br />
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Flipping through the book, I realized every single page mimicked the design of the cup. Each page had a red curve, just like the edge of the cup. Inside the curve, each page was colored a light beige, like a coffee filled with creamer. Usually the text was inside that. There are also flowers inside each curve. Then there are section dividers, where there are huge bouquets of flowers inside, and the text on a reddish background outside the "cup."<br />
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The first section divider "The Garden" was very appropriate. It assures the reader "God has planted you in just the right place." And so, that is what my page says, along with the scriptural quote "I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring completion at the day of Jesus Christ."<br />
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The process was to glue the copy of the devotional book to the art journal. I used markers to extend the "mug" to the edges of the page. Because the copy was not color correct, and made yellow flowers and parts of flowers look white or grey, as well as the cream, I added more color to them with a yellow marker, and brightened the leaves with a green marker. Then I added some more stamped flowers in and out of the mug.Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2321321141260345484.post-57916706401295186092013-01-30T16:02:00.000-08:002013-02-01T08:48:01.249-08:00The rain...just enough<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
When I wrote my last blog entry <a href="http://portergandg.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-rainbow.html" target="_blank">about the rainbow</a> six days ago, it was raining. It was the last of several rainy days we had/will have in January. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmV90OMvW8EEWWBQ2_69sEngCTzA094R9zrG3zhoEjDMeTPNb3gbxdtrNfEKSQiCvWriKe24kSlBU7fYVndmF0fKfFeqWsIOrFO1fjSAV640zZk9vTekboe5u8RUxHQRm_3gR4ROEwex7g/s1600/6ix+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmV90OMvW8EEWWBQ2_69sEngCTzA094R9zrG3zhoEjDMeTPNb3gbxdtrNfEKSQiCvWriKe24kSlBU7fYVndmF0fKfFeqWsIOrFO1fjSAV640zZk9vTekboe5u8RUxHQRm_3gR4ROEwex7g/s320/6ix+2.jpg" width="175" /></a></div>
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It was also raining on Jan. 12 when I posted<a href="http://portergandg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-cat-and-rain.html" target="_blank"> this entry </a>about how several times, Segunda has posed under wet umbrellas when we come in from the rain, and how she likes the blue and white toys we got her this Christmas. Random thoughts that come up when an art journalist (Daisy Yellow 6ix2) prompts you to journal about raindrops and treasure.<br />
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Today, it is not raining and there is no more rain in the 10-day forecast. Since this is southern California, it's hard to know when we might have more rain. So, I can't do the photo prompt posted today at A Year in The Life of An Art Journal, which is to shoot a mug (teacup or ????) in front of a rainy window. But I can do the journaling prompt, which is to share a little bit about what the perfect rainy day looks like to me. The prompt also called for dripping acrylic paint down a page, and my thinned blue acrylic paint is certainly very good at doing that.<br />
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My thoughts about the rain are that the amount on neither side of Cajon Pass is perfect, although rain in southern California is definitely more tolerable than elsewhere.<br />
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On the north side of Cajon Pass where I used to live, it's the Mojave Desert and there is not enough. Any rainfall there is welcomed, because it will be so little it doesn't even bother anyone. And here on the south side, we sometimes have so much rain it's annoying and inconvenient. Yet if we don't have that much rain, we don't have the pleasant green hills we are enjoying at this time.<br />
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Although the hills have become green, I would classify the 2013 rainy days as only minorly annoying and inconvenient. I and others have had to cancel or modify running and other outdoor exercise plans, but the rain has not been the type to cause property damage. But that does happens sometimes here. I remember in January 2005 it raining so hard they had to shut March Air Force Base down to visitors until they could sandbag the place, and I remember in I think December 2010 it being so rainy here at the house, water was coming in through the under-sink cupboard in our house. Don, being already unemployed, had managed to spend so much of our money we could not afford to buy dirt for the 10 empty sandbags the Rubidoux CSD had provided each of its households to help with the storm.<br />
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Thankfully, we have figured out that even on a limited income, saving for emergencies is a good idea - and that we have not had a weather-related one in awhile.<br />
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There may be two reasons, why I am thinking about the desert. First of all, the 6ix prompt for Week 5, posted yesterday, includes "cactus" and bloom. And that had me reaching for a photo I took in 2011 at Joshua Tree National Park of cactus blooms. I am not finished with that one, it will be my second two-page art journal creation and I will post it either Friday or on the weekend.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo9AwcKjf6fX_IbJVAYF9m_Pg-FH9KfTEKpMHb9MVO70GE-R5W-ObeHE6IFyJzUVLeNvxvGvRJTk1wV-uJjdbv_QYaZ9muuYU7K4qIng2MCWQbnpr7N9bXUnf59DHNiKPx6_dovvdj96x9/s1600/IMG_0615.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo9AwcKjf6fX_IbJVAYF9m_Pg-FH9KfTEKpMHb9MVO70GE-R5W-ObeHE6IFyJzUVLeNvxvGvRJTk1wV-uJjdbv_QYaZ9muuYU7K4qIng2MCWQbnpr7N9bXUnf59DHNiKPx6_dovvdj96x9/s320/IMG_0615.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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But then there is this page, which I did in response to a Two Peas prompt earlier this month. It reminds me of the desert too. It wanted the colors tan and grey, acrylic paint, distress ink and bubble wrap (which is great for stamping a dotted background), And it's the page opposite the "Cat in the Rain" page. I had always hated this page, and knew when I posted it to Two Peas that it would probably get recycled before I finished putting new creations into Art Journal #1. (We're getting very close to the start of Art Journal #2, probably sometime in February.) In fact, within days of posting it, I clipped a scripture about "treasure" from my church bulletin and pasted it down on this page.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie-yYZfzxgerI5d0ig9uTZIYoIt7lwBGyq8f64ojVAROKfmn72O99Fd5p8c4QFFVhm-aZrFPwqLipZPQttFJvjvB8Ko5bPIX9NSXeh0tfvLitU3vsPfoNz31GHA3wf6E5HQcRuXQCzniyj/s1600/IMG_0642.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie-yYZfzxgerI5d0ig9uTZIYoIt7lwBGyq8f64ojVAROKfmn72O99Fd5p8c4QFFVhm-aZrFPwqLipZPQttFJvjvB8Ko5bPIX9NSXeh0tfvLitU3vsPfoNz31GHA3wf6E5HQcRuXQCzniyj/s320/IMG_0642.jpg" width="274" /></a></div>
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This is how the spread looks now. "Cat in the Rain" has also been somewhat modified since I posted it here. Those little treasures would not stay on the page, so I left two off and finally pop-dotted one on, to give it a stronger hold than glue.<br />
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Also, you should know that "Cat in the Rain" is one of three pages I accidentally created with the book upside down. Although it appears to be near the front of the book, it's actually near the end. And that means that its predecessor, the formerly desert neutral page with the bubble wrap polka dots, was boosted up in the book by all of the pages I had done before it. This means what little bit of acrylic paint I put on the left side dripped not down the page, but onto the crease of the book, thankfully only at the top where I had already covered the page in blue.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUGs30d2-ngr3NuzoMS8fx85eTO9qaV0-45rEUA8aCjn2clOKhdz6lx9-iuhZS944r5C1w30_2KinTPNlmPKcwEjnx6VCdMUO4M6_uSxpX9oudqe08NcK4H59fsoR-l9mbM0kHgy1VzTRU/s1600/IMG_0643.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUGs30d2-ngr3NuzoMS8fx85eTO9qaV0-45rEUA8aCjn2clOKhdz6lx9-iuhZS944r5C1w30_2KinTPNlmPKcwEjnx6VCdMUO4M6_uSxpX9oudqe08NcK4H59fsoR-l9mbM0kHgy1VzTRU/s320/IMG_0643.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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What you cannot see well, even in this closeup shot, is that a little bit of the old blue paint from the next page brushed off onto what is now the bottomof this page, and a little bit of the light blue water color pencil, from the project on the opposite side of this sheet of paper, bleeds through at the lower right of the area inside the black frame. These are those "happy accidents" that permeate my art journal. I call them "happy" because more often than not, they create some kind of unintended effect that I actually like. This is one of those times. With two shades of blue specks, it was a prettier page.<br />
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To not cover up too much of that, I ended up turning my new journal creation on its side, which is actually how it had been to begin with. This means my blue paint drips now spread across the page like sky. I also added some green ink, symbolic of how the open spaces in my neighborhood have a bit of green from the rains now. The 2013 rains have been just enough.<br />
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But I thought the scripture clipping still looked better on this page than the other one.</div>
Ellen Porterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17942277715689671551noreply@blogger.com5