Playing with my cat

I tried zentangling outside the cat this time. This was fun; I may have to print out more of these for zentangle cards.



I made some like this for a recycling swap. I decided the cat needed some yarn to play with. Can you guess what the base of this ATC is?



I had some more scraps, so I made a little quilt for my cat to recline upon. The faux stitching qualifies it for the Corrosive Challenge this week.



Finally, I have a color mingle in my inchie group, so I made these in the designated colors of dark green, yellow, and bright blue.

It's more fun playing with an image when it is your very own image!

A cat of my own

You may recall that I had to draw 30 cats for a drawing assignment; to be honest, I probably did fifty before I had enough. Then I looked at the book and there were some additional assignments. The first was to digitize (scan) our best cat and apply the faux offset printing effect on it.



You have wonder about a book that teaches you how to doodle cats, but assumes that you can already do a faux offset printing effect digitally (is that a PhotoShop thing? Because in PSP, you have to juggle layers to do it).

Anyway, the next thing we were supposed to do with our cat was to use it in our normal art. My normal art is inchies, ATCs, and cards, so I printed out a sheet of cats in three sizes. Here are some inchies:



The shape of this cat makes it very easy to cut out, and since I had relatively thick lines, it reduced very well. The think the plainness of the cat really offsets the backgrounds. Now, to the ATCs:



I thought that this would be a good size to embellish an ATC while allowing a lot of background to show. I just had this painted background lying around, plenty for this ATC and the inchies. This fits the Gingersnap Creations paint challenge. The thing about acrylic paint is that it resists water based media, but you can use alcohol markers and pens on it just fine.



This was a colorblocked background that I made from old scraps of paper. I realized that my largest cat would fit on it fine if I turned it to a landscape orientation.

I like a plain white cat, but it also occured to me that the cat would take well to coloring, paper piecing, and even this:



At this size, the lines are bold enough to hold their own against the zentangling. I was going to leave more white space so that the cat would look like this one that I know in real life, but I got carried away. The cat is in my computer, I guess I can do whatever I want with him.

What a coincidence that the theme at Fun with ATCs is cats!

Would you like to play with my cat? Here is the plain scanned HiRes image:



Just click it to see it full size. If you use it, I would love to see what you make! Share it and I will send some love your way.

Teddy ATC

This limited time freebie over at Designed2Delight was just my style, so I printed out a whole sheet of them. I chose to print them on cocoa cardstock so that they wouldn't need to be colored, just cut out and applied. In addition to the four that I printed out in a suitable size for cards, I also printed out a dozen for ATCs.




I've used the TJ Level Up technique here, it gives a very simple layout just enough depth to be interesting. I happened to have a bunch of CTMH paper scraps that a demo I know kindly gave to me, and the little balloon brad was a dubious clearance bin buy - dubious because this is the first time I've used it since I bought it years ago. It doesn't matter how cheap something is, it's not a good deal if you never use it. I hope the ATCs that I make will justify the balloon brads - the rest of the ATC is free!

Drawing Lab - Week 1

I just bought this book that I thought would help me with my drawing -
Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun (Lab Series)
- and the first assignment is to draw 30 cats while lying in bed.



I know, this is only ten of them, but I have a short attention span. I just have to do 10 at a time. I can't draw 30 cats at one sitting.

I do understand the point of the exercise, though. Real artists don't pick up a pencil and create art on their first try. They draw something over and over until they figure out how to make their image look right. Only amateurs think that everything they do is great. Pros know that most of what they do is just practice for the real thing.

Also, lying in bed is supposed to help us be more relaxed. Unfortunately, for me, it isn't relaxing. I don't do anything that involves sitting up in my bed, like reading or writing, because waterbeds aren't designed for that. There are only two things I like to do in bed, and they both start with the letter S. Sketching isn't one of them.

Ice Crystal mermaids

These two ATCs are from a set I created for the TJ swap. They have the Ice Crystal Technique on them, which may be hard to see, but if you compare how these look to how the inchies look, you will see that the surface is different. By using a wash of an Epsom Salt solution and letting it dry, the surface of the card looks iced over. The white spots you see on the mermaid images are salt deposits. The Epsom salt did not behave on the packing tape the way it did over the acrylic/gesso background. Fortunately, the white spots brush off fairly well.

So, this is my recommendation for the Ice Crystal Technique - use it on a toothy surface, so it will resist flaking, and apply it as a final finish, not on raw cardstock.

Mermaid inchies

I enjoy doing Packing tape transfers, but it always feels like I used stickers. Homemade stickers maybe? I just thought these mermaids were too cute.

The background is an acrylic paint/gesso wash that I made a while back. Whenever I get my paints out for a project, and I have a bunch squeezed out onto my palette that I don't want to waste, I slap it on cut up cardboard boxes so I will have backgrounds handy for future use. This box had breakfast cereal in it, and the cut up squares are a good weight for inchies. These fit the Creative Belli challenge of using paint.

Gray, Navy and Mustard - yech!

I don't know who came up with the colors for this challenge, but they should be shot. Actually, I've seen the other inchies for this mingle, and they are really very nice, but I think they would have been even nicer in pretty colors.

I hope that whoever gets these can forgive me!