Thriving Art

Hi all you happy bloggers, hope your having a great day.  It is still early here in SOCAL and it is already warming up, gonna be a HOT one today.  It is  8:29 AM here and the temp matches at 82' F or 28 C and going to top out at 106 F or 41C and the forecast is the same though out the weekend.  So now you've been updated on the weather how about some positive words (and NOT about the weather...LOL) Positive Words is the prompt for the Journal 52 week 30   What's not to like about positive words, after all the are POISTIVE.  So I turned on some music and went "old school" with my pens and markers and even a few stamps.  I enjoyed just fussing around with different types of lettering.........and yes, I still need a LOT of practice, but I had fun anyway. What are your positive words? There is one I didn't get onto this page and that is WELCOME!  And I want to  Welcome Sid , a new follower to my somewhat "dingy" blog. Sid "I'm a c...

The Cutting Edge challenge 5 is going on RIGHT now! Since my Big Shot is NOT located on my desk top, and when it is I try to do more than just one or two Die Cuts, and this is how this card came about.  TH Tattered Flowers in soft yellow, pink and blue (clearing out some snippets) with clear rhinestones for the centers and a sentiment cut in pink glitter paper.....there's that "shiny" thing again.......LOL Thanks for stopping by. Inky Hugs Krisha

I finally had made some time for a little creating time, there were a couple of birthday cards that needed finishing.  I did finish the birthday cards, will post them at a later date, but I got a little side tracked with a couple of challenges.  You know me, I'm all business until I see something shinny....grin!  I had some snippets of glitter paper left over from making my GD's BD card and that was all it  took!  I made a white card blank and used and old Sizzex Die and cut the stars in the CB, then lined it with an aqua glitter paper.  A tiny scrap of lime glitter paper was just begging to be used, so it got used for the sentiment.   The Card Concept challenge #15  is to use aqua, lime green and white (how convenient....eh?)  They also ask you to state what  style you used to create your card.  This is a new twist for me, so I had to look the styles up......they are located on their blog.  This is the only one I co...

  Tis once again time to share what the "drink of the day" is, brought to you by Mr Linky over at E LIZ abeth's Altered Book Lover for T stands for Tuesday   ( Sorry E, I just had to do that after reading your post ) So, my drink, for this Tuesday's post is water!  It was a HOT and HUMID BBQ Competition, this weekend, and I'm still trying to quench my thirst!   If your not really interested in seeing the BBQ pictures, hop over to Elizabeth's  and catch what others are drinking today.     I know I have bored everyone to death with pictures of the meat in the judging boxes, so this time I tried to be a little more creative, and show more of the area and what a street fair-BBQ competition looks like.  So I started taking pictures about 5:30 AM, after my first cup of coffee, and while all was quiet............ Top left is a long shot of the Playhouse, top right is what the street looked like to the west, the blue Easy-Up is a vend...

The prompt for this weeks Journal 52 is FASHION!  This was a fun page to do, even if it took me all week to finally get it finished.  I have only had a bit of time here and there, but I got to play with my Prima dolls..........while running through some good memories of my BFF and I, as kids, playing with paper dolls. For the background I used doll size pattern pieces, then added a few drops of ink to the Mod Podge when I glued them down.  Some NBU sewing stamps were added.  The Prima dolls were paper pieced then added, hand writing the statement on the dress with a marker. So now I have to jump back into the real world and get back to getting the "Playhouse" loaded.  We have a BBQ competition this weekend. Traveling south to Vista, CA, the first BBQ competition we entered last year.  So this is marking our first year!  Talk about a year slipping by FAST ! This is our logo: I'm not happy about the mean looking pig, but my son...

   Here it is time to link up with Elizabeth and Bluebeard for T Stand for Tuesday, and what a surprise I got when I liked up this week.  Elizabeth, with no help form Bluebeard, drew my name for last weeks birthday bash.  How cool is that? So here is my drink for this week.  It is a glass of Viognier wine. (pronounced Vee- own-yah for our non wine drinkers)  DH had a short week last week, so Friday we decided to head over to the Mid State Fair in Paso Robles.  It is such a nice big and CLEAN fairground, and we just enjoy going over and walking around, and eating, and this time wine drinking.  Well, I am the one that was drinking wine, while DH went back into one of the buildings to check something out.  It was a warn day, but there was a nice breeze, so sitting and sipping a glass of wine was perfect. They even had some samples of grape growing along the building, you can just make them out in the background. Here are some pictures...

Well, here we are on the last Monday of sharing my smaller art journal (is that cheering I hear? It must be in MY head as I have been posting these way in advance, yep scheduled posting...now I hear boos?) The back ground on these pages is scrapped on acrylic paint, the rest was all done with a marker.  Simple, but a lot of fun to create. Finally, here is the cover of the journal.  It is made with a 9 x 12 envelope, gesso'd and then painted and decorated.  The 813 stands for the month and year I made it. So there you have it, the whole journal one Monday at a time. Thanks to all who have hung in there for the 11 weeks it took to get it all posted. Inky Hugs Krisha

The July Reader Art Quest, for   Unruly Paper Arts  is "Summer Fiesta" and in the spirit ( I couldn't resist that one ) of things I created a wine bottle tag.  The image is an Art Impressions stamp, colored with pencil and markers, then fussy cut to be mounted on the tag with pop dots.  The tag background is a designer paper, from my stash, mounted onto a chipboard base.  The words are hand written in a graffiti style. Here it is hanging on a wine bottle.  Check out the label on the bottle....LOL so appropriate!       This RAQ is running to the end of the month, so there is still time to LINK UP . I think sitting in the hot tub, with BFFs, and drinking a glass of wine would be a great Summer Fiesta, or a great girls night! So are you having a summer fiesta? Do you gather with your BFFS and have a girls night?   Thanks for stopping by Inky Hugs Krisha    

We have already come to the last challenge by  Kristin for Summer Of Color  over at Twinkle Twinkle.   WOW! How fast that 6 weeks flew by! So the challenge colors for this last challenge are raspberry, tangerine and a pop of lemon.  Kristin came up with these pretty colors while watching the sunset up in the mountains.......lucky girl!! (grin) I have found a "new" challenge for myself:  Graffiti Art, or Lettering Art, or Street Art....it goes by many different names.  Oh, so illegal to get caught doing this on anything but YOUR own paper, but I have always secretly admired it.  I mean it does making watching a looooong train go by, at the rail road crossing, more enjoyable. (grin) So here is one of my attempts at it, in my art journal.  Let me know what you think? Inky HNugs Krisha

Happy Birthday T- Stands for Tuesday!   What a ride it has been to join in T-day with Elizabeth and Bluebeard  for the past year, although I think I missed one or two. This is  a photo I took on vacation a couple weeks ago.  The drink is water, but that coffee cake is was a 3 berry, scrumptious creation, that they make right there and it was still warm when I got it.  It was so BIG, but I did manage to eat almost half of it.  We were in the small town of Avila, right on the beach, and dropped into a place that our DIL said had good ice cream and fudge ( DH doesn't pass an ice cream shop, of a place that sells good fudge very often )  You can see his cup of ice cream peaking from behind the glass.  This place, called The Hula Hut, reminded me of Elizabeth and all the places she takes us to and takes great pictures of the excursion.  So, only to be out done a smidge, I walked around the shop and took some pict...

Welcome back to my Mondays sharing of a small 5 x 7 art journal that I finally finished.  On these pages I wanted to use up a lot of grunge punch outs.  I'm not crazy about the grunge board stuff, too hard to paint unless you do like I did here.  Glue it all down, give it a coat of gesso then get on with the spritz and the sprays..........................fun, fun, fun!! Only one more Monday share of the Art Journal and you will have seen all the pages.  I'll also share what the cover looks like.  Thanks for stopping by. Inky Hugs Krisha

Friday the "new" prompt for Journal 52 came to me by e-mail ( I don't want to miss anything.....grin ).  Technology!  Okay, a lot of things came to mind, one was some kind of lettering that could represent technology.  I had also received, by email, my E-copy of Cloth Paper, Scissors week in review and it had a free downloadable article on lettering..........perfect timing eh?  No, it didn't tell me how to do this lettering, but had TONS of good information.  I went to the "net" and printed out a few, ok a lot , of free fonts and started practicing last night.  This font is actually for cross stitching and was shown on a grid background, so I used 1/4" grid paper to practice on.  This morning ( Sunday ) I gave it a try, well I traced it off my practice sheet onto the page. I did make some lines, then hit it with ink sprays, water and alcohol ( Oh so much fun )  Once it was dry I added magazine pictures and stickers of technology then...

scan washed it out some, more vibrant in real life WOW! we are starting on the second half of the Journal 52, a journal page a week for a year.  This week the prompt is NOSTALGIA. Nostalgia is defined as "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations." Was this my favorite period with happy associations?  Well, yes and no.  I love the 60's for the art that came from that era, the fashions were fun to wear ( hip huggers and bell bottoms oh my!), and some of the music still plays on my I-Pod, and we had just moved to California.  Was I a hippie? no not really (my parents would have killed me.....grin)  I was really more into the surfing scene and music.  The 70's began my life I have now, getting married and having two sons, disco music (ha, ha, remember that?),  some really funny sit-coms on TV (do you have a favorite you remember?) learning to water ski and snow ski, ha...

Red, royal blue and a pop of light blue.  These are the colors for the Summer of Color challenges.   I did have this swirly design running through my head and finally just put it on paper(art journal really). Kinda dull, so I whipped out a Prima Doll, paper pieced her together for a finishing touch......oh....but wait...it still looked unfinished....Hmmmmmm????/  I happened to pick up a small set of stamps at Michael's Craft store this afternoon from Recollections (on sale) so I used them too.  Ok, balanced and a little more interesting.....what do you think? Inky Hugs Krisha

Woah! Look at all the color on Betsy this week.  It has been a couple of weeks since I have had a chance to link up with Julia at The Stamping Ground for WOYWW.  Life does have a way of getting in the way of play time. Front and center is a SOC page I am working on for this week, with my extra eyes sitting on top, my calendar, to the left, a well used paper plate on the right.  I use and reuse a paper plate as a pallet for my acrylic paints, once they have a good coat of acrylic paint they are water proof.  A few bottles of acrylic paint, bottle of water and a nasty cleaning rag round off the picture. Keeping it short and sweet to the point, as are the non-rules of WOYWW.  This is a Tuesday night photo, as I am not planning on doing anything else, but going to bed.  It was 108' (F) here today, and after a week at the beach it feels more like 180" ..........yuck!  This kind of heat really wears me down, thank goodness for air con...

WOOT! WOOT! I'm home in time for tea with Elizabeth and Bluebeard! Here is the first lunch we had on our vacation at the beach.  My glass holds diet Coke (they didn't have Pepsi :( ), and we were at Pismo Fish and Chips right after coming off the beach.  Dummy me, didn't bring a top to go over my swim suit, just a zip up sweat shirt jacket.  Coming off the beach, it got hot (well for over there it was hot)  I couldn't take my jacket off, and I was really starting to get uncomfortable, so I bought one of their T-shirts, slipped it over my suit and had lunch.  One way to get a souvenir....LOL A black one with a white skeleton of a fish on it, plus a nice little sunburn to cover.  The rest of the week I remembered to grab an extra top if we went to the sand. I won't bore you with a ton of pictures, the DH figured out how to make the camera take lightning fast pictures, so there were like 450 pictures I had to go through this morning.  Some were...

Last Monday I said "just turn the page", but I had forgotten what was on the next page.  These are doodles that I did while at the doctor's offices with DH while they did all kinds of tests on his stomach (never could find anything....I think it is stress) and then we were at different doctors with the pain in is neck (no not me........I'm much lower...LOL) Sometimes just making marks, like on the left side, can be very zen-like for me. Promise next week will be a colorful one, so come back. Inky Hugs Krisha

Scheduling this post as it is just TOO HOT to be here.  Today's forecast says it is going to be 107' (F) or 42'(c) here.  So you know we are at the beach where it is going to be 70' (F) and about 21' (c).  Instead of sitting HERE is shorts and flip flops I'm at the beach wearing jeans and tennies, and probably a light jacket..............oh I am so ginning! So I did make you a sunny card to depict what I am NOT missing, but there are those in this valley that love this extreme heat.........................I'm just not one of them!!! This is a very old stamp from Stampendous, embossed with gold on a glossy circle, mounted on a glitter paper (sorry the scan just doesn't show the sparkles at all)   I used a designer paper for the background, as it reminded me of sun shine and heat. Today is Tuesday so a reminder that   Elizabeth, the Altered Book Lover is serving up Tea with a great group of people from all around the world, and Juila ...