One Word

We needed to switch our regular Saturday morning piano lesson to later in the day. So I emailed our native Japanese speaking piano teacher and asked, "Would it be possible to schedule our lessons on Saturday to later in the day - we can meet any time after 1pm. Thank you!!!" Which lead to an exchange of emails where our teacher conveyed that she needed to speak to all of the other Saturday students to schedule a better time. Early Saturday morning she was still working on the time, so I asked if we should just cancel. Her worried response was my clue that I had not specified "this Saturday" but rather "Saturday" so she was trying to re-arrange her weekly Saturday schedule just for us! And thought I was canceling our lessons ad infinitim, poor thing! A simple request had gone awry for lack of a word. 

Can you think of a situation where one word could have made all of the difference, where one word messed everything up, or perhaps where one word saved the day?

Gelatin + Acrylic Printing Therapy

"A sunset is always more beautiful when it is covered with irregularly shaped clouds, because only then can it reflect the many colours out of which dreams and poetry are made."
Paul Coelho

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Watercolor Playground {21 Secrets}

In a matter of HOURS... 21 Secrets begins. I hope you enjoy this little peek at the pages we will create in my Watercolor Playground workshop. 

This is the HD Version. Yes, there's music.

{If you cannot see it, there's a non-HD version at the end of this post.}

Register for 21 Secrets through any of the links on this page.

21 art journaling workshops in an online creative workspace. There is one fee for the entire experience which lasts from April 1 to December 31. Work at your own pace, in your own space.

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365 Somethings #84-90

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
Ray Bradbury

"worship inventiveness"

fabric, found text, cardstock, handpainted papers, maps, colored pencil doodles, japanese papers

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Hanna's 2013 DIY Postcard Swap

I've been creating a few postcards a day and now have a stack for Hanna's swap!

An arc of stitched cards. These make me happy.

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Cut + Paste Therapy #2

Thank you to Aimee of Artsyville for motivating me to cut + paste these pages! I am such a happy camper, with a stack of magazines and catalogs to my left, matte medium and a brush to my right, journal open in front of me at the breakfast table.

Above, the 4th set of pages from this cut + paste journal. The contents include images from Japanese and Italian magazines, stamps, wrapping paper, cuttings from the gel prints I made recently, found words, hand painted papers, etc. I didn't really have a theme on this page, as I did with the first three pages I did last week. I tried to use the colors from the swatches on the right as a guide, rich colors like red, green, gold, purple. It wasn't as cohesive as last week. I learned that I like having a theme.

Pages from my 8 1/4 x 11 3/4" Clairefontaine Carnet de Voyage. 

Above, the 5th set of page. The contents include images from Japanese and Italian magazines, Japanese washi papers, receipts, ticket stubs, a map... The theme was greys and greens and a serious mood.

I love the freedom and meditative experience of paging through magazines, scissors in hand, cutting what strikes your fancy, painting the back with matte medium and gluing it to the page. The clink of the brush in the glass jar waiting for the next thing. The page blooming with color. As the page gets more complete, the hunt for just the right thing to add to make it complete. I like working in this grid oriented format, the simplicity of the lines, the ability to see everything at a glance.

In art journaling, I like to layer texture and color and images, but here, I want to see everything. Loving this!

See the other pages from this journal in Cut + Paste Therapy #1 and Therapy #3and Therapy #4 and Therapy #5.

Art Journaling 101

 

Pop over to Art Journaling 101 for an introduction to art journaling. I've updated the entire post!

You do not need to be an "artist" or know how to paint or draw to make an art journal. It is easy to get started. Learn what supplies you'll need to start an art journal, including how to find collage and ephemera, art supplies, watercolor and acrylic paints, pens, adhesives, gessoes and other materials used to make art journal pages. There are also links to sites, challenges, books and journal prompts to inspire your creativity every day!

Throughout Daisy Yellow you'll find tutorials and techniques to explore once you get started.

Doing art is relaxing and joyful. It allows you to communicate emotions, explore thoughts, express thoughts and feelings with color, words and images. An art journal is free of constraints. It is whatever you want it to be. It lets you "draw outside the lines" and remove the box altogether.

The fun is in the process. Getting lost in the process. It's not about what your pages look like in the end. That's a bonus. Pop over to Art Journaling 101 for an introduction to art journaling. 

365 Somethings #77-83

“Luck is not chance, it's toil;
fortune's expensive smile is earned.”
Emily Dickinson

 

"unfocused week"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, map, accounting paper, patterned cardstock, playing card

"Annie's mood disaster"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, map, accounting paper, patterned cardstock, playing card

"another balloon"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, map, accounting paper, patterned cardstock, inked paper, playing card

"yielded less"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, patterned cardstock

"an invisible warning"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, map, accounting paper, patterned cardstock, paint chip

"badly broken"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, patterned cardstock, form, paint chip, ticket stubs, inked paper

"look sullen"

fabric, japanese papers, hand-painted papers, found text, map, patterned cardstock, inked paper, photo of daughter's painting, tokyo subway map, number stamps

It seems counter-intuitive that the more I do, the more ideas I have. But that is the reality of these little collages.

I remember feeling this way when I first started drawing mandalas. Each mandala, like each stitched collage, is a challenge. These cards are made with tiny squares and rectangles of paper and fabric. The cards are 3x5" so the first card has 32 tiny pieces attached.

Just got an email from a reader concerned about my found text this week! So I went back and read the little found text on this collection and so funny that they ARE indeed sort of dark! But I'm not in a dark mood at all {that's quite rare for me}. I think it's more that my snarkiness and dark humour come out in my word choices {and definitely on Twitter}. I'm not so snarky here, it just comes out in little blips elsewhere!

I stitched each of the collages to 3x5" index cards. You'll find my 365 somethings posts at this link.

Click on the button to follow Daisy Yellow using bloglovin.

What's Up Doc?

“She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”
Dean Koontz

This is my little orange fairie house just outside the back door in a japanese maple tree. I got this effect by taking the photo without the lens attached. I found this idea at A Beautiful Mess. I'm going to try this with some other subjects and see what happens.

The winner!!! of the 21 Secrets Workshop registration is....

NUMBER ELEVEN: JULIE K IN TAIWAN! 

CONGRATULATIONS and THANK YOU to everyone who entered the drawing!

To register for 21 Secrets, check out this post.

Continuing my commitment to share fun finds here at DY: 

Karen of I am Rushmore has added her delightful creative bits to our postcards for the collaborative mail art project. Here's the introduction to the project, to see where it started.

Mary of uncustomary is {creatively} working through 100 ways to be creative.

At Ten Paces and Draw, illustrations of various characters from the beloved Downton Abbey.

Diane adds insight to the discussion of Free + Sustainability in her post Re-Calculating. This progression of thought stems from her rational choice to cease her podcast. Don't skip the comments. I wrote about the demise of Diane's podcast in this post. 

For years, I've been enamored with the fashion photography at The Sartorialist.

Love Lizzie Bo's collaged pages at Green Glass.

Helen Dardik's designs make me happy.

Eden adds the finishing touches on her drawings with a Sakura Micron. 

Ricë shares thoughts on dying fabric at Notes from the Voodoo Café and here's my fav quote, "I learned The Science Part--the rules, the steps, The Right Way--and then I moved on to The Art Part: playing around and seeing what it can do."

I'm loving the cut+paste therapy that Aimee prompted. Check out the links to the yummy gluey goodness at Artsyville.

Tommy Kane created a happy video called Let's Dance. 

Kate doodles with such a cool graffiti feel in Dawn's book Art Doodle Love. I drew in the book in slicci pens and gelly rolls for the book's blog hop.

Cut + Paste Therapy

This cut + paste therapy session was sponsored by / enabled by imagined by Aimee of Artsyville, who announced this idea called GLUE IT TUESDAY. On Tuesday with just an hour before I had to go pick up the kiddos I pulled out all sorts of stuff and got to work. 

The first thing was to pick a journal for the occasion. I wanted something BIG and reasonably sturdy that I would enjoy using. I don't know about you but I really need to like the paper in my journals. I found a new 8 1/4 x 11 3/4" Clairefontaine Carnet de Voyage {Travel Album} gifted to me and got to work. The paper in this wirebound journal is lovely for collage at 180g/83 lb.

I skipped the first page. Only because I always skip the first page. Then I started cutting like a madwoman. Really bonkers. I have been wanting to do color-themed cut + paste journal pages for a long, long time and this was the perfect opportunity. So I went with blue for the first set. Blues and blacks, mostly. I glued from magazines, receipts, notes, japanese washi papers, catalogs, ads, brochures, stamps, even clippings from the DIY gel prints I've been printing.

Soon it was time to go pick up the kids. Then I came back and made another! I started with the woman in the kimono on the left, the yellow pencils and the wavy lines on the right and just kept going. The theme helps me pick images, sort of. This is rainbowy + bright. My DIY pinterest board. An inspiration board. On this page, along with the magazine-stuff, there's hand painted papers, gift wrap, neocolors, doodles, fabric. I scribbled in pencil too.

And when I got home on Wednesday, another page! I am physically uncapable of doing just one page. This one has the usual suspects plus washi tape too.

This challenge was served at just the right time. I'd been feeling a need to DO SOMETHING with the stacks of magazines in the pantry {Vogues gifted to me by a friend, a stack of magazines purchased in Italy, a stack of magazines my husband brought back from a trip to Japan}, etc. The truth is that I was feeling a little guilty about collecting magazines and not using them to their fullest extent. 

Happy fun.

I went all over the house collecting magazines I'd put away to look at "some day" and I'm going to make more pages. Because I'm on deadline. With something else.

Each Tuesday, a fresh 6-word prompt called Prompt6ix! Here's today's Prompt6ix.

See the other pages from this journal in Cut + Paste Therapy #2 and Therapy #3 and Therapy #4 and Therapy #5.