A little bit on paper

I have been working on my art with paper skills.  I warn you, they are minimal.  But nobody gets better without practice, right?

Smash book page

The dress part I made with a balloon punch I had...  I was trying to figure out different uses for things I already have, like I did with her bonnet.

Martha Stewart Crafter's Clay butterfly.  Pretty cool stuff, but it doesn't smell very good.

The butterfly is made out of Martha Stewart Crafter's Clay (using one of her molds) and then I inked it up a little.  The clay is pretty nifty, but it took a while for the ink to dry on it.  Hence all the weird shapes in the background...they made OK stamps...  And some bling...which I am on the fence about...but I definitely dislike the word bling...I prefer shiny stuff...although I don't think the pearls are too shiny, so maybe fancy doo-dads?  I don't know, but there's some on the page, so there you go.

If you look closely,  you can see the tiny word on washi tape:"trapped"

I had her bonnet for a long time.  It is actually a baby bib (if you look the picture upside down, it is easy to see...or perhaps it is even if you don't...) die cut from Jocelyn.  I just filled it in with some quotes because these are some things I want to keep on my brain:

"I want to be remembered as the girl who always smiles even when her heart is broken, and the one that could always brighten up your day even if she couldn't brighten her own."
"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel."
"If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."
"Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

If you look closely at the bigger picture, you can see little words on washi tape saying things like trapped, afraid, indecisive, frozen, alone.  These are things that float around and pester me all the time, so I added them in.  But I am trying to concentrate on the good things, that's why they get the prime territory on my head...

The big words are a quote from a Lucinda Williams song called "Copenhagan"

I have a thing for words, and song lyrics especially stick in my head.  I think the line above is a really good metaphor for hearing something you don't expect to hear.  I just had to draw a little picture to go with it, and then some journaling stuff.  I actually like this drawing a lot.  Clearly it looks like a child did it, but you have to start somewhere, right?  Oh, and there are shiny snowflake confetti on the page too.  I don't know if you can tell that they are shiny, but they are.  I always check out confetti if I see it.  Even the word sounds fun...CONFETTI!!!  I think anything sounds fun if you capitalize and throw three exclamation points behind it.  Maybe not, because if you do the same thing with, say for instance, the word 'fart', then it just sounds like you should run in the other direction.  FART!!!  See, you just got up and ran away from your computer for a minute...

Wimpy page...

This page was an experiment...mostly, I strongly dislike the page, but I did learn from the experiment, so it wasn't a total loss!  I had written on the other side of the page, and it bled through, and I wanted to cover it up.  I decided to try some modeling paste that I had recently gotten, and blended it with a metallic copper paint I had.  This was a failure...the paint just turned a dirt colored brown when mixed with the modeling paste.  At least now I know...no metallic paint in modeling paste for me.  I tried to make the best of the situation, so I glued down some die cut leaves I had, drew some veins on them and then wrote: "And green things kept growing out of the dirt, thriving on things below that are causing me hurt."  I had originally liked the "GOOD.", which was already on the smash book page, but then it just doesn't fit with the rest of the page at all to me, so I may go back over it with some more dirt colored paint.  I think I would actually like the page much better if I did that.

Line is from a Josh Ritter song "The Curse"

I drew this with charcoal and it's shaded with chalk pastels.  I am pretty happy with the face.  I think it shows improvement over past faces I have drawn, and that's all I am aiming for.  Her poor boob looks really wonky...botched plastic surgery and all, very sad indeed...  Also, that song is very cool.  It's the only song I have heard from Josh Ritter, but I like the lyrics, so I will have to check out his other music.

Acrylic paint on an actual canvas...fancy!

  Lastly, here is a little painting I did.  I saw a picture somewhere online forever ago that I thought was really cool, but it was before Pinterest came into my life, so it has been lost to me in the stream of time.  At any rate, the image stuck in my head, so I used it for inspiration and painted this up.  The amount of happiness I have over things I make never directly correlates to the amount of ascetically pleasing-ness people (other than myself) would have looking at the things.  In other words, even though this looks like a third grader did this, and I will be 29 on Saturday, I really like it.  Except for the girl's face...If you do a close up on her, she is kinda creepy...  I will probably just paint over her face at some point...I don't know yet.  I am giving her time to grow on me.

Have you been doing anything awesome?  Tell me about it in the comments below!  Any comment is very much appreciated.

~Sully

For Buttons

Disclaimer:  This has absolutely nothing to do with actual buttons...so if you are reading this title thinking "Huzzah!  I love buttons...I will check this out...", you will be sadly disappointed.  Just a warning!

Instead, this has to do with my younger sister, Teddy, who is pregnant.  Teddy and Buttons...  Buttons is what we are calling Teddy's baby.  She got tired of me calling her unborn baby 'it', and so from about a week after we found out she was preggo, we have called 'it' Buttons...  This Friday, we get to find out whether Buttons will be a girl or a boy!  (If Buttons cooperates, that is...)  I am excited, because I get to be there!  I can't have any kids of my own, so Teddy is lovingly letting me be a big part of her pregnancy experience.  So as a little surprise, I am giving Teddy a smash book.  (I almost called this post Baby Smash Book, but all I could think was how terrible baby smash sounded, so I decided against that...)

At any rate, smash books are kind of like a scrapbook that you fill with all kinds of ephemera and words and whatever you want.  You can definitely make your own if you were so inclined, and there are lots of cool tutorials for smash books/ junk journals all over the internet.  But I didn't want my limited paper crafting skills to get in the way on this present, so I went with the real deal from K & Company.

This one:



I also got her a bunch of little stickers and doodads to put in the book, gender neutral, as we won't find out till Friday what she is having.

To me a smash book is a very cool, easy way for her to keep track of what its like to be pregnant.  Teddy is one to notoriously put things off, and I don't want her to forget anything that happens.  The smash book seems like a good way to get her to record things, in just a few sentences if she wants, with pictures, or other memorabilia that she can just toss in when she feels like it.  To me a smash book is like a casual scrapbook...where you don't worry too much about how polished it looks if you don't want to.  They are also neat (especially for people like Teddy) because they have the little smash stick (which is a fine tip sharpie on one end and a glue stick on the other) attached right to the book.  That way if you are out somewhere, you can smash stuff right then and not forget about it...pretty smart...

To help Teddy get over the blank page jitters, I did the first page in her book.

Here is the blank page:

Before...

And here is the after:

And After...  Get it...a book about buttons...cause we call the baby Buttons... genius!

On a really cool side note, those button die cuts came from one of my other sisters, Jocelyn.  The library where she lives has a huge die cutting machine that you can use if you bring your own paper!  I checked out my local library, but they don't have one (which made me a sad panda).  But it may be worth checking into at your own local library.  Besides, libraries are awesome in general, so its not like the trip would be wasted.  Plus, some libraries keep a rack of old books and magazines for sale (mine does do this) year round that can be a great source for paper crafting supplies.

I also did the back of the page:

Good quotes!  The yellow is a pocket for a little card I am making...I will post that when I get it done...

I didn't go overboard on the whole decorating end of it.  Teddy is not super crafty, and I didn't want to freak her out with some crazy fancy whatever that would make it be intimidating for her to add to...  Also, while the thick layers of stuff look cool, in reality, it makes it difficult to do the pages that follow...so I kept it simple...  I am trying not to give her any excuse to not just 'smash' the crap out of this smash book!!!

What do you think of smash books?  Any thoughts, I would love to hear whatever you have to say!

~Sully