Again With The Pretty Papers

This is from my little square hemp journal which is currently in Patti's keeping while we swap. :)

Not yet finished... but I like his/her hair. Fluid acrylics and Pitt pens.

My sincerest apologies to any octopus enthusiasts. It's just a doodle and doodles are immune to anatomy.

I Do Like To Play With Pretty Papers.

I've also been playing with oil pastels and matte medium a fair bit lately, along with Pitt brush pens, beeswax, masking tape, blended fibre paste, paper clay, and watercolours.

 This is the front cover to my current favourite journal. Patti and I found two of them left at The Papery and loved the weight of the paper. It really stands up to a lot of abuse. The shiny cover was a bit of a pain to sand off, but enough matte medium could make a politician stick to his promises...

 One of the abused pages inside the journal du jour... Axel dubbed him Professor Erstwhile and it stuck. Must've been all the matte medium.

I had a wave of nostalgia the other day for being ten years old when I loved purple and reading the Oz books with all the John R. Neill illustrations.

What a good day

Bean and I went for his first (but not last!) visit to Patti's studio and huge puppy fun was had by all! Patti's husband Tim Zurowski is an amazing wildlife photographer and he kindly offered to get some shots of His Bean-ness today. He needed all his skill to capture this puppy-blur! He just does not sit still unless he's comatose, and when he's comatose, he's snuggled next to someone. Not an ideal subject really, except that he's so damned cute!

What you can't see here are Patti and Tim's two standard poodles, Cody and Keiko, who are fantastic doggy hosts! Cody and Bean got along like a house a-fire and Bean was wooooorn out by the end of the day. He napped a couple of times in his kennel, so Patti and I got to art awhile too.We played with some awesome Japanese masking tape, from Pretty Tape and Happy Tape and pan pastels, mmmm.

I had a moment today where I was perfectly happy and finally felt that all the grief I've gone through up to now has been totally worth it. :)

Haven't had an awful lot of time to do any involved projects, but I've been doing a lot of doodling and painting of abstract backgrounds in my journals.

Here's a few of them.

A little distracted lately...

... and here's why.

Meet the 4-legged addition to our family: Bean!
He's a border collie/black lab mix and, yes, we are insane for doing this to ourselves. ;)

And the latest piece

I utilized charcoal and matte medium a lot in this one, as well as some clothing pattern paper.

Newest Journal

I love my little square hemp journal so much that I got its big sister, my medium rectangular hemp journal... which somehow does not flow off the tongue quite as easily. This is the cover and a few of the inside pages. Still want to dropkick Photoshop.

Okay!

Wow, what a lot of changes in so small a time-frame. New jobs, new house, new household accoutrements, deaths in the family, huge family dramas and my one and only kiddo getting her first job. Feels like I've been thrown into the deep end of the pool and I'm just now getting that first gasp of air after struggling to the surface! I sure do wish that life came with an instruction manual. I'm sure all of you have been in a similar position at some point.

ANYways. Art!

I finally got the scanner hooked up again, although Photoshop is running like a passed-out sloth on my old desktop for some reason.

There's so much to catch up on, it will likely take me a few days of scanscanscan-swear at Photoshop-scanscanscan.

Here's a few to start: