Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That and Probably Some Other Stuff, Too!

Hello Readers!

The County Fair starts next week. Monday, to be exact. I started a fish picture the day before yesterday in hopes of completing it before the 5pm Monday deadline to get entries registered and at the fairgrounds. 

Nothing like cutting it close....

I believe I may just hit that goal!

I don't think this is enough fish and I know they need a different color applied to them for them to work out right on that bright pink canvas you're about to see.

Luckily there were only two of the fishes totally annihilated when the lid blew off the rose colored glitter glue I was trying so hard to come out of that bottle. It went:

POOFT! Like a big fart and sprayed glitter glue in a giant blob on my paint pallet, on my fishes I was painting and on the front of my red painting smock. 

Didn't hurt my pallet or my smock but three of the fishes took a direct hit and they must be fixed. 

They're about 3 inches long, just paper painted black with dimensional paint and then with green glitter glue. I do like me some glitter when fish pictures are taking shape!

I believe another half dozen or so of them will be required for the finished picture. 

I'm thinking blue fish with red and green stripes. 

We shall all know what they look like when I get them made!

Some detail at the bottom of the picture. There's a lot of different things on this canvas. Those blue things are crewel embroidery. There's some red netting from an onion bag. wooden beads. lots of glitter glue! 

I strung up some copper wire and glass bead thingamabobs and laid a gazillion different types of yarn on the painted canvas.

I started out with a pink tree...you all saw that thing some posts back....I painted the whole thing black and started over again. I was thinking on a pink hue for the finished picture so the background painting was a bit reddish, more than pink. It has three or four coats of different acrylics....there's yellow, red, a bit of green and whole bunch of gorilla glue that was painted over once it dried. Gorilla glue is some great stuff when you're in need of some texture in a mixed media piece. It takes awhile to dry, but it's well worth the wait!

There are green crewel embroidery urchins as well as blue ones.

Along the bottom of the canvas is a shelf of 'rocks'. Those rocks are really styrofoam balls broke into chunks and then glued to the canvas. I let the styrofoam chunks dry for about an hour and then I cut pink silk (used to be a blouse) into rough 3 inch squares and covered the 'rocks' by saturating the silk in a mixture of watered down white glue.

After the silk had dried and all the remaining holes were covered with another layer of silk, I hit the pink silk with three or four different colors of glitter glue. 

The silk draped beautifully around the rocks while it was wet and dried rock hard! Lots of peaks and valleys to tuck sea critters into.

Wooden beads strung on copper wire. You can see the red onion bag netting and the different kinds of yarn and strings used on the background.

If you click on these pictures they will get bigger.

This is what it looks like at 3 a.m. on the 10th of August. There will be progress tomorrow for sure. That bottom blue urchin that's hanging off the canvas isn't there anymore. I moved it up and over to the right some. 

The canvas is 16x20 inches.

There's still more crap to add to the seafloor before the fishes get put on. Then there will be another two, maybe three different kinds of string over the fishes so it looks like they're swimming IN the water. 

Fear not! You'll get to see it when it's done!

Those of you who know me, know I am not a one project kind of girl.

I did these two ATCs on the 31st of July.

Madame Lazonga

ATC

markers on cardstock

She's really not this orange in real life. I took pictures instead of scanning these two. I'm lazy sometimes!

The All-Seeing

ATC

markers on cardstock

Inspired by Mexican art.

A few weeks ago I was at the gas station in Pburg with my sister and there were half a dozen or so political signs on the corner there. I walked over the grassy spot where the signs were while sis filled her car with gas. I wanted to see what they were made out of.  There were hundreds of them littering yards and curbs all over the darn place for the last three months or so. I figured if they were made out of something useful, they were free art fodder!

Thursday morning, two after the elections were over, Ma brought me three political signs made out of corrugated plastic board. I'm flush with book cover material for awhile. (Not that I wasn't already flush with book cover making supplies before Ma showed up with more...)

I cut 1/3 of 1 sign up and made 5 little book covers from it.

This one I zentangled the front cover with black sharpie and sewed it together with roughly 80 pages of copy paper. It's sewn together with white crochet cotton and the spine edge has been glued because my sewing wasn't the tightest and the book wobbled a bit. Gluing the spine corrects bad sewing to some degree. This book is 3.5x2.5x1 inches

Football playing Barbie is a magazine picture glued to some of that signage board and then painted in acrylics. I liked this girl's hairdo.  I really liked it before I made her look like she's wearing an old-timey leather helmet! She had it all pinned up with bobby pins. Must of been 200 bobby pins in her hair. It looked really cool!

Something got lost in the remake.

I'm leaving her as is cause to try to fix her hair would just muck up the whole thing! She will become the front cover for a little book. This one is 3.5x5 inches. The back cover is painted blue like the background on this here lady.

I was really surprised that plastic took the acrylics so nicely! 

I'll be playing around with that plastic board. Don't be surprised if you find a box or two here on the blog in the coming weeks.

I'm sitting here at my desk and I look over to my left and there sits a paper flower ball I made a few days ago and another paper flower ball I made last week that I neglected to even take a picture of when I was taking pictures. 

There's also a felt flower hanging off the old 8mm movie camera to my right that I neglected to take a picture of. Next time!

My sister, Kathy came to visit over the weekend and brought me a big box of things made out of velvet. I've spent the last few days cutting those shirts and skirts apart so I can use the velvet in sewing projects.

Velvet monsters are quite soft and huggable. 

I have enough velvet to start cutting out 4 inch squares in preparation of sewing them into a quilt top. Most of the velvet will probably be turned into monsters of one kind or another though. 

That blue box hiding under the stack of velvet on the right was an excellent find while digging through the cutting room last week. It's a set of craft knives with a bunch of different blades. No clue where it came from. That cutting room is full of stuff I don't even know I have! One of these days those shelves I've been asking for for 4 years now will materialize on the wall above the paper cutter and I can start to organize things in that room. Someone really needs to sort through the closet and the boxes under the work bench as well. 

I suspect that will have to be me cause no one else knows what is useful and what is not. 

As soon as Fish Picture 6 is done and delivered to the fairgrounds on Monday, I am going to make a batch of paper clay and finish that flamingo! Pink seems to be the color for August!

You all be good to one another!

Thanks for stopping by!

Peace

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