Strong Heart Felt and Paper Collage

My theme for the #100DaysChallenge is Hearts and Houses so there will be a lot of hearts and a lot of houses posted here over the next three months.

I'll bundle them as needed so I don't bore you all :-)

#31Postcard in October

I'm sending thirty-one postcards in the month of October. While some will be bought and others are ones I made in the past, I am using up my spare bits of time to play.

This collage will be going in the mail tonight :-)

#31postcards

Coffee Girl Art Journal Page

I've got this strange quirk. 

I keep practicing faces and then using the ones that I'd call fails in my art journal. 

Which has resulted in a good many weird ones making it into 'finished' work and the 'good' ones in a stack of papers with my mail... getting coffee stained as I'm a huge klutz.

This is funny as I've always been a proponent of, 'kill your darlings" and this has a whiff of, "those ones are too precious" to it.

How about you? Do you use your crappy stuff (supplies, sketches, backgrounds, yarn...) and hoard your good stuff?

Just me?

P.S. I'm very happy to be going back to my art journalling roots. It's nice to just mess around with no real concern for the outcome. Makes this girl very happy.

And Happy Halloween!

Swimmer Triathlon Collage

I couldn't make a runner and a cyclist without adding in a swimmer.

This is a tri-house after all. Missing the discipline my crew loves the most would be blasphemy :-)

Love this quote!

And here is the set together:

Swimmer available on Etsy

Running Collage

Hello! Another sports-themed collage this morning. 

I really loved this quote when I saw it on Pinterest and decided to make something right away.

This canvas background had been languishing in my pile for about two years. I really loved the dimensional paste flower silhouettes, the doily stencil and the spray paint but it felt too... assembled... literal? I'm not sure. 

It didn't float my boat. 

But when I added a runner, and the flowers morphed into speed, or something to add motion, excitement, something to draw the eye  - now we're cooking with gas!

Please click to enbiggan :-)

Available on Etsy

How Far Can You Go? Original Collage

As I'm sure some of you know, my husband is a triathlete. He's currently training for a half-ironman in St. Croix.

So we are living eating and breathing endurance sports. And it's coming out in my art.

A real challenge with collage work is making art that would be suitable to add to a man's collection. Let's face it, a lot of it is pretty girly. 

I think I met my goal on making a masculine collage that still incorporates all the elements and techniques that make up my work. 

Do you have an endurance athlete in your life? Is your spouse sporty? How about you? Do you do sweaty things?

Available on Etsy

Mixed Media Daisy Canvas

I've been painting over old canvases again. Some of these are starting to crack and tear from age but a little gesso and some book paper is just the thing to make repairs. 

This time the book paper came from a very, very old completely beyond repair copy of Harry Potter we had lying around. At one point at the height of Potter Mania I think we had three copies of each book. This one had been well-loved to the point of destruction. 

The funny thing is that as I was cutting and gluing down the circles I started reading and was a solid chapter through before I realized I'd quit crafting. Now that's the sign of a great book!

For this I tried Golden fluid acrylics for the first time. I only bought neon pink as I thought even if I hate the stuff, it's a color I'll use up. It's awesome. I can't believe something so thin and ... well... fluid, covers so well. The opacity over darker colors is really impressive.

I had to leave it to dry overnight though as the open time is long.

Thanks so much for visiting. 

Warmly,

~~~Nicole

You Are Free to Be Happy: Birdhouse 3D Collage

Available on Etsy

Chunky Wooden Houses

Hello Everyone. Sorry for the light posting schedule, I have pneumonia. And it's our birthday-birthday-anniversary week (his 45th, my 41st our 19th) so the universe has conspired against me posting regular craftiness. 

I'm so tired. Wow. Like breathing in and out is completely, devastatingly exhausting. Hope this passes super-fast.

Did I mention we also are having our floors replaced this week? 

It's kind of a good news/bad news joke as all five of us are in our master bedroom because the main floor is torn apart. It's good timing as staying in bed is pretty easy but bad timing as we're all here... together. I hope listening to me cough and sleep isn't too hard on them. Trying to feed a family of five from our bathroom while sick is a challenge. Wanna see the set up?

Kinda works. It's amazing what you can cook in a keurig. LOL And the crockpot is my best friend. Last night we had chicken taco bowls... which is pretty amazing considering all the extenuating circumstances. It was delicious and smelled terrific.

Now... On with the show!

Back in December I made these chunky wooden houses and I'm just itching to make more. They are so much fun. 

To begin I took some old wood from our garden that had been weathering for years and unscrewed the boards. Then my husband sawed them into house shapes. To do this SIMPLY you just draw an X somewhere on the board from side to side. When you cut along the lines, you get two houses, each with a peaked roof. Just occurred to me that a picture might be worth all the above words, don't mind my sharpie drawing on my youngest math scratch paper. I'm sick.

The colored in bit is the wood that gets wasted. 

Paint a base color. If you like how the wood looks (like the one in the front) leave it exposed.

Add contrasting roofs and sides.

Embellish with paper and bibs and bobs from your stash. 

Some of the details were glued on with matte Mod Podge (like the music paper) and the larger ones were attached with a glue gun. 

All the sequins were nailed in. I took extra care to make sure the nails were all catawampus  for interest. 

It's a great way to use up little pieces left from other projects.

Interweave has a tutorial for these wooden houses in their Art Lessons (that I didn't follow, but it's very good.) Karen Michel's are much nicer than mine. Check them out :-) I totally swiped her wire flag idea - so cute!

Do you have a favorite? 

I've noticed that people seem to gravitate to certain houses over the others and it's fascinating to me to see who likes what.