Day Twenty Nine

Another quickie... just made a little snowflake in the last few minutes of the day.

I made it out of a page from a book about tumors... so the front (which I like better) is just text, and the back has a photo of a magnified tumor. Gross, but I actually think those photos look pretty cool and can even be beautiful.

 

Day Eighteen

My Lovely came over for dinner today (it's so weird to say that I had my husband over for dinner) and it was so nice to see him! A lot of couples are apart all the time, but I'm not used to it: we got married and then lived in different states for two months which was totally bizarre, but in the year since then we haven't been apart for more than a day or two. After tonight I won't see him for another week or so and while it will suck for that week, after I'm done watching my cousins and he comes home from his ski trip we'll be so glad to see each other that it just might be worth it!

Anyway. I only worked on my rug a little bit today, but since hubby was here, I got a better picture of it- hooray! It's almost a 18 inches in diameter by my estimation.
Again, the great tutorial I followed can be found here.


I also made a bunch of beads made from sculpey. I haven't baked them yet - I'm kind of scared of ruining them. I've never baked sculpey before.
EDIT - I baked them, and they're fine! They look exactly the same though, so I won't post another picture.

You can tell that I'm not in my own house from the gorgeous counter tops and the real hardwood floors.... but it's fine because I love my little house and I know that I'm blessed to have it!

Day Nine

My sweet friend Juli stole me over to her house today to make some adorable cards with her, which was so fun... I'm so bad at staying connected with people, and it really touches me when others make that effort to reach out to me. I don't realize how alone I am most of the time until after spending time with other human beings!

Anyway, it was just fun to play with paper and buttons and different colors. Hopefully I'll actually use these cards to send to people - another thing I'm bad at is getting thank you cards sent!

Click to see a close up! Is it necessary for me to say that every time? I feel kinda silly, but I worry that someone won't know that you can do that. Oh well. I guess I'll just say it for the pictures that I actually want people to click on to see a close up. Click on my pictures, dagnabbit!

Day Eight

I finally finished the project I started on day four! (I showed you my mess from this project, but it hadn't dried yet so I made a melodramatic drawing instead).

I can never decide if stuff like this can really be called art, or if it's more just crafts... personally I want to call it crafts. On a larger, more sculptural scale I would call it art. This is could turn into a huge debate centered on the definition of the word "art," but for now I'm just going to say that it's a craft but it's still creative, so I will include things like this in my art a day quest.

My other problem with this project is that it's unoriginal - I saw it on pinterest. Really, very few of the artsy things I do are original at this point. I found a video that taught me how to make the plastic fabric stuff, I saw poetry done on book pages on deviantart a long time ago, and I drew a picture straight from a TV show. I don't know, I'm just having real issues coming up with any ideas of my own. I'm hoping that this blog will help me to be more original along the way, and that researcing other artists will help me to see what I like, and turn that into my own style. I'm reading this great book called How to Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon, that gives great advice on finding inspiration and gradually building your voice as an artist. I'll write a blog post about the book one of these days. I really recommend it.

ANYWAY. My lovely, unoriginal craft for today:

These bowls are made from paper mache using both magazine and dictionary pages, one kind on each side of each of the bowls to create contrast. I put plastic wrap inside bowls I already had and used them as molds for the paper mache. The bowls were completely dry today and I just finished them by cleaning them up a little then applying a coat of mod podge to give them shine!