girl meets art

Chicken Wire Ghost Tutorial. Just think how these would go over during Halloween! Very cool.

Via craftdiscoveries and Be Different…Act Normal

At Craft Fair-ology, crafters share their tips on getting into fairs, branding, setting up, etc. What a useful site!

Page from my sketchbook, using pigment markers, color pencil, and pencil to explore pattern and color. Another sketch inspired by the work of Andrea Way. The text is simply a repeating pattern of 30-degree increments around a circle.

Top is the full page; bottom is a detail.

Page from my sketchbook, exploring “rules” for drawing a pattern.

From my sketchbooks, a study in color, pattern, and line. Left, full page; right, details.

Over the weekend, I went to Artisphere in Arlington, Va., to see an exhibit related to the Washington DC International Design Festival. Then I discovered Voltron’s Corpse, an exhibit curated by Jared Davis and Andrew Wodzianski. The exhibit involves the work of 15 artists tasked with commemorating the first human spaceflight, while “addressing space exploration’s transition from a mission of man to a mission of robots.”

The work blends the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse with late 20th-century pop culture esthetics, especially the animé series Voltron. Each artist created interchangeable parts of robots, and every week, the curators reassemble the canvas segments into new configurations.

And you can play curator yourself at this online mix-and-match tool created by Jason Pasch.

I did this landscape mixed-media collage for the Art House Co-op Infinite Scroll online project. (A version modified for the project template appears in the Infinite Scroll Flickr group). This is another example of going outside my comfort zone by working quickly and not overthinking (well, not too much!).

Photos I took for the Things Found series of projects sponsored by Art House Co-op, in this case, The Letter E.

My entry to the latest Infinite Scroll projects from Art House Co-op, Patterns. Read more about my inspiration for the piece at GirlMeetsArt. 

And check out the other entries at AHC’s tumble log.

One of my entries to the Sketchbook free project, Things Found … In A Row. There is one of those tacky made-in-China clothing stores in my neighborhood, with rows of mannequins (well, actually, just the butts and legs), with jeans on them. All the mannequins have SERIOUS junk in the trunk, LOL.

I used a fun little Mac app called Photo Effect studio to add the vignetting and the scratched look. On Twitter, search on #thingsfound to see other contributions.

Some illustrations from the fun “daily dishonesty” blog by graphic designer/artist Lauren Nicole Hom. You can buy T-shirts and art prints!

Graphic designer Lauren Nicole Hom shares her process in creating her series of humorous hand-lettered “daily dishonesties.”

From a cool little tumblog, Fastest Possible Drawings of Everything, that just goes to show how anyone can draw, and how little information the human eye needs to complete the picture. You may want to see if you can get the creators to join your Pictionary team pronto. As they say in their About page, 

Not everybody knows how to draw, but everybody should try. It’s a skill and casual expressive form often neglected once school’s out (unless that school is art school, or maybe especially if that school is art school). In our observation, people tend to get wound up about drawing; nobody’s ever lost a limb over a gross-looking drawing of a turtle, but it’s a lot better than reading Facebook. Get a pen and start drawing. This project, as much as anything else, is about that.

40 Art Journal prompts, for those times when you just get into a creative funk. From My Neat Little Domestic Life blog.

A couple of interesting prompts:

• Write down all of the things you dislike about yourself then cover it up with gesso, and write down all of the things you like about yourself.
• Design a room that would inspire you just being in it.
• Create an abstract painting of the room you’re in.

City Structures from Lie Dirkx, a London-based artist who is sharing her sketchbook pages from her Masters program.

This piece is intriguing for how she finds pieces of photos and juxtaposes them in an array of alternating organic and geometric frames. It reminds me of the various exercises I did in my visual thinking class at Virginia Commonwealth University.