8/31/10 Alphastamps Design Team

I'm thrilled to announce I was chosen as one of Alpha Stamps Design Team Members.  I have been an admirer of the other women on the team for awhile and am honored to be in their company.  Alpha Stamps carries a wide and ever changing variety of supplies for collage, rubber stamping and jewelry making. 
There are thirteen new collage papers for Halloween and two new swaps - Halloween Dwellings Slide Mailer Swap and Skeletons in the Attic Book Swap.  Check their website for these swaps and loads of great supplies and to read about the new design team.

8/9/10 Floral Studies

Floral Study #1 - acrylics on gessoed masonite board

Floral Study #2 acrylic on gessoed masonite board

I did these floral studies a while ago and wanted to try taking photos for this blog.  Usually I scan artwork - it's much easier, but it can't always be done.  And then there's putting the images into Photoshop Elements and cropping, etc.  Well, what's life without challenges!

8/4/10 Retro Art Cafe Blog Giveaway

Retro Art Cafe has wonderful images, shrine kits, doll parts and all kinds of retro inspired goodies.  Kristin is nearing her 500th post on her blog!  All you have to do is leave a comment.  Hurry.

7/10/10 Entering the Castle

Paper Whimsy hosts a monthly ATC lottery - the subject is chosen by whoever won the lottery the month before.  This month was "Entering the Castle" and inspired by a book by Carolyn Myss.

The image of the woman was from a free download offered to members who figured out a puzzle devised by Gale - it was a lot of fun and many goodies were won at the end.

7/9/10 Garden Variety

Lenna Andrews  is hosting an Alpha Stamps swap called "Garden Variety" Postcard swap.  Alpha Stamps has a wealth of images and supplies to chose from.  I do a lot of ATC's so the larger 4 x 6 postcard size is a nice change.  I used some of their collage sheets, german scrap and patterned papers for these cards.  Lenna hosts swaps all the time on her blog and they're always fabulous!

6/30/10 A Little Whimsy

The website Paper Whimsy is a site I've written about before - it has beautiful collage sheets.  Many of the images are available for download as well as hardcopies.  Gale has a large collection of old photos which she lovingly "restores/retouches" - her site has a look and feel all it's own.
The site hosts a monthly ATC Lottery - all images are due by the end of the month, a winner is chosen and they get all the ATC's that were done for that challenge.  The winner then decides on the theme for the following month, and on it goes.
This month the theme was Fruits of Life and my ATC is pictured below.

I used one of the collage sheets that had images of pears and some of them were arranged in the size of an ATC already.  I then too leaves from another floral sheet to make a hat and chose one of the many adorable children available on the site to place on top.  I then cut out another pear, covered it in clear Stickles and attached it with a dimensional square adhesive.  Hope I win.....

6/11/10 Summer is Here

Chicago heat has come early this year.  Even Memorial Day weekend was warm - almost unheard of.  So, it seemed fitting that a Summertime / Beach theme ATC challenge is being done through Alphastamps Yahoo Group.  I'm just getting ready to mail these in.

I also just mailed 10 Chunky Book pages -  Bird themed - to Lisa at Collage Stuff.  She's going to collect pages from everyone,  assemble/bind the books so each has the work of 10 different artists and make the cover for each.  I bought single sheets of paper from Michael's for the backgrounds and the images are from both collage sheets and german scrap I bought at Collagestuff. Here's the pages I sent in last week: