lara

Ah lists....
Here's my list of my top 10 favorite projects of the year.
This was the list from 2008
and from 2007

and here's 2009:

1.


The pre-art journal art journal! This is hands down the most favortist thing i've EVER made. I am hoping to think of it as a prototype and make more, possibly to help obtain one of my goals for the new year - selling some of my art.

2.


Bono's 49th Birthday Card for African Well Fund's "Build a well for Bono" fundraiser. This is when i was deep into experimenting with spray paint. I made, tore apart, and remade this card three times - and i actually came up with something i was pretty proud of! Also really enjoyed using envelopes this year ... will continue on that theme for sure!

3.


I finished all 24 spreads for the year in the life journal. i used this "challenge" as a journal as well as a place to practice and develop techniques. There were some pages I really really liked, though:

4.


The "F" spread from "A Year in the Life" art journal.
This was really the first time i tried image transfer using matte medium directly onto the page.

5.


The "H" spread for "Year in the life"
couldn't decide what font to use, so i used a couple -i like the repetition. This was also one of the first layouts of 2009 i actually felt positivity.

the full set of pages are here at flickr

6.


This was also the year i completed my first art journal EVER!
All pages can be seen here at flickr

7.


The first of Nine Feng Shui squares. This really looks nicer in person on my wall. I love the colors - let's hope it works! It's for "Abundance and Prosperity" :)


8.


For the October prompt of Gutter Girlz. I'd been wanting to try this for awhile, and love how it came out.

9.


For Soul Journal I started and should probably start working on again :)
Inchies! Loved doing this and actually constantly daydream about doing another lighter one.

10.
Tshirt design for AWF:


I know this isn't paper and glue art, but it's something i designed for the U2 USA Leg 1 of the tour. I am really proud of how it turned out and it looks great on flyers and t-shirts.

the finished year in the life of my art journal!

The front:


Back:


YUMMMM:


and yummmmmmmmmm:

my new project is making nine feng shui squares.
feng shui is kind of like karma to me, not sure i believe in it, but hey, it can't hurt.
so, with the aid of a book a friend gave me years ago and a desire to transform the space i've been living in for 3 years hoping it will help turn my life around, i'm studying up on the practice.

a little background on feng shui - you divide your living space up into 9 areas that are called "guas" and each gua represents an aspect of life. it is believed that each gua has an energy that can affect the area of life it corresponds to in a positive or negative way. One way to control the energy and make it positive is using material items.

What i like about this book my friend gave me is it's not only kind of written for "dummies" but for people who don't have a lot of patience and maybe a hint of attention deficit, like myself.

The first piece I've made is for the prosperity corner of my house - which is the farthest left and back corner from my front door - my bedroom, actually. I've been having so many money issues, as well as the feeling of not having the abundance of anything, i thought this might be a good place to start.

So, the things that are said to cause positive energy in this corner are the colors purple, green, red and gold. also things that remind me of abundance, moving water, moving objects and round leaved plants. Also the #8 is somehow associated with this corner.

Here's the piece I came up with encompassing these things and that i have placed in this corner:



The canvas is a wood block - i trash picked, erm, repurposed, 9 square pieces of wood awhile ago - i thought it might be a bit fortuitous that i took exactly 9 pieces (even though there was a mound of a whole lot more) not knowing what i would do with them.

I put down some purple duck tape and painted over that with purple acrylic paint as the background then collaged bits of paper (8 pieces of two different patterns) and even a piece of monopoly money :)

The "frame" material comes from gauche alchemy - the red matte is from a new kit being released shortly and the gold is punch waste. I adhered them with nails which adds a nice little 3D effect :) There are 4 strips of each, making the frame out of 8 pieces total (get it?).

The sun is a pin i suspended on the ribbon so it can move around if i want it to.

the last entry of the Year in the life of an art journal is DONE! The whole journal is so wonderous to hold. And look at. Whoa, have i been up and down and all around this year! I want to put all 24 entries together in a slideshow for myself at some point, but here are the last page - XYZ and the cover page.





P.S. we will be doing this again in 2010!!!!! But a little different, but pretty much the same. I'll, of course, post more info when it's out there.

i made this card for my friends birthday.
Tried some new things and decided i LOVE this new way of doing image transfers with Omni Gel.
And i love using sheet music as a base.
In fact, this card became the prototype for the other 20 or so holiday cards i've made.

Inside:



Wax paper over the sheet music gives it nice texture and obscurity and makes the paper much more sturdy! Win-Win!

This is for the new Gutter Girlz prompt:

THE PROMPT: I'm Only Fine
THE SONG: It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing by Shania Twain
PRODUCT/TECHNIQUE: Mesh/Gauze




It's FULL of Gauche Alchemy products if anything really intrigues you!
The prompt could be taken so many different ways, but the lyrics from the song are what clicked in my head (even though i still haven't actually heard the song :) )

That awesome photo in the center is from an ACME kit (I believe #2) - it was on an old newspaper magazine about bachelors, I believe.

The cardboard around it is called "Ouchless Cardboard" which i dripped some white paint onto.

The gold strips are called Punchinella and they come in all sorts of different colors and punch designs - i think its "waste" from metallic confetti factories.

Other doodads are from the Wedding Night White Mixed Media Kit, the Green Mixed Media Kit and the Black Mixed Media Kit - these little kits come in EVERY color and are so affordable and SO AWESOME!

And finally the sheet music, ahhhhh the sheet music, that is from a top secret but up and coming gauche kit that i've been using the hell out of recently!!!

i somehow forgot to post this present I made for my dad's birthday!



I started with a box that my new Magic Mouse was shipped in and gesso'd the heck outta it! Then i layered on a couple of different types of text and music and over that put one of my new favorite tools - wax paper with paint. The image over that is a drawing i drew of my dad, like, um, 20ish years ago (thank god my mom kept a scrapbook of her own!) and scanned it into my computer then printed it out and made a packing tape image transfer of it (tutorial to come one of these days).



Around the inside edges of the box i glued down different little pieces from the Gauche Alchemy mixed media kit elements and various pieces of hardware i collected. And i discovered the BEST adhesive i have used yet from the Gauche Alchemy store: Omni-Gel Transfer Medium!




I have yet to use it as a transfer agent, but as an adhesive it ROCKS!!!!! WOW it holds all that on upside down and stuff!



The background matte is made of my other favorite technique - duct tape and acrylic paint



He liked it :)

for Wish Prompt at year in the life of an art journal.

duct tape, paint, my first cut letters from my new cricut!

a couple of art journal pages from the weekend-ish:

page(s) for the november gauche alchemy circle journal. the theme is "vintage feminist"

this really is more of a mod podge collage than i'm used to doing, but i was just curious to see what a bunch of scraps i had looked like all applied to a page.
The journal itself was made from a book who's spine was cut off and pages glued together to be thicker and stronger. In the collage you can still see some of the original page and text shown through.

The bird was in a bag of a bunch of goodies passed from person to person to pick and choose and use. A massive part of the background is a zipper holder, a plastic bag (orange lined) and screen.

There's a lot of text on the page - the upper page has text cut out from a children's story about a little plane learning how to fly in the sky with the beautiful sun. The bottom page, over the woman, is one of my favorite quotes from Howard Thurman about coming alive and following your dreams. I wanted to kind of juxtapose the notion of freedom and growth against the traditional looking woman and the old zipper for sewing. So, there's a loose story going on here :)

Hello, my name is lara, and i'm a font addict.



When hunting for fonts my first stops are usually Font Space or Abstract Fonts. Both let you search by category then sub category then sub category etc to really narrow things down. Font Space has some wicked descriptive categories (tags) since users upload their homemade fonts there and anyone can add a tag:



I mean, how cool is it that if you want to find something with magical butterflies and killer whales all in the same font set you can? (Although there were no gauche tags...hmmm)

Both sites let you type in a couple of custom words and see what they look like in that font. Abstract Fonts has a downloadable catalog but i've noticed it becomes out of date fast since so many new fonts get added so quick.

Another must go to font site specializes in handwriting fonts - Font for Peas. Yup, I'm one of those journallers that HATE my handwriting, although i'm beginning to at least accept it as i have been doing so much art journalling lately. This site has hundreds of REAL handwriting fonts and for a charge you can get your handwriting turned into a font and posted!

Lastly, a site that has saved my butt MANY MANY times in my dayjob is What the Font? You upload a sample of the font you like, or are searching for, and their database gives you matches! And probably 75% of the time i have found the font or something so close to it only a design professional could tell the difference! The only problem with whatthefont i have found, which isn't really a problem *wink wink* is most of the fonts it finds are "foundry fonts" which means you have to pay to use them.

Listen to me ... i could go on for hours about finding fonts. But what do you do when you find them and you're not into digital scrapbooking? Well, i'm sure there are some amazing things out there, but since i don't hold the copyright to them, i'll just show a few from my own gallery, if you don't mind:


Obviously, this is the easiest to do - print an easy to read font out (don't forget to spellcheck :D ), crumple or ink and glue on!



I love the look of sentences cut a part and placed in different angles - adds an extra interest to what's being read, IMHO

As a caveat, I prefer to use laser print outs - that's tonor based. But i also have the luxury of having a laser printer in my office. But tonor isn't water soluable, so if you want to do something with the print that involves water (like some transfers, paint on) you can't use an inkjet who's ink is water based.


Image transfer is pretty easy with packing tape and you don't need to worry about mirror imaging


Lastly, painting over print outs is a easy way to add custom color and make it look "digital." I prefer acrylic paints with lots of water, but water color works well too. If I know i'm going to be painting I use a higher quality paper, one that isn't as pourous as regular office paper. Actually paper made specifically for color copying and laser printers works the best.

So, go and download and create and mix and match! Please leave comments and post to the Gauche Alchemy flickr group any other ways you use fonts - i can't wait to experiment in new and exciting ways!

For this month's Gutter Girlz challenge I did kind of a "lift" of an idea i've been enamored with for awhile now. I have this printed out at work and at home - something about it really feeds my soul:

Inspiration

Actually all her stuff is AWWWW-MAZING and completely INSPIRING!

I like how my "version" turned out - I used different materials and related it to the song prompt.

This month prompts are:

THE PROMPT: My Glass
THE SONG: Thank You by Alanis Morissette
PRODUCT/TECHNIQUE: Newspaper clipping



For the background I tore up bits of newspaper and glued them down with modge podge - didn't be super neat about it so i'd have edges sticking up and stuff. I then went over it with a very light coat of white gesso to obscure the text a little but keep the texture. The fun part was dripping the acrylic paint which i cut with water to make it more drippy - man it was exciting to see the color spread in front of my eyes!

Finally after drying time i got super down and dirty and took paper napkin, dipped it in white gesso and ran it over my hand to cause the reverse print.

Here are some background shots before I gesso'd my hand on:

You can totally see how yummy the texture is - i love this effect! I will definitely be using newspaper and acrylic in the future!

Art journal page for Year in the life of an art journal.

Word is Vicarious

close up:



Duct Tape, Gesso and acrylic Paint.

I've had this photo since 2001, someone sent it to me in gratitude of me sending them a U2-inspired holiday card way back when. Instead of it continuing to gather dust in a box, thought i'd pop it on a journal page so I can see it more often :)




The background of this page was a list i made in NYC when waiting for U2 to either enter or exit the NBC Studios for their SNL gig in September. I was just passing time listing all the ways to stalk a rock star - apparently they don't always work (but sometimes they do). I then covered the list with some used wax paper and did a tape transfer of Bono from a photo I took at the 2nd night at New Jersey's show. The lyrics are from "City of Blinding Lights" which is a song i never cared for whatsoever (hell when they played it at Obama's inaugauration party i was baffled and disappointed) but after seeing their treatment of it during the tour and Bono repeating those lyrics over and over, well i must say it's become a pretty powerful song in my life these days.

my first post for gauche alchemy is up!
no cut and paste - go here to see:

http://gauchealchemy.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/oh-hello/

inspired by the "u for underneath" prompt at A Year in the life of an art journal and my love for colored duct tape and paint and screen and zippers.

and from underneath
the colorless place i have been inhabiting
came a new energy
a renewal of life
i see color,
i dream in color,
i feel color.



In my "art Journal #2" - i found these photos from when i was shining and skinny and healthy and happy - i thought i'd put one on the page since i tend to look at my art journals more these days than shoeboxes of photos :)

More duct tape and some "punch waste" from a gauche alchemy kit.

The future needs a big kiss



...not a fan of the song, but love this line in it. I've been wanting to do something with it since the first U2 show in New York.

Here's this months layout for the gauche alchemy circle journal.
The theme of this one is "vintage bling" and i have to admit i was stumped almost all month! But with the deadline of Nov 1 looming i pulled it together and tried some new techniques. I'm pretty happy with the outcome! And it's something i would normally not do, but it still has me in it :) The size of each page is 8"x 8"



OK, one of the cool things I've discovered is wax paper will adhere to other paper and I've been using sheets of wax paper i've used under and between projects - when glued over the top of something it makes a cool almost beeswaxy but with muted paint effect. For this I put it over a thin children's book page that otherwise tears too easy because it's so old - YAY! It preserves and looks cool!



To add some additional color and texture and lines i adhered some sewing pattern pieces on to the pages too. And then the title is a package tape transfer! Don't ask me the font ... can't remember ;)



The flower is made from ribbon odds and ends, mesh fabric, gold punch waste and vintage buttons. I didn't have any thread so i used wire :)



I super like this page - it's just something different for me. As i said i was having difficulty being inspired by "vintage bling" and i knew i wanted to use the u2 lyric - somehow by great fortune my supervisor at work wanted to show me where all of our archived clip art cd's are (along with print samples) and i saw this CD called "Adobe Image Library - Yesterday's Lifestyles" and went through it and found a couple of kitchsy images mixed in with mostly the scary "nuclear family" images. Four pieces of packaging tape later - and voila! The bitch is on the page!