New Chunky Pages

School's out, my classroom is packed and I'm finally free to create!!!!! (Except for the days when the grand kids come to visit :) - the 8-year-old loves to make art journal pages, so he & I play in glue & paint!)More journal pages to come soon along with more collage sheets. I've also got some great pics of the pages my 4th graders made to share, so more to come soon!

New Journal Pages

Wheeewwww! School is almost over - just 6 more days. I don't know who is more excited - the kids or me! We've been working on art journals in our class. Here's a picture of some of the kids. I'll post some of their pages soon. I have some very talented artists in my class!

I've been working on lots of chunky pages for swaps, but have managed to finish 2 journal pages. I'm really enjoying the Zetti style pages. I've just got to figure out a good way to organize all the magazine pieces I'm cutting out! When I figure it out, I'll be sure to post. I'm not the most organized person in the world (alright - I wasn't born with the organization gene at all), but I can't work in complete chaos. I hate spending time digging through the piles on the dining table to find that perfect piece that I just saw a minute ago. I have cleaned the dining table, it's Memorial Day and the kids & grand kids are coming over, so I figured unless I wanted toddler bbq finger prints all over my pages I'd better put things up. So things are a little organized, but I know I need to find a better way. Any one out there with a good solution for sorting and storing all the strips I've cut for boarders, thumb shaped pieces, triangles, and so on? I've got the heads, bodies, arms, legs and accessories all organized in sandwich bags, but all the rest is in a pile in a box. I'll have to give this some thought.

I have the same problem at school. I would post a picture of my desk, but I'm too embarrassed. I've just discovered a new book by Debbie Diller called "Spaces and Places". It's about organizing your classroom so at the end of the year it only takes 1 day to pack everything up so the cleaning crew can wax the floors. It usually takes me 2 weeks. I have too much junk. Debbie suggests working on one area at a time & purging. It's working well at school because I have so many duplicate copies, out-dated stuff, and stuff from when I taught kindergarten years ago. Purging actually feels good! At first I was very reluctant to throw stuff away, so I put extra copies in a box for my students to take home this summer. Believe it or not, so 4th graders still like to play "school" during the summer. I'm also giving a lot of the kindergarten stuff to my daughter who is an assistant director of a preschool. Other stuff has been sent to recycle and some actually ended up in the trash. My father lived through the depression and was a certified hoarder, so it's been hard not to follow in his footsteps. The feeling of being able to find stuff in my classroom outweighs the fear that I am throwing something away that I might need. If I haven't used it in the last year (or 2 or 3 years!) then I really don't need it.

Now, if I can just apply this to my art area. The problem is that in art, everything is usable :) I know, I'm hopeless - hee hee. Seriously though, any solutions to storing all the little bits and pieces, please share.

Chunky Book Pages

The end of school is near & hopefully I'll have more time to make art!!! I have been making chunky pages for swaps on swapbot and atcsforall. Lots of fun - the 4" X 4" page size is quick to complete. The Mother's Day page is more my usual style, sort of vintage and pastel, but I'm really loving the bright colors, inks, paint and wild creatures I'm working with now. Here's some of the pages I've been doing.

Zetti Pages

Even though we had house guests for 9 days, I actually got some work done! I'm beginning to love this style art. I'm mulling over the idea of doing a journal using only one magazine with the idea being to use as much of it as possible. I got this idea as I was digging pieces of magazine pages out of the trash in my classroom as my students began their own art journals. I began showing them the many ways to use what they were viewing as "trash" and one of the kids made the comment that it looked like I was going to use all their trash!

Am I crazy? Probably - but the seed of an idea has been planted. Hummmm - definitely worth thinking over.

Zetti Parts

I've been trying out the Zetti style and created several pages for my journal. After spending hours at the computer and thumbing through magazines to find arms and legs for my art, I decided to stick them on a page & scan them in for others to use. The first arms I did (on the leg page) I cut out completely. On my second attempt, I left them together with a bit of background. I used my paint pen to cover that area (to save ink when printing). Now I can actually find a pair when I want them! I cut out the parts and store them in plastic baggies, so they're ready to go when I want to sit down & create something.

My disclaimer: I collected these pictures from Flickr Creative Commons, magazines and Public Domain pictures as far as I know. If you see something that is copyrighted, please email me so I can remove it. I'm not selling these pages, they are free for you to use in your art, but PLEASE don't sell the images as part of a collage sheet or on CD. I don't own the rights to these pictures and am only using them under Creative Commons. I'd love to see what you create with them. Please email me!

The Tree Page is finally up!

With spring break over and me back with my 4th graders, I've finally got the time to post the lovely tree page. This is the water color picture I did so poorly and went back and rescued it with some acrylic paint, markers and leaves stamped on various green papers. I added a quote from e.e. cummings I picked up at the Quote Garden web site. I thought it turned out rather nice. I didn't do so bad on the second water color forest, so that page will complete the spread with the tree as-is. I can't wait to finish the rest of the pages and bind the whole thing into a book so I can start writing!

Just one and a half weeks until my kiddos start art journals. Our big stakes test here in Arkansas is the week of April 12. After that, we are going to relax and have some fun! Our reading focus for the 4th quarter of school is poetry, so I'm going to incorporate it into our art journals. I'll post some of the kids work here. Every year I'm amazed at the art these guys turn out.

New Journal Pages

I've been taking a journal class on-line and have gotten caught up making pages instead of working on journal entries! The 2 pages were made on sheets of 140 lb. water color paper. I used a mixture of 1/3 school glue, 1/3 matte gel and 1/3 water mixed well to glue the pieces down. Collage pieces are junk mail! I never knew that junk mail could be so cute inside. Lots of the enveloped have security lining and each seems to be a little different. Use lots of the adhesive mixture. Cover the whole page first with a good coat, then start laying pieces down randomly, overlapping edges. Do this quickly without much thought. This part is a lot of fun and very relaxing. A perfect art project for weekday evenings when you're just too tired to do anything that requires a lot of thought! As you lay the pieces down, apply another coat of adhesive over the top of each piece. I'm using a 1" chip brush to do this. Once you've used a brush in this mixture, don't use it in paint again. Even though you clean up with soap and water, the brush is never quite the same again. The hard part is waiting for your pages to dry. I let mine dry overnight before painting them. I choose an inexpensive craft acrylic paint and mixed it with a lot of gloss medium (you can find both in the art section of Hobby Lobby). Both products are kind of pricy, but they go a long way, so it's a good investment. The gloss medium says it keeps the acrylic paint wet longer to allow for blending, but I'm using it as a glaze over the top of the papers. I brushed a thin, almost watercolor looking coat over the whole page. You can immediately wipe some off with a paper towel if you get it heavier than you want. I wanted a translucent effect that toned the papers down, but that didn't completely cover them up. After letting this dry (about an hour) I went back and added the peach color in the same way. My third coat was a little more paint and I just worked around the edge to make a boarder. I'll go back and add some vintage collage images around the edge and do my journal entry in the middle eventually, but right now I want to complete all my pages and bind the journal before I do much writing. I did do a page with a whimsical tree and have written a quote on that page, but for the most part the writing will come later. I'll add the tree tomorrow, so stay tuned for the next entry!