Eccentric Spirit

I’m in such a fabulous mood today! I actually got everything on my to do list done, including getting my new Serendipity Packs listed on Etsy, and uploading a huge backlog of art journal pictures to Flickr.  I’m feeling celebratory, so first of all I am sharing my journal pics with you! Enjoy all the gorgeous eye candy! Ok, some less gorgeous than others, some of these are older entries and I’ve come a long way in the past few months. :) Click on the mosaic to be taken to my Art Journal Pictures set.

Secondly, I am having a giveaway! Seems like there have been loads of giveaways posted to Twitter in the past few days, and I wanted to jump on the bandwagon – giving stuff away is fun! So, the prize is one of my new Serendipity Packs – 25 assorted game cards, playing cards, and flashcards great for your collage and mixed media art. These are the cards I blogged about last week and I am just tickled pink with how they came out – so juicy and full of inspiring randomosity! Hence the name Serendipity Packs. To enter the giveaway, leave a comment here. You can also get yourself a bonus entry either by blogging about the giveaway or tweeting/retweeting about it. Be sure to let me know if you blog about in a comment here, and use my Twitter name – @Eccentric_Betsi – in your tweet. (I can’t count your bonus entry if I don’t know about it!) In fact, you can do both if you like! Limit 3 entries per person. I will draw a name at 10:30pm Eastern Saturday night (January 16, 2010).

I’ve really had a blast the past month or so of blogging, and the past week on Twitter – this is just my little way of saying Thank You to everyone for being such a fabulous network of creative, juicy, awesome people! ♥

Been a while! Busy weekend, plus lots of new site-seeing ’round the web has lead to it getting to be nearly a week since my last post. Hmm, let’s see, what have I been up to? I bought a new chair at Staples; normally I wouldn’t bother mentioning such mundanities but OH my heavens does this chair rock. It’s like an armchair mated with an office chair and gave birth to a cloud. Seriously. But let’s see, what else for news from the land of Betsistudio? Still Twittering like mad, though I still feel totally clueless about some aspects. Oh, and a tremendously fun mail day, yay!

I got an order from Dick Blick, an order from PrettyTape on Etsy, and Lynne Perrella’s “Art Making: Collections & Obsessions” from PaperbackSwap. All on Monday. Woot for excellent mail days! Let’s see, what’s the rundown… a BUNCH of loose Caran D’Ache Neocolor watersoluble crayons. I caved to peer pressure – everyone else is using them! They look like so much FUN in the bazillion blog posts and YouTube videos I’ve seen referencing them. I went with picking out my colors individually, as it seems to be cheaper that way than buying the sets! On a similar note, I saw my friend Ricia using watersoluble oil pastels (with gold acrylic paint instead of water, YUMMY!) at our art retreat back in November, and I finally sprang for ‘em. And last but decidedly not least, I picked up Sharpie Poster Paint pens in three fluorescent colors. Frickin’ awesome. These, along with all the yummy tapes from PrettyTape, are Kelly Kilmer’s influence. :)

And speaking of Kelly, this brings me to the title of my post. I am working hard this year (and have been forever, really) on creating my life, by hand, one piece at a time. So it’s only natural that I signed up for Kelly’s six month journaling workshop, A Life Made by Hand. I’ve been a member for less than a week and I’m loving every single minute. It’s only $50 for now til the end of June, I can’t recommend it enough. We are having SO MUCH FUN. Here is a spread I’ve done using Kelly’s marvelous prompts:

(Click the image to see it bigger on Flickr.) This was a tricky prompt, talking about my gifts – I am learning to be better about recognizing my own talents, but writing about it and sharing it is pushing some new boundries for me!

Just a quick post today, trying to take a day of less computer time. It’s near impossible to drag myself away from my computer completely, but after a day of being fairly thoroughly absorbed in blogs, Twitter, and shopping on Etsy most of yesterday I’m feeling a need to step back a bit. However, I wanted to pop on briefly to share my latest page. This is the end result of the infamous transfer attempt. If you can find the faintest hint of success with my image transfer, I will be mightily impressed! I did manage to do a fairly good job fixing up the New Year’s page, carefully gluing bits of torn page back in place where possible and coloring in with gray gel pen where it wasn’t. I only lost about 6 words in all, and was able to write them back in. As frustrating as the whole transfer fiasco was, I am quite pleased by the end result, transfers or no. LOADS of stickers on this one, I’m in a very sticker place right now – especially Lisa Frank! I’m a little disappointed with the lettering, especially on the right page… it’s a bit hard to read over the tie-dye background. Oh well, practice makes perfect, live and learn, etc. :)

I’m so glad I photographed my Jaded & Frustrated journal page when I did, because I ended up wreaking some serious havoc on it the other night. I was attempting to do an image transfer, something I know full well I don’t really know how to do, and the solvent did basically nothing to the image I was transferring but loosened up the paint on both the page I was working on and the previous one – the New Year’s page. When I tried burnishing the image in an attempt to get better results with the transfer, I ended up “gluing” the pages together with their own paint. Ugh. This is why I should really have a separate journal for art experiments! And it also highlights for me that I need to make a concerted effort to sit myself down and properly LEARN the stuff I want to use in my art but don’t know how. I can’t remember if I made this page right after The Transfer Incident or not, but this is my To Learn list for the year. Click to go to my Flickr stream to see it larger.

P.S. I’ve finally caved in and joined Twitter like all the cool kids! I am @Eccentric_Betsi on there, and if I know what I’m doing (which is somewhat doubtful) this is a link to my profile. Feel free to follow me! :) I’m still figuring it out, to a certain extent, but it looks like fun.

Do you remember in my last post how I mentioned that the little guy in a truck was from one of hundreds of miscellaneous game and playing cards I have that I’ve been thinking of putting into grab bags for my Etsy shop? Well I seem to have underestimated. I spent a few HOURS of my afternoon today collecting them all up and attempting to shuffle them up so they are as randomized as possible for grab bags. The grand total? 2,040. The picture to the left shows them sorted into stacks of 100. Yeesh… now to figure out how to price them, how to photograph them, what size grab bags to do… I can’t decide if 100 is too many. Maybe more than one size of card grab bag? Like, say… 20, 45, or 100. I’ve been round and round on these subjects for months now, which is why they are still not listed. It’s kind of driving me crazy because I think these are such a cool idea – the fun of looking through a random handful of them, seeing what ideas it sparks, it’s like Muse Wake-Up Juice. Hmm. I suspect this is one of those cases where I’m just being ridiculously indecisive and I should just make a choice and go with it. I’m very open to suggestions though! Feel free to tell me what you think.

While I’m on the subject of studio pictures, I know I’ve been promising to share more of my big nesting project, so while I had the camera out I took a picture of the jungle – er, my workspace that is. The walls look very festive, look at those. Ignore the chaos going on on the tables (and let’s not even TALK about underneath!) while I try to wade though piles of stuff I’ve been meaning to list in my shop for ages. One of my goals for the year is to step things up with my shop, so I am trying to focus a chunk of my energy there. I listed a couple new things this afternoon, watch faces and keys I’d had all

packaged and photographed for a few months now. I wish I’d done it sooner, but thonestly it’s not as if I had the time. And wishing things were different doesn’t change anything, only acting on that desire does! On that note, I think I’ll attempt to make tomorrow even more of an Etsy Day and list the rest of the stuff I have packaged and photographed already. And hopefully sort things out with these darn cards! After that, on to sorting out game piece grab bags!

Today I have two VERY different New Year’s journal entries to share. I like them both quite a lot, but they have such different moods to them! The first page is the beginning of the book I made in Kelly Kilmer’s Kawaii Book class at Ink About It. I did the whole page on December 30, most of it in class but the journaling and a few details were added after I got home that evening. I love, love, LOVE this book and I can’t wait to do more in it. I want to finish the altered book I’ve been working in for the past several months first though. Not sure if I will, I may just end up with multiple books going at once. That’s kind of already the case anyhow, given that I have my Strategic Planner in the works. I need to share that soon too! :)

I had SO much fun making this book, and the page came together surprisingly easily. Kelly gave out a piece of tape that said “Happy New Year” to everyone in class, and the colors matched my background really nicely. I cut out the little man in his truck from one of many, many letfover game cards. (I added the rainbow star on the hubcap though – Lisa Frank stickers FTW!) I end up with bits and pieces of lots of different games from my Etsy listings. I have seriously HUNDREDS of random cards that I’m hoping to break into grabbags to put in my shop soon. The randomness of them is pretty cool, they make awesome journal fodder. I’m definitely keeping a few for myself, though! :)

Clicking on either photo will let you view them in closer detail.

As for the second New Year’s page, I found myself in a wicked bad funk as the clocks ticked over into 2010. [Oops! New England-ism alert! Wicked = very.] I was feeling overwhelmed by all the other journal artists out there, and found myself wondering why I was even bothering to try and share what I have to offer. I have to admit, this was partly prompted by the new issue of Art Journaling magazine I picked up at Barnes & Noble. It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but I have to say I was kind of disappointed with it. I mean, I didn’t dislike it exactly; there’s a lot of great stuff to look at and it was an enjoyable read, but I have to say I was sort of expecting more How To type articles. Ah well, to each her own. Anyhow, I was all cranky and, well, jaded and frustrated. So over the few hours around about the time 2009 turned into 2010, I put this together. It’s kind of ironic, but I really like how it came out! The background is brayered – many, many layers! It took quite a few tries to get the color combo I was going for to evoke both my mood and the windy, snowy weather outside that seemed to echo it. I added some star punchinella stencilling, which blurred a lot but it worked well that way. I stamped a cityscape with a stamp I picked up at Ink About It, but it’s a bit subtle. I scribbled sort of an aurora borealis emphasis with silver paint marker. At Christmas I got some snowflake stickers in my stocking, and they matched my color scheme quite well. I used a couple of those (yes, I’m on a sticker kick!) and drew in a bunch more with gel pen. The headline is rub on letters of various origins and the journaling is my good ole DecoColors.

Hope everyone is enjoying the New Year – I know January 3rd is a bit late for New Year journal pages but I’m a bit slow to blog without my own laptop – still! Hopefully this afternoon, we’ll have to see how the roads look. Stupid snow. At least it waited until after my workshops with Kelly! :D

Hello friends – long time no post… ok, that feels completely silly to say on a blog I’ve had for less than a month, but I was SO enjoying posting fairly regularly and then Christmas came and I didn’t have time for a few days. I was chomping at the bit to post when I got home, only to get a message saying “Warning, 3% battery power left” on my laptop after watching too many YouTube vids. “Yikes,” I think,  “Better go get the power cord out of my overnight bag!” …which, of course, was the point at which I realized my laptop cord somehow got left at my aunt’s house, three hours away. I’ve been trying to coordinate family members to get it back home to me ever since, and borrowing my boyfriend’s completely unfamiliar laptop in the meantime. MUCH better than no computer, but still a hassle – no photo editing software on here, or any of my music or pictures or my news reader! I had hoped to get my cord back tonight, but no such luck, thanks to the icetastic weather. Maybe by the weekend.

In the meantime, I wanted to post that I had a fabulous time at Kelly Kilmer‘s classes at Ink About It in Westford. I tried some fun new things, hung out with some fabulous art ladies, and made a book from scratch – a new adventure for me!

I will try to post some pictures of the results in the next few days, but for I’m going to share a picture of my studio nesting project. Things have progressed a bit since I took this, and there are plenty of other bits to show you, but I’m struggling to upload any pictures at all while working on an unfamiliar machine. If you want more details you can check it out in my Flickr photostream. Hope you enjoy the little studio peek – more actual art coming soon, I hope!

I haven’t really completed any art in the past few days, but I made two backgrounds in my altered book journal that I really like, so I thought I’d share them with you.

First is a sort of pink-ish text background. First I stuck some hole reinforcers (you know, those little donut shaped sticker thingies?) in random lines on the pages. Then I tore up a zillion different bits of text pages and glued them down. This took FOREVER. At least, where forever is defined as the length of the pilot of Star Trek Voyager, which I put on to keep myself amused. So, like, and hour and a half. Anyhow. Next I used the weirdest color combo I’ve ever tried – a nice bright pink, somewhere between carnation and fuchsia and… beige! I am SO not a beige person. (Don’t believe me, check out the pics in my About page.) But it actually works surprisingly well, especially with the addition of a small amount of white gesso. It gave it a cool grungy sort of look, that whole shabby chic thing.

The other background I made I made in about five minutes, after getting inspired to play with my brayer after watching the beginning of this awesome new art journal vid:

I saw it linked from the photo of the finished journal page on Flickr, and now I am totally following chlorofluoro’s blog. Yes, I am an art blog addict, don’t try and stop me. I’m not sure if the photo does this page justice, the colors are amazingly, eyepoppingly bright – almost neon. I’m madly in love with this page; I told my boyfriend I’m going to run away to Vegas to marry my brayer. He told me to have fun. (True bliss is having a boyfriend who understands the need to run away and marry your brayer.)

To see more details on either of these backgrounds, you can click on them, and it will bring it up in a new page, and if you click on it again you will see a big version. You’ll probably get a magnifying glass cursor so you can click on it AGAIN for mega-details! (Yes, my colorful one has old to-do lists under the paint!)

P.S. Yes, I know I said there would be no post today, but thanks to what the greater DC area is calling “Snowpacalypse” and us folks up in New England are calling “December” my family wasn’t able to make it out to my house today. Oh, and I really do promise to share some studio pics soon, I’ve been hanging so much wacky fun stuff on the walls it looks like the artist equivilant of a TGI Friday’s in here!

Hey everyone, nothing much to share from me today, but I wanted to pass along that Lani Kent of Healing Expressions is offering a lovely giveaway – two, actually! Two names will be drawn on Christmas Day for the two lovely gift sets shown here. All you have to do is leave a comment on that entry (linked above) with your contact info. There is also a truly beautiful “virtual open house” series of pics in that same post. If my name is drawn, I really hope I get the first one – I just adore that “Embrace the Journey” ornament and as you guys know I’m in a super nest-y mood! I would love more inspiring art for my walls, and the message really speaks to me.

I’ve been cleaning and organizing and decorating like mad. I guess the Christmas season brought it out in me, it may have started with setting up a wreath and some lights for a small family gathering last weekend. My boyfriend and I had my mom and two siblings to visit and wrap Christmas presents as part of my plan to my Christmas less stressful from now on. Too often in our family people end up staying up til 2am wrapping gifts and then are crabby and tired the next day. The party was bittersweet, as my father’s memorial service was the day before. He got sick in early November and things progressed very quickly; he had surgery on the 24th but they were unable to stop the bleeding. Needless to say, it’s been a difficult holiday season for us all. The service last weekend was very healing for me though, and I’m working through my grief as best I can. It’s been quite the reminder that life can be so short. At 27, I am about half the age my father was when he died – and nearly twice the age my dear cousin was when he died close to twenty years ago. I’m sorry to sound so dark and morbid, but this thought has occurred to me many, many times over the past few weeks and in a strange way it’s a very encouraging one; one that encourages me to live my life because it can be so short. Even the longest life will go by quickly, so I’d better get moving and do the things I keep meaning to do. Maybe that’s part of my nesting mood too – I’ve been meaning to decorate and make my apartment homey for years now, but never got to it. But now I have an pair of fairy wings from a few Halloween ago staple-gunned to my wall, the collaborative watercolor piece from last year’s art retreat FINALLY hung up over my whiteboard, and today I even got out hammer and nails to create a happy little halo of white Christmas lights around the studio. They are never coming down!

Gosh, I thought I didn’t have much to share, but I guess I just meant I didn’t have much ART to share today. Sometime soon I’m going to go through my art journal (my first, which I started in September – did I mention that already in a previous post? I forget.) and take a bunch of pictures so I have stuff to share even on days I have nothing new finished. I will also try to take some studio pictures, to show you more of all this nesting I’m talking about. Probably no post tomorrow though, my family is coming over for a second round of wrapping! Next year, I hope to get it done in one day, but it’s been an unusual holiday season to say the least. Today I would like to leave you with a lovely video from the wise and wonderful willowing – yes, I figured out how to do it without crashing my computer! (I hope!) She shares some powerful insights about the concept of “being here now” – something that I feel is very important for me; in general, and especially during the holiday season, AND especially with what’s on my mind about life being short, and how I need to really LIVE my life, savour every moment.

Today’s picture is of the journal spread I made today, which I made as a way to work through the mental process of figuring out the theme for my 2010 Strategic Planner. (If you click on the image, you’ll be able to see a bigger version with more details in my Flickr stream.) I bought Lisa Sonora Beam’s book “The Creative Entrepreneur” right after Christmas last year (one of those “Dang, Santa didn’t get me that one!” moments). I worked with the journaling prompts last January and made some important discoveries about my personal values and goals, but somewhere along the way I lost momentum. I’ve been back at it in a sort of haphazard way the past few weeks and was just thinking that with a new year coming up it was a good time to work on making a Strategic Planner when lo and behold, she started blogging about that very subject. I’m terribly grateful that she’s sharing advice on the subject and even her own personal notes on her goals for next year. It really got the juices flowing so I could figure some things out.

So many materials went into this spread, it’s definitely one of the more noticeably MIXED mixed media pieces I’ve done lately. The background is three or four colors of blue and green craft acrylics smooshed around with a funky little foam… thing. I have no idea how to describe it; I bought it at a dollar store ages ago because it looked like it would be fun to paint with – I think it was supposed to be some sort of soap latherer bath type thingamie. Basically it looks like what happens when craft foam and Koosh balls mate. (Am I the only person who remembers Koosh balls? They were THE thing for about five minutes when I was in school.)

Umm, anyhow, now that I’ve spent a whole paragraph on the first layer, let’s see… the left page is written with a large black magic marker and a white paint marker. I added various rubber/acrylic stamps with my Staz-On inkpads. The compass and map get a TON of use in my journal, I spent a lot of my time feeling very lost. I just unearthed my knot stamp in my marathon of studio cleaning over the past couple days, and it made a nice border next to the spine. On the right page I did a little journaling about what I want to accomplish and what the unifying theme there is. I was delighted to find that my purple ballpoint wrote just fine on the dried acrylic. As I wrote, it came to me: BLOSSOM. That’s my theme for 2010. So I drew a blossoming flower with Gel FX crayons, gel pens, and my beloved paint markers. I was very pleased with the result, I rarely draw because I usually don’t like the results. Finally, I added the rose sticker in the corner, some notes in black paint marker, a bit of paper doily, and the word “blossom” that I printed on some specialty paper.

“Blossom” for me encompasses my desires for growth, independence, exploration, healing and weeding-out in 2010. My goals include getting my driver’s license, losing weight, increasing my income, and de-stuff-ifying my house.