Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Mad! Notebook

Drumroll once again for our weekly theme!  Where Jessica and I embark upon madness together...

This week's madness concerns notebooks.

I have a lot of notebooks.  Tons of notebooks.  I use them and love them and they are great, but they have a tendency to get a bit jumbled together and I don't know which is which or where I put this one or if that one is at all serviceable anymore...

So, this week I created new covers for some of them.  I've been meaning to do this for some time and finally got around to it.  (And in the process developed some really spectacularly new and awesome and amazing ideas for Notebook Usage, but that's another story.)

This book is for history notes.


Closeup of Napoleon's hat.  He must've lost it during a campaign.


This book is for keeping track of copywork and spelling words and other like sundries.


And this book is for language learning.  Yes, I am a bit odd.


And of course, after I started these, I had to assist in doing three more, one for each of the minions.  But I forgot photos of those.  It shouldn't be possible to be so ridiculously excited about something like spiral-bound notebooks, but we are.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Baby Giraffe start

This last weekend I attended the Tooele Arts Festival.  This was my first year doing it; in the grand scheme of things, I kind of decided to do it last-minute, so my booth did not look as good as I'd wished it had, but it was great nonetheless.  I met some really great people and I got a lot of good inspiration for this upcoming year.

This is one thing I worked on while I was there.

There is a baby giraffe at the zoo.  Her name is Willow and she is wonderful.  I believe she is two months old in the reference I was using.

So far I've used watercolor markers and watercolor crayons; this is on Canson mix media XL paper, which is my favorite paper (so far) to use the markers on.  Lots of work to do still, but I am not displeased with the beginning.  I think it's 11x14.

(sorry for the shadow on the photo)

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Mad! Ajax Tree

This is the series of themes that I do weekly with the wonderful Jessica.

This week's was a funny theme, especially since I wasn't even the one to suggest it.  :D

The Ajax Tree lives in my yard...well, it exists there, at any rate.  You see, back in the day when we didn't have a fence, poor Ajax had to be tied up.  He was usually tied around this tree.  Well, Ajax being a male dog, you can imagine what that poor tree was subjected to...I suspect this, um, treatment is why this beautiful tree ended up dying. :(  It made me sad because it was beautiful and it had gorgeous pink blooms in the spring.

This is what it used to look like.


Here is a rendition of what it looks like currently.  Poor thing.  Drawing this, I couldn't help but think that it looks a bit witchy now.


If a dog can do this to a tree, I'm glad I never had to tie my cats to a tree...

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Mad! Sparta

You know your friend is a good person when they accept themes like this.

...And also when they save your computer from certain destruction when you're so frustrated with your #$%^&* software that if you can't find a sledgehammer you are one step away from going out to buy one.  (Thank you, Jessica!)


Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Mad! Cute!

Okay, so if this post doesn't give you cute overload, *nothing ever will*.  Which would be sad.

So, as is our amazingly long-lived standard, Jessica and I do a theme together each week.  This week couldn't really fail.  It just couldn't.  No way.

This ACEO sat around for a while as a pencil drawing because I loved the drawing so much I was afraid of painting it.  But I did eventually.


Also, must add this...

I am getting ready for the local art fair next week (in theory...).  I bought some frames today for my display.  I asked Scarlett to go over to my ACEO pile and choose three that would go well together.  This is what she chose, lol!  So perfect!  (I really think I'm actually going to do a couple of mama-n-baby horse aceos to replace the top and bottom here to go along with the theme of the middle...haha, I am so weird it's awesome.  Scarlett and I, I think we are related.)