Art Play Date

My friend Kate came over for an Art play date. I forgot to take pictures while we were working. I ended up showing her a lot of Art Journaling techniques. So I have a few pages to share. It was so much fun for me to find someone who likes mixed media like I do. Kate is ready to dive in and create now. I think we will get together regularly to play.


















This was to show making a painted background, and then add stamping, collage and embellishments.



















This was to show making a background with foam stamps and acrylic paint.


















This was using a napkin as background, some masking tape, soft pastels, using a rub on and stamping.

It was great working in a new clean studio. I now have space for another person to work so it turned out great. I have been busily working on some soul journal pages and will post them in as soon as I feel they are somewhat finished. I haven't worked much in a double spread before and I am finding that I like that more than these single pages. It gives you more room to explore and so forth.

The evolution of a studio

My studio is not as big as many I seen so I really have been concentrating on making good use of the space that I have. I didn't have much to spend on this but I like what I was able to do with what I already had.













This is how it all started. Our local Linens N Things closed and I bought this fixture thinking I could use it to store my stamps. It is the one in the middle. It really didn't work for that so my charming hubby said he could build me something.


















A closeup of the shelf shows you that I found other things to use it for.













Dave made the shelves you see on the wall. I painted them and then organized of all the stamps. The first shelf on the left had wood in front of the stamps and that worked OK for big stamps but not the little ones. The next shelves were made with a piece of Plexiglas in front of the stamps and it worked great. This also shows the new workbench we installed.













The stamp wall continued..













This drawer was a mess. All these jars of Pearl-x and embossing powder were hard to store. I found these wire kitchen drawer organizers and they worked really great. I find you need to look for storage options in different departments.













This is my desk where I sit most of the time. I see that my cork board is a hodge podge again. I guess I need to work on that too!













This is where I store my craft paint and then the clip and store handles all my magazine images. They are sitting on a dresser. I also used the wall to store unused and in process canvasses. The Clip N Store wasn't working for me since I just had too many images. So I broke down my categories and labeled everything. Instead of several sleeves full of female images I now have them grouped into Large faces, medium sized, small images, sporty looking images. I did this with several other categories too. I now have more things hanging there but they are easier to find.













Here is my sewing area. I managed to clear out some areas on the big bookshelf to the left to store some works in progress.

You may wonder how I handled this issue of ephemera. Well I kept the drawers I had been using and I used the ziplog bag organizing system. I used Snack size, sandwich size and quart size.













Here are three of the drawers showing what they look like now. This first one has little bags of all sorts of stuff, like alphabet letters, chipboard embellishments, paper beads and more.














This one has bigger pieces, metal charms and tool, scrabble pieces, and varioius types of tags.













This one has miscellaneous ribbons and yarns. I like this organization and I think it will work fairly well.

After uploading all these pictures I keep thinking a video would have been easier. I still may do one later just as an example of how to organize your craft space.