My sister-in-law sent me an art piece she created by being inspired by "The Creative Cove" on YouTube.  I loved it and went to her channel to see what she was doing,  And I got hooked.

Her techniques (watercolor, black & white markers, and lines and circles creating patterns around leaves and other nature images) while not original but how she combined them was.  t least to me.

So now, I've spent the last few days creating myown pieces with these techniques and loving how the addition of large black sections, softened by white dots, make my work so interesting!  

​This piece is the second one I made and I'm jut having a good time.  

Several years ago, I decided to paint Christmas cards and send them to friends and family.  

It takes a while to create 50 original paintings so I usually start before Thanksgiving.  This year, each one is created by drawing circles in the shape of a tree and then painting with metallic watercolors in each of the circles.

I haven't decided whether to paint a star at the top but probable will.

Last year, my nephew said "This is the first and only Christmas card I got this year and it's hanging on my fridge!"  

I guess the tradition of sending "real" cards through the mail is winding down as greetings are now send electronically.  Or not at all.  

I have learned over my lifetime, that things that go out of favor always come back.  So I will be one of the people that will cling to my "traditions" and hope, someday, they will come back again.

Happy Thanksgiving and looking forward to Christmas!

I've been making and trading Artists Trading Cards (ATC's) for years.  

I recently joined the Santa Fe Book Arts Group and they have an ATC exchange every month so I thought I would join.  I only have to make 5-6 cards a month so it's not a commitment of a lot of time.  Here's my contribution for December.  I look forward to seeing what other artists send me during the year.

I'm having a great time making these pieces.  This is my second one and I'm working on a third.  I LOVE keeping these weaving on the frame, rather than taking them off and figuring out another way to display them.  Although, I did walk in the park today and found a tree branch that would also work.
  
While I don't knit any more, I still have tons of yarn that I used for Stupendous Stitching so it will be a long time before I exhaust my stash. I find this very soothing.  Working with my hands has always made me happy.   Maybe I SHOULD go back to knitting!
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I've been working on a kot of grid paintings in my journal.  Now, I am working on 4" x 4" tiles that are the same as grids but can be rotated and moved around a lot to different compositions.  I really like this way of creating grids.  Here is my first one.  It's pretty busy so I don't know where my eye is going.  Maybe to just give me a headache!  But it shows the power of black & white.
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I took a free online class from Jessica Ybarra .  It made me interested in weaving.  I have lots of yarns and roving from other experiements I have done in fiber art and the loom was pretty inexpensive so I thought I would give it a try.

I like how it sits on the loom so I'm unsure of what to do next.  If I leave it on the loom, as kind of a frame, I can't make any more unless I buy another loom!  My brother is a wood worker so maybe he can make me a few similar looms.  I don't mind paying since this is like paying for framing of some of my mixed media works.  

I also think I will add more weavings to cover more of the white string (warp?) at the top.  I can say this is very zen.  No pressure.  No pattern.  No idea how it will look in the end.  Just my kind of art-making!

I love making paper.  Sometimes, I make it from pulp and sometimes, I just print, stamp, paint on watercolor or mixed media paper.  But now, I have a LOT of papers!

So how to use all this paper?  I've started to collage these papers into new compositions.  Here's one I did recently.  I machine stitched around the edges to give it a mixed media feel.  Not sure I liked that but will continue to experiment as I continue to collage my papers in the future.

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If you would come to my studio, you would see lots of notebooks, filled with my efforts to mix colors together to make new colors.  I usually do this using "tags" so I can re-arrange a color palette and know what it might look like.

For this exercise, I wanted to know how my colors would contrast with black, since black has always been a color I have struggled with but always liked in the end.

It was also fun to see more colors on the page together in a group.  I tend to sort my paints along the colors of the color wheel because I know that analogous colors always work.  

I have to say, after years of making these "swatches" I rarely go back and visit them but the process, in itself, is training my mind in a way I never imagined.  This process is developing my "intuition" and I think that's what is the underpinning of the advent of AI these days.  If you train your mind (or computer) on lots of information from a variety of sources, then your mind begins to see the world through a different lens.

Hmmm.  Getting too psychological for this Saturday night!

Mindful Stitching is a movement that uses hand stitching to quiet the mind.  At least, that's how I understand it.

I've never been into meditation so I'm sure there is more to this movement but I decided to use a running stitch with 4 different variegated threads to cover a piece of mud cloth.  Of course, I broke all the rules by listening to the radio while I was working instead of stitching in  silence.  I've never been a fan of "getting in touch with your inner self" but will confess to having my palm read a couple of times.  

I have no idea what I will do with this cloth but I can tell you, the process was fun and fulfilling, and I'm all about process! (AND,  I love hand stitching!)