So last fall I really made an effort to start arting again. Not sure if arting is a word it's being underlined by my spellcheck. I made and effort to make time to do some art. I started watching my old favorite Ustreams. Mixed Media Monday, Inkwell, Inky Obsessions and Journal Artista. And I found some new artists to follow and watch on Ustream or Youtube.
I have really enjoyed using the creative part of my brain again. I used to scrapbook and spent so much time designing my pages that I never got any scrapbook pages done. Now that I do more painting and art journaling, gelli printing I get more scrapbook pages done because I'm not using up all my time figuring out colors making my own embellishments or looking for embellishments that don't exist because I have an idea of what I want. I have actually been completing journal pages and am trying to finish one journal completely. I work out of several journals. They usually start out with left over paint from my gelli plate and other things I have been working on. Or I'm just experimenting with different medium.
This got me thinking most of my art starts out from leftovers. When I'm working or watching a video I will flip through my journals and find starting points for things I want to work on. I'm sure lots of you do that. I started putting my leftovers in a journal after watching Paula, Journal Artista. She would put her excess paint into what she called her leftover journal. So I'm kind of like a left over artist. Everything I create seems to have something leftover in it. There are a few things I start fresh but mostly its from leftovers. Even a lot of my art supplies when I first started painting were from my daughters high school and college art classes. I had taken some drawing classes but had never painted before.
When I started my blog I also created a facebook page called Left Over Artist and thought it would be fun to have a group where people could post there art that was created with leftovers. But since I hadn't really been doing much art it never got going. But now I think I'm going to see if there is any interest and may start posting pictures on that page.
Staying with the theme of left over art. I am going to post some pictures of starter ATC's that I made. Several weeks ago I made my version of a "pocket journal". I got the idea from one of Paula's streams. I have so many gelli prints and was not sure what to do with them. A light bulb went on. I could use those for a pocket journal. So I started my pocket journal which I loved making. I will post another blog on how I made that. But what I found out was. When you make an 8x8 pocket journal pages out of 8 1/2 x 11 gelli prints, you have enough gelli print left over for 2 ATC's.
Pocket letters seem to be very popular now. Dede (Inkewll) started a pocket letter swap. I did not join because I was kind of busy and did not want to commit and then bail. But I also did not know where to start. I have never done any kind of swaps or exchanged happy mail so I was kind of intimidated. So anyway, I was cutting up the paper for my pocket journal and started saving the scraps in 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch pieces.
The last time I was cutting papers there was a pile of small scraps that I was going to throw out. I used those to decorate the cards. And now I have starter ATC's and hopefully wont be intimidated to join the next pocket letter swap.
