Karen's Muse and Musings

Coming out of the funk

So, have you missed me? I know at least a few blog followers out there have noticed my absence because they have contacted me. Sometime in August, I totally lost any interest in art or blogging. It could have been the heat (which thankfully is now a thing of the past — soon I'll wish it would warm up!) or perhaps just a burnout. I don't know. I'm not sure I'm really out of the funk yet, but I have created a few things this week.

I painted three trees this week. The first two are spooky. As my friend Trinka said, "Yikes! They're creepy."

These ghostly collage/paintings are for Lisa on my OhMyGothic yahoo group as part of our 4"x4" fatbook page swap. I had so much fun painting these trees — imagine that! actually having fun doing art — that I decided to paint another tree, not spooky this time, for Trinka's 4x4 page.

If you follow my blog, you may remember that way back in August I wrote that my next post would be my 400th and I would offer a giveaway to celebrate the occasion. My math was off (that's not surprising) and this is actually my 399th post. So stay tuned. Next post I will offer a piece of my art to one commenter. I will do my best not to wait another two whole months before my next post!

There's Challenge and Then There's Challenging!

So, this week's theme at Sunday Postcard Challenge is Day of the Dead. When I first read the theme, I groaned. This is SO NOT my thing, but I did a little research into Dia de los Muertos and learned about the rich heritage of this special Mexican holiday. It is a day set aside to honor friends and family members who have died. They celebrate with bright colors, sugar skulls, flowers, food and celebration. After studying photos and images online, I tried to meet this challenge with a combination of rubber stamps. Definitely not my usual style, but I learned something and tried to meet the challenge.

The stamps I used are from B-line Designs and Layers of Color.

Sunday Postcard Challenge — Witch

I am so glad I found this challenge. I love the proportions of a postcard, and it's such a fun and relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon. So here she is — my little witch.

(Background is done with Adirondack alcohol inks, rubber stamping and rub-ons, tree is painted by me, images are from my private collection.)

Sunday Postcard — Scary Fairies

I just found this Sunday Postcard challenge a couple of hours ago, and I was totally inspired by this theme. I don't know why this sweet little Paper Whimsy image is scary, but she is. I've used her several times in eerie settings. I cut her wings out of some really cool flocked paper from Paula's Kit Club from last year or maybe 2 years ago. I showed the paper to Warren and said, "Don't you think this would make cool wings?" You should have seen the look on his face!

More Skinny Halloween

Gotta do this quick. It's past time to start cooking supper, so here is the flip side of my Halloween skinny page.

So this is my lighthearted haunted house. The fun part of this is the Photoshop work I did to the house. Before Photoshopping, the house looked like this.

The Skinny on Halloween

So once again it's time to do a skinny book page for the swap on my OhMyGothic group. When we began this swap, we each chose a theme, and Betsy chose Halloween. I am so lucky that it's my turn to create a page for her, and it is actually October! She wanted lighthearted Halloween, so I did my best to accomodate her. The little witch is from a vintage postcard, and using Photoshop I replaced her face with the sweet little face of Nellie (from one of my collage sheets). I used Color Mists from Outside the Margins on pages from an old German textbook for the background, and then I used Distress Inks to grunge it up a bit. Color Mists create a beautiful shimmer that doesn't really show up in the scan.

Just for fun!

I'm participating in a pirate-themed cabinet card swap. Each player alters 7 vintage photographs turning the unwitting subjects in the photos into pirates! This was a delightful adventured, and I thought I'd share a few of mine with you. I wrote a couple of sentences about my imaginary pirates on the back of each card.

Captain Bill Jack, cursed with a terrible sense of direction, spent most of his life sailing round and round trying to locate his buried treasure.

Mary Vane was perfectly happy with her husband being a pirate until she discovered he had a wife in every port. After forcing him to walk the plank, she embarked on her own pirating adventure.

Lady Ladeda grew bored while her husband, the Admiral Ladeda, was away. She forced her household servants to join her as she looted and wreaked havoc on the open seas.

Little is known about the pirate Jean Renault, but it is rumored that he led a double life as a humble schoolteacher by day and pirate by night.

Ghostly Trees

 

Mermaids are done, so I'm back to painting trees. These tags are a little different from the alcohol ink tags I did last week. As I was thinking about Halloween, I remembered the banners I made last year, and how I used pages from old encyclopedias for the background. To learn about the process, read what I wrote last year here. When choosing images from the encyclopedias, I have discovered that poets and musicians make the best ghosts. I wonder why that is.

Mermaids

As promised, here are my mermaid skinny pages for my friend, Cat. I thought I would have them done sooner, but my first set is in the trash ... uh ... I mean the prototype file. I found two poems that inspired these pages, but I had the hardest time finding a way to incorporate the poems until I decided to put the poems in the tails! You can't read the entire poem in the tail, but you can get the idea. Here's the poem that inspired the page above.

Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair
Under the sea,
In a golden curl
With a comb of pearl,
On a throne?
I would be a mermaid fair;
I would sing to myself the whole of the day;
With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair;
And still as I comb I would sing and say,
"Who is it loves me? who loves not me?"
      - Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Mermaid

 

The second one is darker because of this poem:

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
     - William Butler Yeats

Isn't that sad? I love it though. It's been haunting me for days.

You probably recognize the top parts of the mermaids as paintings by John William Waterhouse, an English Pre-Raphaelite painter who lived from 1849 to 1917.

More Spookiness

It's been a busy birthday week around here with grandson Bobby's 2nd and my ##th. (I'll never tell!) Still, I couldn't wait to get back up into my studio and paint some more spooky trees. I've done eight so far, but now I have to pull myself away and do my skinny page for the month. The theme is mermaids which is scary for me — much scarier than these trees — but I've been searching for quotes or poems for inspiration. Hopefully in a day or two, I'll have a couple of mermaid pages to show you.