Karen's Muse and Musings

Stone Angels

If you follow my blog, you probably know how much I love stone angels. So, when I had free choice of subject matter for my friend Debby's skinny pages, I gladly chose angels.

Our skinny pages are 4" x 8", and I find these proportions very easy to work with.

This round robin has been a long one, beginning in January 2010 and ending April 2011. Now that it's coming to a close, I have mixed feelings. I'm sad it's almost over, but I'm elated that soon my entire book will be complete, filled with artwork from my 15 friends who participated along with me. I'm also excited that in a couple of months I will be able to share all of the wonderful art within my book with you.

A Heart Leaping with Joy

I'm not exactly sure my heart is leaping, but I am feeling very grateful. I'm grateful for a truly delightful Thanksgiving Day here at my house with 13 in attendance. I'm grateful that the holiday is now over, and I am taking a break from all the cleaning and cooking I did in preparation. Since I now have some time to breathe, I have been catching up on art projects, including this skinny page for Leslie in the OhMyGothic group. Her preference for her pages is shades of white and neutral with splashes of color. As usual, I created the first page as the front, but after completing the second side, I liked it best. The second side is above, and if you look closely, you can read the little words "heart leaping with joy." The first side is below. Now I can't decide which I like best. I'll let Leslie decide which is the front and which is the back.

Christmas House Ornament

Even though it's a dark, gloomy, rainy day here, I borrowed my husband's camera (much better than mine!) and managed to get some better photos of the project I showed you last night. I used a house-shaped box to make a Christmas ornament.

I'm putting one of those little battery-operated tealights inside to glow through the vellum window.

To see another project in which I used one of these boxes, click here.

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.)

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.

Another project done!

My friend Kathy is sponsoring a fall banner swap, using fabric and spelling out the word W-E-L-C-O-M-E. I have the O, and  I decided to use a pumpkin to represent the O. I can't wait to see what the other players come up, and I look forward to receiving all the letters so I can hang up my banner.

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.