This is my Wonky House - I've also used the "smoke" and the sky as a background for a quote banner.
What went right this year - - the truth is a lot of things went right. My accomplishments weren't as they might have been in the past, but they are turning out to be more and more remarkable as this year comes to a close.
Here is a look at one of my recent - and very happy - "What went right."
I have been participating in Creative Every Day with Leah Piken Kolidas and her Art Every Day in November for the past five years. I have always loved it, but something was different this year.
I was on fire for new techniques and stretching myself and my abilities and out of the blue I found a deeper level to myself and my art. Mixed Media, Functional Art, More Book-Word-Love Art, naturally tons of photography and photo editing, and let's not forget I even practiced sketching eyes and working with paper mache.
I usually feel like I'm not quite up to par with art every day month but suddenly, in 2013, I felt on steady footing.
I've included some images here for you to see.
These are my first book sculptures. I'm officially in love with the process.
There are really many other things
that went right. I am sure I will
share more throughout the month,
but this is what immediately popped
into my mind.
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Check out the prompt today for the specific wording and ways to connect by visiting KatMcNally.com.
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Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at a First Friday soon, when it is warmer than it was in December!, in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
Notice, too, the rag rug pieces waiting to be completed and several mixed media works in progress. :~)
I'm not exactly sure what has made me resist writing these last two days for AEDM2013. I plan to do a wrap up post tomorrow and then rush right into posting for the Creative Every Day challenge.
Today I worked on functional art. Very very practical and for organization sake, I painted a simple shelf my friend, Stacy, gave me at a great price - free. I can always use places to put my stuff so I can see it, so I took the shelf and painted it a Winter Grey and then added some ballet slipper pink as well, speckles (and in some cases more than speckles - ooops!)
I stacked up the majority of my fabrics including a lot of vintage 70's as well as linens which I have been using for rag rugs and as accents on other pieces. I have a tendency to forget what I have. I find myself at a rummage sale or estate sale - where I purchase most of my fabrics, especially vintage - and I can't remember what I have on hand.
I figure this will help me a lot.
On the top of the shelf is a piece of iron from a building built in 1912 very close to my home that is getting demolished. I've been poking amidst the salvage (yes, you will see some other art there, too, that I actually create!) I have no idea what this piece of iron was, but it intrigues me and deserves to be out and admired.
Also on top are my book sculptures which people have been enjoying a lot. Yesterday I worked on an abstract and decided to do a series of abstracts inspired by the writers of Concord, Massachusetts. This first abstract (no photo yet) is named Louisa and Henry and Laurie and Jo. Little Women might catch the reference: Jo is Louisa and Laurie is reported to be none other than Henry David Thoreau.
Come back tomorrow for the wrap up... or at the latest, Monday. I must get over my resistance! This has been such a fruitful month with so many great people I've come to know - I want to be sure to memorialize it!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I found it more fun to fold from the front and back and work my way to the center of the book. I also discovered that as your sculptures get more complex, there is a reason for starting in the middle.
The only tradition for Thanksgiving in my family is that there is no tradition. Emma says she hates it, Samuel doesn’t like for his routine to be broken. Katherine is three-thousand miles away, playing in the snow. What is, at its heart, my favorite holiday, sits like stale pumpkin pie shoved into the back of my pantry.
Unnoticed and definitely unappreciated, plus it is perpetually non-activated.
Emma and I have started planning for next year: we will finally host a Sunday before Thanksgiving feast with friends (who are like family) and do a turkey, a ham – all the fixings and actually celebrate traditionally. If I get my way, the word “Gratitude” will even get thrown about and I may gather everyone to do some Kum Bay Ya style bonding.
It is long overdue. Well, in my opinion it is long overdue.
For now, though, it is another Thanksgiving watching Hallmark Christmas movies and though we have yet to eat dinner, the kids are pushing for Denny’s since it is what we did last year and if we can’t have a conventional Thanksgiving, let’s go as weird as possible.
In the meanwhile, I have been folding books.
I have seen folded books and I have started – and never finished – folding other books.
I saw an idea for folded book mobiles on the Re_Creative blog last night and that was all I needed to go from a complete lump in front of the television set – yes, more Hallmark channel – to a paperback novel folding lump in front of the television set.
I made two different styles of mobile - both very simple: a tube and what I swear looks like a dreidel!
Here is the beginning of the result.
I also sprayed the almost-mobiles with ink and spray paint.
When preparing to spray them, I decided to use an upcycled thrift store canvas I am collaging on as a “protective tray” so now it has some paint and some dye layered on its whiteness as well. I really like how it is looking, too, and perhaps in tomorrow’s edition of Art Every Day Month you will see it more clearly.
For now, enjoy my work in progress almost-mobiles and now that your tummies have consumed lots of turkey, etc, I think I’ll go get my more than once annually Grand Slam at Denny’s. I might even go crazy and “Slam it up!”
Oh, one more thing.
As for the title of this post, when Emma was little we were sitting around telling knock-knock jokes. This is an actual Jordan Family "whenever we rarely got together in the past" tradition. She didn't want to be left out, so she joined in with the hilarious joke,
"Knock-Knock" followed by a curious "Who's there?" from the adults and older kids assembled.
Young, bright eyed Emma said with all the four-year-old-not-quite-knowing-how-to-craft-humor-yet said, "Pizza on thanksgiving!" so it has become a family legend which will undoubtedly be told at family events which I plan to host and/or attend on a regular basis.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
This is yet another version than you will see in the collage below. It may, in fact, be my favorite. Which one speaks to you the most?
One of the lessons from Art Every Day Month I have learned this year is to look at my creations in different ways. I’ve been focusing on finishing and recycling my art projects as well.
I tend to do one of two things: start and not finish and stockpile unfinished gems OR finish gems and put them in a pile of finished yet unappreciated work.
I am in the middle of a mixed media work right now and I am not sure which direction it wants to be taken so instead of just setting it aside completely, I thought about what I might create with what I had.
1.Take photos of sections of the work of art, like cutting your work into pieces of cake.
2.Choose the “piece of cake" that tastes yummiest to you.
3. Playfully experiment with photo editing to consider and discover the many ways that particular art could become other art or serve other purposes both for you and also new products to bring to your art market.
In these examples, you will see how the same slice of my collage has been given three different makeovers.
I used pixlr. com, a very simple photo editing website, to revise my images. Each different one took literally less than a minute.
Once I had the main image the way I wanted it, the others were simply different filters. That's it.
Look at the variety of moods just from changing the filters:
I see the top image as the most conventional. It is romantic, feminine and probably the most favorable to conventional viewers.
The second image is using a newspaper style.
I wasn't wild about it at first and used it mostly to show contrast, but now that I look at it longer I see how well it would work under some circumstances.
It seems bleaker to me, more nebulous.
I can't see the clothing pattern as clearly so it seems more like mush that something creative. The dancer in the front looks sad, lonely, perhaps a bit lost.
There are some who may get the most excited from this particular image.
Do you see all the possibilities?
I like to think of the bottom image as perhaps the most interesting. I feel dizzy when I look at it, not unlike when I took dance lessons as a little girl and spun around before I learned how to eliminate that by strategic focus.
I also appreciate the more intense colors along with that dizzyness.
Looking at the complete ladder of images I also see how I could photo edit further by numbering each of the images - yes, actually adding a numeral - and some words right over each image.
I have heard wonderful reviews of PicMonkey but I have yet to use it. This weekend that is one of my goals. To check out PicMonkey and perhaps to begin using it.
Pixlr is so simple, I hope PicMonkey can match it. I used to use Picnik, which I heard is a lot like PicMonkey: another encouraging fact.
Between my use of instagram and pixlr and mixing them up together, I could play with images and create both digital art as well as 2D and 3D art probably all day long.
I know eventually a poem or an essay would come alongside me and slap me on the face to get my attention.... words are not ready to take "the mistress" position in my life. *Happy Smiles*
What simple image editing program do you most frequently use?
How could using one image in different ways spark your creativity both in your "play" and in your blogging and life work?
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
The background is actually more pink than this, but the photo was taken in the early morning light under a tree, so it didn't pick it up very well.
This year of Art Every Day Month has been my favorite yet. I have incorporated new skills, adapted old ones, and stretched far beyond the artist I once was. I had a surgery in the midst of it and I kept going.
Because of the new techniques I am learning I have re-ignited my bug to take photos of unusual sights and very normal sights in different ways. This makes me more happy than I can say with words.
Today's work is perhaps my favorite mixed media work yet. It is small, 5 inches by 5 inches, on a tile that once had a cheapo reprint of Monet's Waterlilies. It was sold at a big box store and landed at my local thrift store where I picked it up for 45 cents.
I started with color - pink and light green and she grew from there. I used a variety of materials: lace, acrylic paint, photo transfer on tissue paper, spray dye, several pages from an old dictionary and a 1930's textbook. I even took a print of a fallen leaf from my beloved magnolia tree AND just to out do myself, tried out one of my new stencils. The pink had taken over most of the color, so I wanted to put in more green. The stencil painting took care of that "need". The photo transfer is a selfie I took in 2009 toward the end of Art Every Day Month. It is still one of my Google ID photos.
Yes, I took selfies long before they were such a big thing and before their name was the word of the year!
I tend to tell myself its not important if I like what I make or not.
Well, this time I am deeply in love with what I created.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I thought for certain I had posted these images someplace - I think I actually did, on instagram in some form. I posted them on flickr but somehow I didn't get them here.
The good thing is even though I am behind in posting, I have been creating even in the tiniest ways and isn't that what art every day month is about?
I took photos before surgery:
This is my pre-op view from the head of my bed at the San Joaquin Outpatient Surgery Center, where I received great care, by the way.
I edited images after surgery (two old works - a black and white film photo of me overlaid with a mixed media abstract self portrait.) I loved playing around with these and look forward to doing more.
Multi-layered with meaning mixed media piece titled, for now, Boom Boom Boom Take 3
I am pleased to report I am healing well.
Tonight I plan to see a play and tomorrow I am actually going to facilitate a workshop. I don't think I am pushing too hard as long as I stay gentle and conscious in each moment.
Right now I am sitting on the recliner with my laptop, smelling the fire in my fireplace and listening to it crackle. I am not rushing, I am not dawdling.
I had a great a-ha today, too, and hope to learn more origami via videos today.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
This is how I've wanted my photo layering to look for eons!
Something very exciting happened!!
After many attempts to get some of my photos layered in the way I like them to be or inserted into collages or mixed media pieces, I finally found a method that gives me the effect I want. I literally wanted to jump up and down and have a big hug fest with Virginia Woolf, her sisters and TS Elliot but I thought since they are all long dead that wouldn’t work out.
Here is the stalled mixed media piece I’ve been working on, wondering why TS Elliot of all people would be the “star” of one of my works. I started this in July, I believe – it was a long time ago. The layers of paints tell me. The color of the deepest layer is “Oildale building” or something like that. I know it has Oildale in the title.
Here is a close up. I love how the words "writing" and "blood" show up clearly. Those are from one of T.S. Elliot's writings.
It was one of the recycled paints I got for free last summer. At last point they were specializing in not such wonderful shades of… primarily beige.
Anyway – now that I was able to try the trick of printing on tissue paper and then affixing the tissue paper with mod podge (I’m also going to experience with some other mediums as well) I can’t believe the perfection in the result.
I edited this photo first, I cranked up the contrast which I think will help a lot with black and white photos. I love the crispness and the simultaneously gritty effect it has.
I made progress on several other pieces, but this was by far the most exciting in probably about a week. Today I plan to add a photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay and perhaps a shot of Steepletop, her estate in Upstate New York which I visited last April.
Thank you for reading! I can’t wait to celebrate with you!
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I keep remembering Babe Ruth: most homeruns and most strike outs, right?
I am waving my weekend white flag.
I am surrendering to all the artful attempts and non-successes over the weekend. As Scarlett said, tomorrow is a new day. I did manage to get some more visuals done for the Inspiration for Your Blogging series. That is such a breeze for me… it almost doesn’t feel like I can call it my “Art Every Day Month project” but the smarter me says it does fit.
I am also practicing making eyes for a special secret project I’m working on.
I practice sketching eyes each day and I get better: practice is a very good thing.
Some of the AEDMers are inspiring me with that! (The eyes I mean - plus I am learning to appreciate youtube tutorials a lot. After all, without youtube, I wouldn't have my lovely origami pieces, either.
I have a lot of plans for this week, but once again I am open to wherever the muse chooses to take me. Among those plans are a surgery Wednesday to fix my scar from last year's surgery. Its incredible how much "belief residue" it is bringing up. Being conscious it is just old icky stuff helps a lot.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
Watch this blog for more creativity (and inspiration for you) from these images & quotes.
We are smack dab in the middle of Art Every Day Month and y'all, I am tired. Seriously tired, wiped out, there are so many cool things I want to do but the thought of lifting my finger to create anything - even this silly blog post - feels beyond my means right now.
For quite a long time tonight I watched mixed-media artist's doing their thing and salivating over their supplies but while fun and future driven, it doesn't do anything for my art right this moment.
I just took the last half hour to do something about it. Tonight I am sharing two images I just made for upcoming "Inspiration for Your Blogging, Writing and Creativity" posts.
Here is basically how I did it:
This was from one of my first ever watercolor paintings called "Boom Boom Boom" - I have had several people interested in buying the final mixed media piece, but for now I am using it to repurpose old art into new.
I searched my Flickr photos for watercolor paintings I have done in the past and selected a couple I thought had promise as backgrounds. I put them into the pixlr.com photo editor. First, I cropped - I only wanted certain pieces of the images to appear.
On the quote that is by me - see my signature there? I wrote it, I painted it - it is mine... you are looking at the lower half of an abstract watercolor painting I created in 2008. You know I have been all into repurposing and upcycling? Well, here I go again!
I've also noticed, by the way, one of my very popular pins on pinterest is one in this series and the background is a slice of a recent mixed media piece. Well, the image does something or it is all Abigail Adams words doing something - what I do know it is working so I am testing to see how these work on replicating that success.
Another popular pin is one of my own quotes on a simple altered photo of clouds I took who knows when.
I really enjoy playing with images - and I don't linger over them at all.
It is more zip - zap - zoodle dee dee - and I'm done.
These images took me about 15 minutes from start to finish.
Feel free to ask me questions if this concept is new to you. I didn't think I could EVER figure this stuff out but hey, I have, and while I know there may be better or different programs, for now I'm content with Pixlr.com and my own photography and painting.
Oh, yes. It is Friday. This means over the weekend I can get myself dirty and covered with stuff as I begin making backgrounds, etc, for next week's art every day month posts.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
Last Spring, my son Samuel waited patiently while I snapped a series of photos similar to this one: that was when my shopping cart love affair began in earnest.
I can’t remember exactly when I noticed it, but sometime last Spring I noticed an empty lot on the road to my daughter’s high school – which was adjacent to an old, rundown neighborhood and the county hospital. This empty lot faced a carneceria and.. a "tobacco and discount store. The second store was a bright green color, almost matching one of the visiting shopping carts.
Maybe that is what opened my eyes to this particular subject and art form.
This is a Dollar General Shopping Cart. I like how it looks near this particular tobacco and discount store.
Not many people would think of it as an art form, but I saw it both as beautiful and a study in community cohesion and also perhaps a game someone who appreciates order was playing while the other neighbors saw the utilitarian nature of the enterprise.
I started calling the vacant lot “The Shopping Cart Lending Library” because some days it would have more shopping carts than other days. The first day I went there I got close up to the carts, noticed the trash in them, the broken mirror on the ground one of the carts rested atop.
One day I noticed all the carts were organized by color.
I had a rule, in these photos I would not rearrange the carts, I would only rearrange myself as I clicked my camera to get different perspectives.
I drove by the corner again today - my daughter transfered to a different school - and the lot was empty except for the expected trash. There were no shopping carts in sight.
After I found the shopping cart library last Spring, I started noticing abandoned shopping carts.
I started to hear their story.
A rare sight: an abandoned shopping cart in the northwest. In a vacant lot, naturally and oh, so Bakersfield to be from The Tractor Supply Store.
Here in Bakersfield I found them downtown and on the East side of town, perhaps because this is where I spent the most time. I also noticed they did not appear in the Northwest, which my son calls “Casper-land because it is so white!” and more uniformly affluent.
I realized many people in my town didn’t know about the shopping cart lending library or its cousins, the shopping cart collections at highly frequented bus stops that neighborhoods shared as they got off and on the bus.
I saw abandoned shopping carts as a sign of cooperation or a sign of apathy or perhaps a little of both.
Until the night before last, I only photographed my shopping carts incognito, but when I stopped downtown Tuesday night, I couldn’t help but notice the most eccentric shopping cart yet. I was almost angry when the owner showed up, I thought the photo op was gone but it was simply too good to pass up.
“Hey,” I said to the glasses wearing man with the ‘CAT’ short for the agricultural caterpillar tractor, “I love your set up!”
This is John, the Sculptor and my new friend with his work of art.
He smiled wider than I could have imagined, showing his lack of teeth. I smiled back when he said, “Why thank you! I was on the news the other night, did you see it?” I explained this was the first time for me and he immediately pulled the greatest attraction – a mannequin head and a teddy bear– off the rolling sculpture and posed with it.
“Can you put it back?” I asked “That was what attracted me the most at first.”
He told me his name was John and he was quite congenial. He posed for me in several shots and laughed and we talked and I snapped a few more photos and he confessed, “I’m not even homeless! I live at the Decatur!” He showed me his room key.
“That’s great – you stay there at the Decatur! It’s an ok place!” I reassured him. It is a welfare hotel but it does provide him warmth, protection and a consistent shower.
He told me he took odd jobs sometimes and basically was one of the happiest people I have seen all week.
I suppose artists usually are the most happy and sometimes the most miserable people I encounter.
I had no money to pay John for the photo, but I forgot about it as we both just lived the moment fully.
I have thought of taking photos of people with their shopping carts, but I wanted to bring along payment in food and small bills. John and my friend, Kimberly taught me there are many kinds of currency. A conversation and a smiling face is one kind of currency that is never emptied from my pockets.
Like the shopping carts scattered around less affluent neighborhoods which I have taken to documenting, people like John are usually the ones people ignore or turn their heads when they are seen walking down the street.
I have committed to not ignoring the shopping carts or the people who use shopping carts as a different form of recreational vehicle. When we choose to see beauty, these metal contraptions become beautiful and the people who use them for shelter and as a larger and more grounded back pack may even become our friends.
This is one of the shots I took this morning. See the laundry, hanging on the fence in the background? The white house has a very neatly kept yard. We can not make generalizations. Just because someone hangs laundry to dry on a fence doesn't mean anything except for what we make it mean.
I certainly didn’t expect to meet John-the-Sculptor with a great personality. I expected an angry perhaps drunk man who wouldn’t let me take a photo without giving him money. I was surprised and I would bet John would be surprised, too.
What public art have you seen or appreciated lately?
Perhaps it is time to look again and see beauty where perhaps you used to see shame or humiliation.
Remember John and his sculpture, unique and profoundly perfect, instead.
Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
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