art

What I’m Working On

Personal

This weekend seemed busier than usual for me! Although most of it was spent indoors, I felt like I was constantly creating or organizing. Did you have a productive weekend?

Book-Suggestions

One super fun thing I worked on this weekend was a zine! The amazingly awesome company I work for puts out a zine for the employees every quarter. I’ve submitted pages to the zine but, this quarter, I’m lucky enough to be part of the team! Everyone in the company are welcome to submit whatever they want to the zine, and the zine team makes the submissions pretty and puts the entire zine together. I had 4 submissions to work on! This is one of them. I decided to do all the pages digitally, as I have my entire collection of images scanned into the computer, and it’s so much easier to work that way. I had a ton of fun doing each page. It inspired me to get started on another zine!

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Envelopes, envelopes, envelopes! I learned a new trick that makes my lift 1000 times easier when it comes to making envelopes: getting the larger sized envelopes, painting/collaging the entire front, and then folding it in half to make a normal-sized envelope. It’s a bit of a waste but I’ve always had so much trouble coming up with something to put on the back of an envelope. Now they are more cohesive and it saves me so much time!

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ATCs! When I’m waiting for paint to dry on envelopes, I typically start making an ATC. I switch back and forth while I’m waiting for things to dry. Stephanie inspired me to start doing these little guys. When I was active on Swap-bot, I always wanted to make one but, for whatever reason, they always intimidated me. Anything other than an envelope intimidates me, really. I’m starting to branch out a bit! I have a bunch of little images that are perfectly sized for ATCs.

SCRAP Haul

Personal

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The other day I took a bike ride down to the best store ever, SCRAP. I’ve been watching a ton of YouTube videos of people doing mixed media art and collages, and it inspired me to get some paints! I never worked with paints before because I’ve always figured they were for artists; you know, those that can draw, doodle, or do something other than take other people’s art and turn it into something else.

Since I wasn’t sure if I would really enjoy using paints, I figured I should pick up some super cheap ones to start with. Off to SCRAP I go! They have tons of collage bits; all the magazines you could imagine, papers of all kinds, maps, game pieces, and more. It was hard to resist but I know I don’t need any more paper bits right now. Especially after a pen pal just sent me 14 pounds of ephemera.

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The acrylic paint bin at SCRAP is full of mostly neutral colors but all the paints are just 25 cents. I tried to dig through and find some fun colors, and I picked out several that I thought I would use. I know nothing about paint or paint types so I’m not picky! I was really hoping to find a few of those spray-type paints that I see everyone using in their videos. They look like so much fun and create a really cool look. I did find one spray bottle, nearly empty and pink, but I picked it up anyway. It doesn’t quite create the look that I’ve seen but I figured I might be able to clean it out and put some different paint in it.

I also picked up a ton of Gelly Roll pens. I love these pens but they are often $2+ in stores so I never buy them. At SCRAP? These pens are 10 cents each. For 10 cents, I didn’t care if I bought a bum pen that didn’t write so I just picked up as many as I could find in their gel pen bin.

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The other random things I picked up was the x-ray (because how can you resist buying an x-ray?!), some glitter glue, and also packs of used postage. I totally forgot to put the postage in the picture but it’s pretty self-explanatory! The postage packs were $2 a pack but I had to get a few! All in all, my total came to $11 and some change. I love SCRAP!