Welcome to my journey!

Welcome to all!  I decided to start this blog to share my mixed media creations, with the goal of showing readers how I create my art and to hopefully inspire others to create (I will also share the occasional kitty pictures).

I love mixed media - I love the textures, the various mediums used...it's messy and oh, so wonderful!  I am by no means an expert in anything, and I definitely am NOT an artist. But I am learning, I am improving and I do love to experiment.  Not everything turns out well, but that's part of the journey, am I right?  I have no trade secrets, so eventually I will post pictures of my progress from beginning to end.

I trade ATCs For All, a very friendly site for both the experienced and the new creators out there - I highly encourage you to check it out if you haven't already.  I primarily experiment in small art - Artist Trading Cards, Artist Trading Coins/Circles, Inchies, Twinchies...you get the idea.  The largest size I trade are 5x7" canvases.  I don't always do mixed media - I dabble with acrylics and watercolors too.  In fact, the background picture on this site is an acrylic painting I did for a swap.  I really need to make a duplicate for myself...sigh.  Actually, most of the time, I will do two of whatever I create.  One to keep (the experiment) and the better looking one to trade.

Anyhow, let's begin this blog with some previous things I've done.

This was a 5x7 canvas that I created for a swap a couple of months ago.  I was struggling so bad with trying to come up with something.  This was going to be traded to a man, so I didn't want to do anything too foo-foo or girly. I went through 4 canvases, and they all looked HORRIBLE!   I first tried a faux encaustic landscape, then a zentangled negative painting-style forest...nothing was working.  I finally decided to go more simple. I have loved the drip-acrylics (is that what they're called?) that you see in stores lately, and decided to try my hand at it. I sketched the trees (they're supposed to be cherry trees), and then I painted the ground and sky.  I then painted the trees in with Dina Wakley's fuschia.  I then pulled out my Golden sepia acrylic pain and black ink, drew them along the tree line and spritzed the heck out of it with water. I LOVED it.  I went back and mixed the fuschia with white acrylic and blobbed it on to the trees.  Oh my gosh - it was a success (even my boyfriend, who has a photographer's eye liked it!) and I managed to mail it the next day.

This is also a 5x7 canvas made for a swap the following month. This was much easier for me!  The person I was swapping with liked gardening, so I decided to do this.  I started by gluing down papers (which you barely end up seeing) and painted the 'table' and wall.  I glued down a free clipart of a watering can, then painted it with a dark grey acrylic from DecoArt. When dry, I went over the can with the DecoArt crackle medium. When that was dry I dabbed a lighter grey over it, and outlined it with a Sharpie pen. I made the flowers using acrylics - the first time I did this!  I went back and stenciled in the designs you see on the table and wall, because I thought it was pretty plain. In the end, the lady who received it loved it.  And that, my friends, is the point!