Art Tart

Today I had planned to go over to Mona and Ernie Fontenot's house to check out the progress on their man cave and give Mona some decorating ideas.  I knew that Joel was going to help them float sheet rock and I thought I might go at the same time since having an extra person there increases the chances that someone will do something either stupid or hilarious that I would want to document.  Joel texted me at 7:30 this morning that he was on his way over there.  I really like Mona and Ernie but not enough to drag my butt out of bed at 7:30 on a Saturday morning.  I decided to wait until late in the afternoon since I was feeling crafty and wanted to try a couple of things I'd seen on the internet recently.  Wouldn't you know it?  Right when I was ready to head over there it started pouring down rain and again, there are few people that I like well enough to go slogging through the rain for.  The poor Fontenots just didn't make the cut today.

I spent most of my day today (okay, all of it) doing artsy/craftsy things.  That made it a very good day.  While I was trolling through Flickr, I ran across this cool looking paper flower thing and followed the link to a website with instructions.  I discovered something I'd never heard of before called origami crumpling.  The gal on this website used magazine pages to make flowers but I decided to use some decorative napkins that I had lying around.  They turned out pretty cute.

On that same website there was a link to a YouTube video with instructions on how to make mushrooms out of tissue paper.  Since you just never know when you might need to make a mushroom out of tissue paper, I watched the video and tried it with some tissue paper that I had lying around.  Yes, I have a lot of stuff just lying around.  I suppose if I did less art and more housekeeping this wouldn't be the case, but then where would I be?  I would be going insane in some institution while Jayson's new wife enjoyed my clean house, that's where I'd be.  So, you see, making tissue paper mushrooms isn't really an option for me, it's necessary.  They're cute, but I don't know what to do with them.

I finished doodling on my new purse.  I guess it would be more accurate to say I've reached a stopping point for now.  I may add more to it later but for now I'm bored with it.

Someone asked me the other day why I don't blog about my art.  I guess it's because I don't really have anything to say about it.  I don't even think about it all that much.  It just...is.

I guess I could show some works in progress.  I'm working on 3 doodles right now.  The first one looks a little bit like intestines at this point.  I'm hoping that once I add all the other elements (that I haven't thought up yet) it will lose some of its bowelishness.  If not I will send it to my sister who suffers from Crohn's disease and she can throw darts at it.  Or suppositories, which are a big part of your life if you have Crohn's.  Hey there's an idea for a game for those with bowel diseases.  Throw the suppository at the...bullseye.  It's times like this that I wish I wasn't a visual thinker. 
The next one is sort of a diamond shape that is my version of a shape I saw on some graffiti on Flickr.  I wish I had bookmarked the page or saved the picture where I saw it but I didn't and now I can't find it again.  Anyway, I have the bones drawn but I haven't decided where to go from here.

The third one has been nothing but a beast.  The background pattern was so tedious and confusing that I kept screwing up and ended up drawing some of it on the swirly parts where it didn't belong.  I sketch everything out in pencil first but that's just a rough guideline.  The design comes together when I put ink to it.  This one started to fall apart as soon as I picked up the pen.  Usually when I make a drawing mistake I can just thicken some lines or add an element to cover it up.  That wasn't the case with the mistakes I made on this one.  There were a couple of areas that desperately needed white out but that won't work in a Moleskine sketchbook.  I needed cream out.  So...I mixed up some craft paint to match the Moleskine's pages and used that to cover up my boo boos.  Now I'm in the process of coloring the image which will help to camouflage the mistakes even more.  I don't need it to be perfect, I just don't want the imperfections to be so dang obvious.

Lately I've been seeing a lot of YouTube demos on felting and I'm just fascinated by this.  I love all the colors of the fluffy wool and how you just kind of add water and rub it and it turns into a purse.  Actually I'm more inspired by the abstract wall hangings where they've added bits of silk and threads and other stuff to the wool as it was being felted.  I'm also intrigued by yarn spinning and would love to give that a try...on someone else's spindle.  I don't think I'll be investing in the equipment for that since it looks to me like I'd also be required to give up wearing makeup, shoes other than Birkenstocks, and clothes that are any color other than gray.  I think I also have to move to a farm and raise my own sheep and goats. That's just my observation. 

That's all I have to say about that.

Speaking of movies, have you seen any good ones lately?  We almost never go to the theater but we'll do Netflix or On Demand pretty regularly.  Last weekend we watched Alice in Wonderland but I think I'm the only one who liked it.  Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter was good but I was absolutely blown away by Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen.  Every little expression on her face and inflection of her voice was perfect!  And, of course, the whole movie appealed to my visual brain.

We also watched The Lovely Bones which I had already seen and Taylor had read the book.  I really love this movie even though, as a parent, it's difficult to watch.  Visually, it makes me think of what parts of The Shack might look like if it was a movie...which makes sense since the stories are similar.

At some point last week we very reluctantly agreed to watch New Moon with Taylor since she hadn't seen it yet.  She liked it.  She was the only one.  Twilight was one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time and New Moon comes in a close second.  Maybe I should have read the books, I dunno.  The weird part about it is that I love vampire movies.  This should be so right up my alley and it so isn't.  My sister says it's all about the love story.  These are high school students.  I can't get on board with a love story about high school students.  They all just need to be grounded.  And Edward...ugh.  The boy, bless his heart, looks like he's been hit in the face with a shovel.  And that sparkling thing he does is just plain gay, there's no nice way to say it.  Bella has one expression and it's the one where she looks like she just smelled sour milk.  Her boyfriend is a vampire but she still manages to accidentally cut herself every time she's around his family which tends to cause a problem.  So, her boyfriend Edward leaves her for her own good and she turns around and hooks up with Jacob who just happens to be a werewolf, the mortal enemies of the vampires.  After Jacob cuts his hair, he is much more pleasant to look at than Edward but evidently Bella has been blinded by Edward's sparkles and only has eyes for him.  Does this girl not see that she doesn't make wise choices when it comes to boys?  Who will her next boyfriend be, the Swamp Thing?  And she's not the least bit phased by it all. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Sparkle Tart.