Lately I've been loving more and more my daily doses of Design*Sponge, a fabulous blog where design and craft intersect more often than you might expect. (You can read more about my take on this here.) A favorite recent post featured graphic designer Katie Kulper and her store window installation of paper airplanes made from ordinary recycled binder paper. I love seeing such a simple repurposing of materials featured so prominently in an upscale place; to me this is just one more sign of a cultural shift toward the handmade--and, of course, toward sustainable art, however unlikely it might be.
Recycling paper in your mixed-media art might seem like the easiest way to incorporate an environmental awareness into your work, but we all know that sometimes what seems the simplest at first flush is often just the opposite. How do you use and reuse paper in your art? Share your ideas in a comment below, or enter a piece in our April challenge!
Hi, it's me, Christine. I’m not sure where squirrels are on the list of trendy animals, but I thought I’d share this bit of squirrel art that I made for my mom. She’s a quilter who favors bright colors and bold prints (see my blog post about her sewing room and creations here), so I wanted to use those same fabrics in this gift—in fact, I even snuck a few pieces from her scrap basket to use. The squirrel design is one that my sister drew, and I then embroidered. I sewed the pieces together in a freeform kind of way, then put it in a shadowbox frame that I had painted to match.
When I make special works like this, especially as a gift, I do like to include some sort of frame so that the recipient needs only to pound a nail and place it on the wall. For some very cool framing ideas for your next project, check out Frame It by Tonia Davenport (if you're in the UK, click here for book info). In addition to traditional framing (like shadowboxes), she includes step-by-step projects for all sorts of unusual options, like suspended Plexiglas frames and much more.
What sorts of framing techniques do you use for the art you create? I’d love to see what you’ve done!
Over the last few weeks, I've been enjoying the work of Annie Lockhart. I appreciate the slightly softer look she brings to the world of assemblage. Annie likens her work to art journaling and I love the idea of journaling being three-dimensional.
As many of you know, Artfest was just wrapped up this last weekend and Annie was one of the instructors teaching there this year. Already, I've been reading wonderful things about her classes by students who have been posting about the experience on their blogs.
I'm sure we'll be seeing more of this wonderful artist's work in the mixed-media world as the days, weeks and months roll on.
Did
you know April is national poetry month? With popular art retreats like Artfest
hosting increasingly popular poetry workshops, it’s only natural to be seeing
more and more artwork incorporating the art of words. Poets.org offers up a fun
list of 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month. Why not add #31 to the list and celebrate with a piece of artwork inspired by a
poem, or a piece of artwork incorporating a few poetic words of your own, or
borrowed from a favorite verse? If you’re a nature lover or a fan of poets
inspired by the natural world, it may just tie in beautifully to this month’s
challenge.
With the focus this month being on repurposed and found objects, I couldn't help but think of artist Kevin Titzer, whose work I greatly admire (and always get a wicked chuckle from). Kevin starts his sculptures with driftwood from the Ohio River and then frequently adds other salvaged materials such as metal from scrapped rain gutters, candy tins and just about anything else. His style is dark and whimsical at the same time and I'm grateful to artists like him that can truly transform trash into something this amazing.
Don't forget to check out this week's free project while it's still available and watch for a brand new project on Monday.
