Tag Archives: paper craft

Inspired

08 Thursday Dec 2011

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What a sweet source of inspiration my children are! Every day they inspire me to do more, create more, trust more, and love more. They remind me to take chances, both as an artist and a human being. This art journal is my attempt to capture my daughter’s passion, humor, and creativity and what an encouragement those things are to me.

Since this is meant to be more journal than scrapbook, I started by writing a series of letters to Kenzie about the ways she delights and inspires me. Then I added in photos I took while she was in full-on create mode, with sketchbooks, markers, and pencils spread out all around her.

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The journal itself started life as a blank 6″x6″ chipboard window album from Maya Road. Each page has a cut-out that allows you to view the next, so it was a fun challenge to place all the pictures and papers so that images showed from one page to the other. I chose papers and embellishments in my daughter’s favorite bright palette, with a vintage feel that she also loves.

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My daughter’s artwork is much like her: cute, quirky, and fun. I asked for donations of drawings and then cut them out and placed them so they are highlighted among the letters and photos. Her imagination is full of the cutest little characters.

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One of the things I admire most about Kenzie is how fearlessly she loves. Whether it’s the people around her or her newest hobby, she is completely prepared for joy. My challenge as a parent is to help her guard her heart, and yet somehow she teaches me more every day about opening mine up.

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One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my recent health issues is not to wait. I want my loved ones to know they are treasured because I have clearly said and shown it is so. I think this journal is a step in the right direction. :)

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Paper monster invasion

04 Sunday Dec 2011

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Thanks to my artsy kiddos and their new favorite book, there are miniature paper monsters cropping up all over the house. Their cumulative paper-crafting zeal and Papertoy Monsters: 50 Cool Papertoys You Can Make Yourself! by Brian Castleforte have populated our dining room table with a 5″-tall community of charming little creeps. (Clearly the cut-and-paste gene has been passed on. :)

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There are 50 original papertoy templates in the book, from Confetti Yeti to Octopup. Author Castleforte and the 24 other contributing artists are talented, imaginative designers, evidenced by their fun paper menagerie. The monsters all feature a mini biography and easy-to-follow instructions, and they are printed in full color on cardstock that’s been both perforated and pre-scored for easier assembly. I am usually leary of “just tear here” paper crafts, but these actually work; unlike my daughter’s paper doll years, the last few weeks have heard very few cries of frustration over inadvertent paper amputees.

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I would recommend Papertoy Monsters for those over age 10, including the grown-up paper artist with a sense of humor. Some monsters require more of a patient, careful hand than others, and I wouldn’t give this book to an amped-up fifth grader who needs to run off a sugar high. But it is just right for quiet time, and in my years of teaching art, I have found kids of all ages have a surprising capacity for focus and detail if the project is engaging and the end result worth the effort. These papertoys certainly meet those requirements.

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(Workman Publishing: New York 2010, ISBN 978-0761158820)

Housewarming Tree

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

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I made this paper tree full of birds as a housewarming gift for dear friends who just moved in-state. Something appealed to me about using vintage maps to welcome them, and the colors seemed a good fit for their charming 1920s home. I am often drawn to using books and text in my artwork, a natural tendency I suppose for an English major and bibliophile. I’m among the few shoppers for used books who entirely bypass consideration of subject matter in favor of pretty fonts. :)

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Making the little birds required some patience, but I don’t mind that at all. Whether in the kitchen or the studio, I find great therapeutic value in hours spent on methodical, detailed tasks. It gives me the opportunity to put all my energy into accomplishing one single thing well. That kind of focus is an increasingly rare occurrence among my other daily responsibilities, and I find I need the balance provided by those deliberate, harnessed moments; they result in a beauty of their own, no matter what I create.

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One of the housewarming tree’s layers of texture comes from cashmere wool the color of linen (also the color of book pages). I finished the tree off with a curled paper nest at its base. It probably says more about me than I care to admit that the little paper nest didn’t get added until three weeks after I originally gave the tree away. I planned to put it on there all along, but my life seldom divides neatly into “before” and “after,” so why should my artwork? I kind of like the potential in that.

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Mobile Art

13 Sunday Nov 2011

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I am a lifelong, card-carrying member of the Cut-and-Paste Club (Platinum Kindergartner level — and, yes, I made the card myself). I was sold from the moment the five-year-old me unfolded a little wedge of paper and discovered that all those pleats and snips had created a big, beautiful snowflake.

So you can imagine my excitement at discovering Mobile Art: Papers, Designs, and Instructions for Twenty Stunning Mobiles. So far I’ve made a charming Matryoshka doll mobile (picture above from the book), and it was surprisingly quick and simple. If you’ve got twenty minutes, a pair of sharp scissors, glue, and twine, then you’ve got a piece of art. Some of the mobiles are whimsical, some seasonally-themed, and some distinctly Calder in design. Simple shapes and colors reign, but the subjects range from cupcakes, to abstract mod shapes, to peas in a pod.

As a paper-crafting geek, I actually have opinions about adhesives and cutting tools. (Just smile and nod.) For the projects in this book, I love EKTools Honey Bee Scissors: they’re small, sharp, and have non-stick coated blades so you can cut tape and stickers with impunity. My adhesive of choice for these mobiles is Weldbond, a thick, white glue that will stick anything to anything — and believe me, I’ve tried. Mosaic tiles to the top of a dishwasher, floral napkins to desk shelves, glass beads to a Gibson guitar, wire limbs to a tree made from books… sticking twine to paper is a gimme for this stuff.

I’d love to see a link to your favorite cut-and-paste project in the comments section. Next on my list is a mobile shaped like a tree limb, with birds and leaves suspended from it. I think it will look great brightening up a corner of our homeschool classroom. :)

Drink it in

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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This is one time when bottling up your feelings can actually lead to something good. :) This project was inspired by Sharon Soneff’s fantastic book, Art Journals and Creative Healing: Restoring the Spirit Through Self-Expression. I imagined myself a sort of existential advertising exec: if I could bottle up freedom, what would it look like? How would it taste?

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I think Freedom comes in many flavors: hope, courage, faith, truth, love, peace, joy, compassion… For me, freedom is found in my faith and in the love of those close to me; freedom is acknowledging my myriad imperfections and continuing to learn and grow in spite of them — on good days, because of them.

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To construct this piece, I started with an empty 4-pack of Starbuck’s Frappuccino (my husband happily accommodated me when it came to the emptying part :), a stack of cardstock, and a few pieces of ribbon and beads. I sanded and inked the cardstock to age it and bring out the texture, then added hand-made labels and logos.

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I finished by adding a little embellishment to the tops of the bottles and then wrote down the daily victories that represent freedom to me. I continue to add to the bottles, and I won’t consider this project complete until they’re overflowing.

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Birthday Wisdom art journal

28 Friday Oct 2011

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I made this journal for a dear friend for her birthday earlier this year. It started life as a blank, 3″-square acrylic album from Maya Road. I loved the challenge of the transparent pages and covered one side of each with 2-sided cardstock from paper designer BasicGrey.

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Each page has a 2″-square pocket I made from coordinating papers in a combination of prints. I sanded the edges of both the background papers and the pockets to give them a soft, worn feel, then embellished with twill tape, stickers, paper cut-outs, and stamped text and images. As you can probably tell, I love intricate papercrafting, and my favorite projects are small, detailed pieces.

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Inside each tiny pocket is an even tinier tag with an inspirational or humorous quote on it, and each tag is decorated with a stamped design and a loop of 1/8″-wide ribbon. This journal has a sort of “Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly” quality to it. Altogether now: “She covered the acrylic so the papers would show, then folded the pockets to hold the tags, then sanded the pages to make them soft, then made the tags to hold the quotes that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her…” :)

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Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” One of the qualities I value most is a sense of humor — it’s what first attracted me to my husband; it connects me with friends across days and miles; and it gets me through times when no amount of tears would do the same.

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Little did I know how much the words on the final page of this journal would come to mean to me just a few months later, and they touch on the heart of what this blog is about.

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“My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.” ~ Maya Angelou

Special thanks to Charity for the wonderful photography :)