Author: lauramchugh

Amidst the sinusy allergy thing and all the computer problems of last week, I got a lot done in my (garage) art studio:

– organized all paper ephemera by color (what a simple, but profound, aha!)

– created a box for various things (paints, stamp pads, stamps, felting tools, ribbons, 3D ephemera, boxes for a big cover-the-box in ephemera project, smallish frames for future projects, sandpaper and sanding block, encaustic materials, large bags, personal treasures [not art-related] etc.

-put office related stuff into drawer’s at arm’s length to where I sit at the computer; and

– cleaned up bookcase, including removing piles o’things into their own boxes.

These things all being in their own box makes finding them when I need them so so much easier. I’m still looking for my more industrial-sized hot glue gun, which I know is there somewhere.

Now I’m ready to do more projects.

I’ve had some time to work with the techniques I learned at the ConvenZioNE workshops. I made some collaged wooden mirrors – two each of different patterns and colors. My inspiration was the La Louviere Carnaval guys. This is a festival in Brussels, Begium that happens a few times a year. The first image I found several years ago while surfing the net. I love the plumage and stoic faces on these guys. It would be fun to go to Brussels to see this event.

After spending most of my waking and some precious otherwise sleeping hours on my computer systems, I stopped in to a local computer store yesterday to see if someone would be available to work on my computer (Macs). I explained all the various and sundry problems I’ve been having and in amongst the agreement that I could use some help and scheduling an appointment, the technician mentioned that an upgrade to the Leopard OSX came out yesterday. I came home and installed on both the iMac and PowerBook and what do you know? All the problems have for the most part disappeared. Yahoo (the expression, not the company!) But it makes me think that Apple is less than transparent about viruses, software glitches, etc. and that some of this may have been the need for the software upgrade. I also heard that Mercury was in retrograde, so maybe it is just the cosmos out there causing all the chaos with the electronics, and the pollen.

Now I can get back to focusing on doing some art. I have a project in mind to use some of these lovely vintage images of La Louviere Carnaval (Brussels) with the techniques I learned at the ConvenZioNE workshops. Seems now like a lifetime ago that I was there.

Since then, I have organized all my ephemera by color family, amassed a small collection of ribbons, dug out my button collection such as it is, and secured some new ephemera images. Here’s one I want to work with:

Today was a really bad day, computer-wise. I lost (hopefully only temporarily) my iPhoto library dating back 10 years. I think there are between 16 and 19,000 photos in it, including a lot of my art and photoshop jpgs. Tomorrow, I will receive a backup drive from Office Depot that will allow me to move around some things. Right now I’m constrained by being out of memory on the laptop and the iMac so I can’t back up the whole library, and in bits and pieces it will just be too easy to accidentally not get some photos back. So, I will do that tomorrow, when I will also be in a better frame of mind. I was so so happy last night to have made about 50-60 of these little bookmarks.

Here are my favorite three, which interestingly include a cat motif on two of the, even though I myself am highly allergic to the little beasties! (Click for more detail).

I attended a ZNE group’s pre-convention workshop today. ZNE is Mixed Media Artists Connected and is a really good group of people. Their big Convenzione is this weekend at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. I won’t unfortunately be able to attend the weekend activities, so I will miss seeing these events, however the art workshop today was fantastic.

Today’s workshop was led by Anna Corba and was on taking mixed media collages and incorporating beeswax as a coating. I was able to create four small pieces during the day, and all the art that was created was amazing. A really good group of attendees, all inspiring.

Anna Critiquing My Pieces My Four Pieces – I worked on getting comfortable with pink and blue together, with a melon theme for the first three pieces.

What I Created – The fourth piece (blue/green) was inspired by the current impending pandemic, and I call it H One N One. Click on the image for a close-up.