A Little Fun with Sculpture

I've been wanting to play with some wire sculpture for awhile and since my forte is with trees I thought what better than to start there. So here is my first attempt at a wire fabric tree sculpture.

I threw a lot of ideas into this tree... some I liked and some I didn't so I had to make another one that was a bit more focused.

I think having a theme works when planning this type of sculpture. I really didn't have a direction until I added the old photos and then it brought all the other things into focus. 

The way I made these was fairly similar to my standard gem tree sculpture only no gemstones and I added strips of fabric as I twisted the wires into shape. The basic tree is fairly straight forward and fast to make, it's the embellishments that take some time as there is some hand sewing of lace and buttons, twisting more wire around the limbs, making the wire flower and pictures framed and then at the end I added all the dangling crystals. For this tree, I used cream fabric that I tea stained after it was in the shape of the tree. I wasn't as happy with the staining towards the end so I added some distress ink to darken it up in places.

I keep thinking it needs just something extra but I'll look at it for awhile and let it sink in and if it is still calling to me maybe it will tell me what it wants.

I have no idea what to call these trees other than a fabric tree sculpture, so if you have any good ideas about what to call this type of sculpture, let me know.

Art and So Much More

For the past week or so I've been working on my journal swap pages. The theme is flowers and in my first post I showed you some pen drawings... well those drawings do factor in to my journal pages but not entirely. They did however turn out great when I took them to the office supply store to be copied on watercolor paper. I've had so much fun painting the flowers and not having to draw them each time. Here is a peak at my work space.... I know, I really need to clean it off but I was too excited to get started. Believe me it looks worse now. LOL

I can't show you the pages of the journal as the organizer will be submitting one of the completed journals to the Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine called "Pages". I'm crossing my fingers that our journal gets included.

I joined another mixed media group on Facebook called Mixed Media Misfits. What a great group of people. I immediately joined in two of their swaps. The first one was to make 3 row houses and thankfully, I already had some of these chipboard row houses from Red Lead that were just lying around so here I was able to use them.

I've added several more embellishments and glitter (because you can never how to much sparkle) since this photo was taken but I really like how they turned out.

My next project will be to work on another swap challenge only this time it is all about birds. More on that next time.

A Peak at some Drawings

If you wandered over here from my "Dana's Jewelry Design" blog, welcome. I'll try to keep these two different and will most likely post on different days so I can keep it all straight. "grin"

These are some of my latest drawings. I did this with waterproof ink on watercolor paper with the intention of painting them later. The purpose was to create some drawings of flowers that I could reproduce via a copier or laser printer onto watercolor paper for a journal pages swap with the theme of flowers. I'm happy with most of the drawings but love the sunflowers the best. I'll take more pictures as they progress from this to paintings and then to a journal page.

If you are interested in art there are a variety of ways to get started. I joined a few Yahoo groups including Mixed Media Art Friends, Art-e-zine Cafe, Artist Trading Cards, and several others. These are a great way to learn more about what type of art you want to create. I also subscribe to several on-line newsletters and took a class on sketching from Alisa Burke (great class by the way). I thought by doing all this my once love of watercolor painting would be reawakened. So for all intents and purposes, I have been creating more art, but it has evolved as I now do more acrylic painting and more ink drawings.

I have fallen in love with doing Zentangles and find they are relaxing and freeing. To some people they may just be doodles on paper but each symbol or piece has steps to complete. Really so much fun to try all the different patterns.

There are a ton of books out there if you want to check them out but I did find this site that has a lot of patterns and how to draw them which would be a great starting point.  http://tanglepatterns.com/

I hope everyone is having a great start to their week. Remember keep your day full of creative things.

Woo Hoo an Art Blog

Okay, so I just had to do it. Start another blog... right like I needed another one. This will be all about my explorations into the world of art and creativity.

For those of you new to me and my blogging, I currently make and sell jewelry and gem trees as well as I am the author of Gem Tree Sculptures. I don't sell my art which is watercolor and acrylic painting (yet), although you could lump my jewelry and gem trees into the category of art. Hubby and I just started last year taking photographs and that has been a blast. I get so many good ideas for my paintings from the photos as well as the beauty of the photos themselves.

For Christmas last year, DH and I made on Blurb a photo book journal for our friends and family. It was the perfect place to highlight some of our photographs of our travels and provide a book as a gift that they could then use to jot down all kinds of things. I may have to try that again this coming year only with some of my paintings and drawings. Might be kind of fun to do one each year. Maybe then the relatives would get the hint that they are supposed to use the books and not just look at the few pictures in it. LOL.

If you are curious about my book, Gem Tree Sculptures, you can find it on Amazon.com or you can see it on my ArtFire studio over on the right hand column. It was a lot of fun writing the book and I have several other tutorials for jewelry on my jewelry blog Dana's Jewelry Design so you can check that out if you are interested. More gem tree tutorials will be available soon as a downloadable .pdf, so keep an eye out and I would love to have you follow me.

I'll leave you with some Springy photos we took at the Conservatory at Wright's Park last year. On an overcast day like today we all need a little sunshine.

Join me in my adventures with Basically ART.