Wednesday, May 03, 2006







Needed a small avatar for another site...just ignore!

Playing around.



I made a couple small quickie cards tonight, to tuck in with the boxes I'm sending to my mom and MIL for their combined birthday/Mother's Day presents. (Both my mom and Todd's mom have early May birthdays.)

I love all the Hero Arts images that you can layer and combine for an artsy look with minimal effort. Every stamp on these cards is Hero Arts, except for the key. It's been ages since I stamped anything for real, beyond swiping distress ink on stuff.

I scribbled over the flowers with one of my new Glaze pens, the clear one. I got a set of Glaze pens and also a set of Soufflé pens at AC Moore last week, after seeing a few rapturous comments about them online. Doodling is a huge trend in scrapbooking and paper crafting right now, and although I do like to doodle, I never really do it as an art thing. The trend is moving away from polished, professional types of layouts and projects, toward a more freeform, handmade, artsy look, which is very far from my comfort zone. I thought it might be good to venture that way just for fun, though, and the pens are one of the few art tools that one can find in this creatively-deprived area.

(I've been feeling a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with this area now. We've lived in Hampton Roads for three years, and I've always liked it fairly well--more than many other transplants I've met--but lately I am SO ready to move on to better things. I like our house a lot and enjoy it so much...but this neighborhood is gloomy, and Newport News is pretty run-down. I think moving into NN from the more "rural" part of York County is what's inspired some of this disgruntlement. I also just really want to live somewhere with a little more life and energy. I guess this is one of my periodic "homesick-for-Columbus" phases.)

Anyway, the Glaze pens are supposed to produce a raised, glossy line, and the Soufflé pens are supposed to produce a raised, puffy line...well, not so much. It's certainly not as dramatic as I expected. I'll need to play with them a little more, I think.