oh Books!

It's been a quite a while since i made a journal. making journals take quite a long time and a substantial amount of focus. it's pretty difficult to find the amount of time that i need to conceptualize and construct one these days. my mind is so all over the place ... baby, creating, school, lunch, dinner, etc. so most of the time, i only make journals when there is a request for it. 

last week, i managed to make 2. one was a request from a lovely lady Leslie Marsh, who is herself an accomplished book artist and a fantastic photographer. i was so honored to be asked to make a journal for her :) she wanted to combine certain elements that she liked in some of my older works and this was what came out of it ... Ancient West. 

working on Ancient West propelled me into the mood, and so i made another journal. a smaller palmsize journal. Fallen Angel, i called it. which didn't actually start that way. 

   
this journal turned out totally the opposite as what I had intended it to be. it was conceived as a Being of Light … something that would have come out of Lothlorien. but it wasn’t to be. IT, wanted to be dark. it made me make it go darker and darker and darker. i wonder why. i wonder who broke it, that now it no longer has any goodness left within. but, perhaps there is, deep within its soul. because i believe that the Angel is not inherently bad. it was just left so broken, that the goodness could never surface again. not unlike what Sauron did to the Elves, who became the Uruk-hai(s) in the Lord of the Rings.

well, those were the 2 journals i made. feeling quite smug that i actually managed 2 last week :p before i run off to the baby again, i'll leave you with another pair of books ... not so dark, but more romantic tiny wearable books :)

the Dream and the Child

“It was in a dream that I saw a child being born from the rocks, naked but well formed. And when she uncurled and lifted her head, light of purity and hope burst forth from her being. I knew then, she was the Child of Light, for I can feel her in my heart.”

This mixed media necklace was inspired by several very different elements - a bio-mechanical tattoo where they would tattoo an image of skin being ripped open revealing mechanical parts within. Operation salvage of an old pouch, where I had removed all the hardware and one that attracted me was a zipper with a leather pull. And then, a dream … well, THAT dream. 

To be honest, I cannot even remember clearly the creative process of this necklace. I remember the beginning … I remember I wanted and HAD to embed a zipper in rock. ???. And then I remember the end. I remember when I finished the main part of the pendant and hooked it onto the chain, it didn’t feel right. It needed something else. After looking at it for half a day, I added the beautiful, huge turquoise. Similar color and striation to the Variscite bead within, yet different. ??? again.

And then just as I was writing this, I looked over to the necklace hanging beside me and it suddenly dawned upon me. It was the dream exactly … the huge turquoise I had to add, was me. I was looking at the Child being born from the rocks, just as I had in my dream. My hair stood on ends.
 

??? all answered.

And as I look at it even more … I can see that the huge turquoise symbolizes a Mother, experiencing HER child being born. Not unlike the experience I had, with my preemie Maia in the delivery room.

This must be one of the most uncanny creative revelation ever!

Revelations aside, I did make some not so uncanny stuff last week. And i discovered how to mask photographs :) you know the effects you can get from the iphones? i found one of the apps on the net for Windows download (for free YAY!!) Pixlr-o-mantic it's called.

 

Another birdhouse necklace creation from Barry's salvaged metals ...

... this is called Remembering a Time. Remembering all the people who made me who I am, remembering all those moments that made me what I am … Remembering my grandmother ...

And this, is Weathered Etchings, a bracelet. The etchings are made on a clay tablet and then roughly wrapped in a sheet of salvage brass like a bezel, only it's not soldered (cos i can't afford to buy a torch yet :( )

The photos were masked using 4 layers of effects. Because Pixlr-o-matic only allows 1 layer of mask from 1 category, you will have to mask and save the photo 3 times to get this effect. But I found a way to save all the effects that I liked on my computer and then put them all together in 1 layer using GIMP. So I only have to mask the photo once and get a 4 layered effect :) One happy duck here!

Buried Treasure 2012

OOO!!! i nearly missed Seth's Buried Treasure call this year! in fact this post is supposed to go up on the 11th and it's already 12th where i live. fortunately it's still 11th at where Seth lives ;) see ... i'm right when i tell my American frens that i'm their future!!

so, what is Buried Treasure 2012? in Seth's words, Buried Treasure is an online, collaborative project that invites art bloggers to go into the depths of their blogs and dig for buried treasure. Each participant was asked to repost one (or more) or their favorite posts from their own blog. we are supposed to dig back into our past posts and repost an article of our choice. what a great way to give old posts new life and having fun at the same time! i tell ya ... Seth thinks of the best participation projects!

before i repost a post of my choice, let me just leave you a link to Seth Apter's The Altered Page, where you will find a list of this year's participants. the post of my choice was called A Christmas Wrap-up and it was published on the 31 Dec 2008. i chose this post for 2 reasons. Firstly, this was the starting point i guess, of me wanting to take art more seriously. becos i remember after this post, i thought to myself ... hey, i can do this for the rest of my life! . Secondly, it's so very interesting to see how my taste and style have evolved from 2008! Kinda weird ... but sweet :) so without further ado ... A Christmas Wrap Up ...

the year is nearly over and i'm excited to see what next year would bring :) after the gift making frenzy in the past month i thought it fitting that i wrap up all the christmas gifts i made in this last post of 2008 :) so here they are ...

3 friendship tags :

i am naturally inclined to slightly "darker" things, so most of the art i come up with are not what i would call "happy" looking. the same thing happened when i made these tags, they naturally turned out to be quite subdued and kinda "bleak" if i may say so... thus didn't go too well with christmas! so i decided to add some tassels and bells to them to give them a more "christmasy" and a happier feel... the tassels were made from putting together ribbons, sequines, yarn and bells. the sunflower (last minute addition) also helped to brighten the last tag up. plus... if anyone intend to hang these on their doors ... they would also make good "door bells" :))) the first two tags had my "untitled ll" poem on them which i thought went well with the travel theme.

2 magnetic boards :

of course these came with 4 magnets each :)) magnets made from glueing raw magnets to mosaics if you remember :) you can find the creative process of these magnetic boards in one of my previous post :)

5 sets of coasters :

this set of 8 were my first try. i gave them to 8 of my colleagues in the office.

subsequently, i enjoyed making coasters so much that i made 4 more sets. i know there are 3 here, that's because that 1 set that i made... ahem... wouldn't be very nice if an under age happen to come into my blog and saw them... so i rather not post the pics here :)))

the doggie set was made last. this was for a very good friend who is also the host of the party we went to ... he is a true animal lover :) lives with 3 dogs and 3 cats :) so i thought doggie coasters were perfect for him :)))

nell who received the betty boop set was squealing and sent me the most lovely thank you message via facebook the next day :))) i'm so glad she loved them...

2 painted mirrors :)

these mirrors were painted with waterbase acrylic. i did a similar sunflower mirror for another friend 2 years ago and one of my friends saw a picture and fell in love with it. she even asked me if could paint another one and she'll buy it from me... of course i'll paint another for her... so she got this as a christmas gift :))

the second mirror i called "lothlorien" which was inspired by lord of the rings :) though you cannot really see it, but the motif is painted with luminesence pearl white paint and looks really magical when you see it under lights :) i especially designed and painted this for a very gentle friend :)

all in all it was a great christmas :) now let's see what next year holds for all of us :)

happy pimping! :)

little people : shredded thoughts

Something i found whilst destashing my craft-stuff a few days ago, reminded me that time indeed just whizzes by without us even noticing it. Gave me a kind of electric shock I guess. 

What I found was a tiny pencil. I remember picking this tiny old pencil up from the floor outside my daughter’s kindergarten some years ago. In fact, thru the years I have picked up at least 3 tiny, discarded pencils. They all have similar characteristics … tiny, blunt, messed up, and all of them have battered butts, probably the result of little teeth chewing on them. 

When I found this little pencil in one of my trays, images came flooding into my mind. Little kids sitting on little chairs and tables, drawing with pencils such as this one. How many children have found joy with this pencil? Could Llara be one of them? Did she ever use this pencil? Was she one of the little culprits who caused its battered butt? It made me smile … 

Time waits for no one, and all of a sudden you realize that little people have grown into big people ... too soon.

I listed this on etsy a couple of days ago, but today, I took it down. I seem to have developed a certain attachment to this little one. Maybe I'll keep it or perhaps gift it someone the cosmic wants me to give to. We'll wait and see what happens ...

Lately I've also realized that (so many realizations!!) I've been extremely drawn to fibers. I'm using so much more of it, even my usually steampunky little books have become all flurry and shredded and fabricky ...  

Wonder how long this fiber fetish is gonna last ...