Christmas Ornaments

I made these over Thanksgiving for the name drawing one side of the family does for Christmas. I thought it would be more fun to have a sort of keepsake instead of a boring tag with someone's name on it. So on the back of each one I have rubber stamped "You play Santa 4 Joe Shmo," only the Santa is an image, so it's like a rebus (and Joe Shmo is not really anyone's names--the names have been changed to protect the innocent). And yet, this family of puzzlers didn't get it, I had to explain it to them! Duh! Anyhow, I hope people liked the ornamensts, I thought they were cool. I really wanted to draw that one with Santa in the big red car, but I didn't want to cheat, so I had to be happy with what I got. Anyway, I finally did something with my stash of Christmas postage stamps!

Another Deco Page: Green

This page is for someone in my local art group who's doing a green book. I think it looks really snazzy. The dark green scribbly-looking bits are actually floral wire that I twisted into interesting shapes.

Color Chunky pages: Eggplant & Pale Green

Here's the next color combo in the series I'm participating in. It's kind of more random than the red and yellow I did. The Lemon slices on the left are cut from a Burt's Bees box. The body of the figure on the right is from a Carter's baby clothes tag that says "3 months." And I played with paint and a lot of my punches.

Red and Yellow Color Combo Chunky

The top pic is the front of the page, and I did all those pretty much the same: the individual letters spell out red and yellow and I glued a red Monopoly hotel on one of the red squares.

The bottom pic is of the backs, which I did all different. All of them have a sort of beaded charm hanging off the side, made from seed beads and a poker chip and a checker.

ATC'S: Japanese cute =kawaii

I have just discovered kawaii, and it's not a Hawaiian island where I spent my honeymoon. It's a japanese phenomenon of super cute things. It seems most popular in stationery and school supplies, and it's not meant exclusively for kids. In fact, some of it seems just for adults, not that it's risque, but just because so many adults are into cute Japanese culture. And I guess I'm one of them. I always liked Hello Kitty growing up, and still do, and now there's all these other Sanrio characters, plus several other brands besides Sanrio that have their own cute characters, and it's all getting exported now to the United States. So I joined this Swapbot swap to make ATC's where you draw some of the Kawaii characters from the brand Decole. They're mostly little food or food-related characters, such as cupcakes, mushrooms, and condiment bottles. Weird, huh? But they are cute, you gotta admit.

If you want to see some examples of kawaii, look at Phoophie, where I just bought some stationery.

New Postcards

For these, I just felt like playing with dry painting in several layers with just a few colors, and these are what I came up with: Rugged, with one of my carved James Dean stamps, and Autumn Birds, with my carved Walter Anderson bird stamp.