ACAD310 - Spotlight on Jack Whitten

I'm always happy to share my art education with you, the reader. One of the advantages of taking so long with my degree is that there's no shortage of new ideas to learn about. The artistic canon has also grown and become more diverse over the years. There are many artists who were contemporaries of famous artists, but, for whatever reason, did not receive as much attention. American artist Jack Whitten (1939-2018) is spotlighted in this video below that we have to watch for next Monday's ACAD310 class.

FIBRE 300 - Today's discount art lesson

Here are two videos we have to watch for this week's reading response in class.

FIBRE 300--Today's discount art history lesson ;-D

FIBRE 300 is all about the history of ornamentation and now we're on to project 2--jewelry! Here are two videos we have to watch for next week courtesy of The British Museum. I love that the videoes dive into material culture--how people create and use objects is endlessly fascinating.

Back to school!

I returned to art college again this past week. I'm taking two classes and as always, you can learn along with me! One of my first assignments is to watch and react to this video.

3 Easy Ways to Cut Tissue Paper for Crafts

Every now and then I enjoy making a craft video. I am by no means a pro at it, but each one gets a little better every time. There are so many factors such as audio, lighting, camera positioning and complaining cockatiels :-D

I finally made a title card after noticing that some craft videos have some pretty snazzy introductions. I made a black & white drawing, cleaned it up in Corel Photo Paint and then converted it to a vector image in CorelDraw so the colours could be changed easily.

Inspiration came from a video that suggested putting the camera tripod on top of the desk. It's hard to craft with a tripod between you and your hands, so this worked well, except the video is upside down and rotating it can look funny. Time to do things the left handed way until I get a fancier set up :-D

I'm pleased to show off this technique for cutting tissue paper. I figured it out back in spring when making a card for my friend Always Artistic and taking photos just didn't seem to do. Take a look and let me know if this is a technique that you would like to try as well!

Blog Backlog #2 - Clean the basement!

From February to May I undertook a gargantuan task - I cleaned the basement, fully completely, and my husband even got into the spirit by e-cycling some old computers. I can't believe we found 300 cubic square feet of space in our house! Blue cart recycling helped a lot, and I said goodbye to boxes of old magazines! I pared down my craft supplies and well, I'm always proud of the nice stuff that I can give to the Salvation Army. A lot of people see thrift stores as their dumping ground, but an old desk, at least four boxes of clothes and a lot of books and household items have hopefully found a second life. Here's another secret - the less stuff you have, the less time you spend looking after it!

Although I was happy last summer when I cleaned up my art space, I wasn't completely happy with it and found a better arrangement once all that stuff was gone! And naturally I captured it on video for posterity.

Me, My Mess and My Model Horses!

I'm having almost too much fun making movies now. Here's one from a few weeks ago as I aim to clean up my downstairs work area. I'm hoping that organized will equal productivity, especially as I have a contest deadline coming up. Eek!

A little slice of my life!

Enjoy, and please don't make fun of my Canadian accent :-)