meeting up with dana

dana is a friend i met though atcsforall, which is the amazing website she owns and runs. i had a fantastic time with dana (adriayna) - we went to have lunch in chinatown, then it was onto Flax - an art store with a fabulous selection of decorative papers. you should have seen dana - she ended up buying a ton of papers, all of which were priced from $1-$2 a sheet. there were italian marble papers that were only a dollar, blue net papers, wrapping paper with blue hot air balloons, delicate silvery white papers. at one point dana had so many papers in her hands, they kept falling!


this is dana working on a page in my journal!


the beginnings of a collage i did in dana's journal.

then it was onto scrap! a warehouse full of junk companies and people donated that was great for all kinds of artists and crafters. because the bus was so late, we ended up getting there by 4:30 and had only half an hour to shop but i think we found some good things - i got some children's alphabet blocks, rubber stamps and some paper. dana got some amazing translucent paper that had been typewritten on, which gave lovely effects on the collages we did.


dana's watercolor pallette

we finally got to my place and made art for a few hours in my attic room. dana taught me the wonders of using vibrant bold shin han watercolors! how to layer colors on top of another, it was so fun to splatter the colors onto the page. i had always wondered about how to use watercolors and now i know how to do vibrant backgrounds...


i had an idea on doing collaborative artwork together, so we worked on two canvases and both came out really well. this is the one i kept and dana has the other one.



the beautiful journal page dana made for me in my journal.

work in progress: frida kahlo paper dolls

i had fun making these frida paper dolls. they are a mix of fabrics and paper and the butterflies are laser cut wood by porkchopshow.

i was inspired mainly by the painting Two Fridas

but i was also inspired by the vibrant colors she uses and i always love seeing her in photos with the flowers in her hair.

inspiration from fairy tales

fairy tales have always inspired me, ever since i was a child like many other children i read fairy tales. of course the classic ones are lovely: cinderella, sleeping beauty, rapunzel, snow white, the little mermaid. but as i grew older i began to seek out the slightly more obscure- tales that have a more darker edge to them like donkeyskin and bluebeard.



and then there are stories that sound like fairy tales themselves like the little princess by frances hodgson burnett and the ordinary princess by m.m kaye i remember reading both of those books many many times...and the best website i have found regarding fairy tales is SurLaLune Fairy Tales which has a great selection of fairy tales that are annotated and include classic illustrations.

i am almost done with the book of lost things, a fantasy novel with a boy who loves reading stories - especially fairy tales and then enters a dangerous world where all those fairy tales exist.