Change of Seasons brings...well change.

After doing the bills and getting totally depressed again.  I decided to distract myself and rummage through my craft room.  After a few moments of "straightening and organizing" it has dawned on me that I really need to start listing some more items up on my shop.  Unfortunately this means I also have to part with my favorites.  One is my mixed media painting of "The Littlest Bear".  She's oh so gosh darn cute, I'll be sad to see her go..but like every artist I need to let go of my babies...it's what we do.  So, without further delay she's now up on my Etsy site looking for a good home."The Littlest Bear"

Spring Has Sprung !

And so has my creativity.  :)


 I decided to break out the old bear making materials again..dusted off the old sewing machine, organized my fabrics, rounded up my needles and took stock of my supplies.  After rummaging around the closet, I pulled out my patterns and found a few nice pieces of mohair I had forgotten about.  As I pulled out the short nap blonde fat yard of mohair..a ziplock bag of fluff fell out.  Pink and lavendar fluff to be specific.  "Whats this?" I thought to myself.. "An unfinished bear! Shut up!"..I unzipped the bag and lo and behold..sure enough..it was a hand dyed bear set..all the pieces were there...arms legs..head pieces.. It just needed to be assembled.

Now..having the flu certainly puts a damper on your crafting abilities, but I was ready to get well and decided to work on that bear..piece by piece and hand sewed most of it.  I finished the head first to get a feel of what it would look like as a whole..then it struck me..I wanted to do something different for the nose..something completely different.  Cotton string would not do this time.  I again went thru my supplies..and found my stash of felting needles "hmm..better put these where they belong before I loose them again"...**Ding ding ding** ~insert bright idea light-bulb here~   Yup, you guessed it...I needle felted a nose.  I had some non-carded wool roving and found a nice minty teal color.  After a while it actually started to look like a nose.  But something was missing.  The nose was too big..hmm..  I looking thru my roving again...this time I dug to the bottom of the container...and guess what folks..I had a bunch of  roving that matched the backing of the mohair "EXACTLY".   Four broken felting needles and a handful of wool later..."ta da".   A bear is born..

Coupon Coupon Coupon

In honor of Valentines Day I am offering a 10% off coupon at my Etsy shop,  which is usable at the check out.  Stop on by to see whats new at the Ol' CLB, make a purchase and be sure to use coupon code CLB10 at your checkout.

Happy Valentines Day!

What the heck is she doing?

Thank you for asking!  Actually I have been doing a lot more work in  my art journal. Faces have always been my bane and I had decided to take an online class to get over my hurdle of not being able to draw any sort of a human looking face.  If you would like to take a look at my Flickr account or my Deviant Art, you can see how I have progressed.  Loving my new skill, thank you Suzi Blu, and looking forward to more work like that.

Recently, however, I have been toying around with Gimp. No, it is not a monkey or something I have locked up in my closet, It is actually a free photo-manipulation program which is very similar to Photoshop.  I am really enjoying fixing up old photos to remove any tears, scratches or dust marks.  The latest one, which I just finished this morning, I removed a third person from the photo.

Here is the original, you can see the younger sibling on the right.  Also, there are multiple scratches all over this photo (example: the girls hat and hair).  After a bit of messing around with Gimp I finally had finished repairing this image, with slight adjustments.

Here is the "fixed" version of the photo.  Most of the scratches are gone, as well as the 3rd sibling (sorry little guy).  It was a great learning experience and I would love to work with this program more. :)

Baby Dragon

Baby Dragon
Originally uploaded by CLBcreations

A work in progress..
I have always wanted to draw a newly hatched baby dragon and finally came up with the layout while laying awake in bed one night. Also, this was a chance to try out my new Caran Neocolor II water soluble artist crayons as well as a new bottle of gesso. Love the crayons...jury is still out on the gesso...it was kinda gritty to be honest..but was very white in color.

I plan on finishing up this little guy with my pigma pen. Choosing to use stippling instead of a crosshatch type detail, I think it lends itself to more of a skin texture ..where crosshatching is more of a textile type shading. The background is yet undecided, but I tend to want to move to a more textured technique. Maybe I'll throw in some moulding paste and do a color wash or two over it..~shrug~ dunno..guess we'll have to see when I get that far.