Time to post again

These are two works I'm entering into the Crazy Amigo Challenge at   http://crazyamigochallenge.wordpress.com/. I don't often enter weekly challenges like this, but lately I've been following Heather Robinson's lead, who enters lots of weekly challenges. Heather, http://creativesolace.blogspot.com/, is an excellent artist and good art buddy of mine, and I so admire her art. Some of you already visit her blog, but for those who don't, you really should -- it will be a treat! Heather and I have a personal swap coming up soon, a collaborative effort we'll be working on. I'm looking forward to that a lot. I think it will be very interesting to see what we end up with, considering our art styles are totally different. Greetings Heather!

The theme of the Crazy Amigo Challenge this week is Hearts. And I do love using hearts in my art! The first piece I created yesterday. I used a sharp awl to scratch diagonal lines into the brown side of a 5x5 piece of frozen pizza cardboard. (I should start abbreviating that into FPC, lol, I use it so often for a base.) Then I rubbed it with brown paste shoe polish, so the lines would show up. Then I glued some torn music paper, and text and an image torn from an old Cumberland General Store catalog published in 1976, and rubbed them with shoe polish. I don't even remember where I got that catalog, maybe at a yard sale, but I think I should start using the images, they are great. The rectangle on the right is a distressed paint chip. I've shared how I distress them in previous posts. I outlined that with a gold paint pen. The hearts were cut out of brown candy wrappers, the the gold circle was punched out of a foil bag that once contained coffee. After the fact, I don't think gold was the best color to use for the circle, but oh well. And the letters and number were burned into the piece with my Wallnut Hollow Hot Stamps tool. I finished by sealing it with Future Floor Finish (FFF).

The second piece is one I made a few weeks ago, and entered into a yahoo group challenge, the theme being using the colors red and green. I used the FPC as a base, but used the colorful image side, after sanding it a bit. Then I used my sharp awl to distress it and scratch the text into it, then rubbed with shoe polish. Then I rubbed magenta acrylic paint over it and quickly wiped some of it off, then rubbed green glaze over certain parts. I stamped with scroll stamps in the green. Then I glued down the hearts and the frame, made from distressed paint chips. Lastly, I sealed it with Acrylic Floor Finish (AFF from the Family Dollar store that gives more of a satin finish.)

As an aside, I wanted to say that I stumbled onto this website yesterday, myartfriends.com http://www.myartfriends.com/index.php, and decided to join. It looked interesting to me, and there's some good art there, and lots of different artists. So, I posted some of my work there, and will be posting more as time goes on. The works I posted have already been posted here on my blog. Just wanted to share that site with all of you.

That's all folks.