Ideas from Pinterest: Family Calendar

I know I'm not the only one who loves Pinterest.  For me, it's a fun way to organize all the ideas I see on the Internet.  I'm a visual person, and being able to see a quick picture of what I am looking for works better for me than reading a list of web bookmarks. 

It's easy to get sucked into browsing all the lovely items people pin, so I have made a goal of at least attempting to create/do something inspired by Pinterest as least once a month (it legitimizes all that browsing, right?).

So, I decided to get organized using ideas from Pinterest.  Part of this was to meet my goal, and part of it was to prepare for the new school year.  I figure if I can be a little bit more organized, I might be able to reduce the stress of juggling teaching with home life and my need to create.

Here is a project I worked on.  I took an idea from Olive and Love that uses an old frame with glass and paint chip samples to create a dry erase calendar.


 It looks great, right?  And organized.

I put my own spin on it, deciding not to use paint chips, but instead created a watercolor wash on paper that I then cut up.  I also decided to raise the paper by using foam tape on the back to achieve more of a 3-D look.  I also made the background by cutting up pages from a book and collaging them onto cardboard.  Since I had all the materials lying around, including an old frame, it didn't cost me a thing.  So here is my version:

Drawing Exercise

Many months ago I purchased Carla Sonheim's  Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun.  It's filled with some excellent ideas for improving your drawing skills and useful if you need to get past a creative block.  It's organized as a series of exercises, many of them fairly short in duration.  I started one of the exercises when I purchased the book, but never got around to finishing it.  Today I went ahead and finished the painting/drawing because I wanted to use some new watercolor pencils I purchased last weekend.  Here is the result.  I like that the exercise freed up the movement in my drawing, as I have a tendency to draw animals in the same position.  What I don't like is that it's obviously off as far as perspective--part of the nature of the exercise, as I tried to stay as close to the watercolor washes as possible.