This month's theme challenge at Art Elements was chosen by Laney - Stars! My first thoughts were that this would be a wonderful versatile theme: From simple drawn stars to complex galaxies, from nightskies to the sun itself...
...but in the end that was not the reason. I simply still struggle with the change of the seasons. It is dark when I get up in the morning, it is dark when I come home. Maybe I see a little bit of light through the windows at word but otherwise it is all dark and grey. It takes me a long time to adapt to the missing light. My body just feels tired and we have an argument about sleep on a daily basis (since I agree with him but not the rest of society, it is even more exhausting). So my energy level is non existent.
You can find stars in my work all the time. Above I showed some simple ceramic pendants (some from last year, some from this year). I make them for simple and fast children workshops using christmas decoration as stamps.
I also love to make small ear studs with polymer clay in star shape. They always look so lovely and I am filling up my stash for the christmas market at Werk II in Leipzig. The glass cabochon earrings are from last year but I just had to show them to you! Made with pages from an old encyclopedia britannica and still some of my favorite ever "view stars"!
I love to make colour swatches from any kind of colour. This really helps me later to decide what I want to use (or buy if it was a sample) and in itself it is so relaxing. Seeing the mainly blueish colours I thought it would be a nice idea to add silhouettes and add some stars! Still working as colour swatches but even more fun to create!
As I wrote above, shapes are always wonderful to transfer to different media and of course I wanted to make some christmas cards. A super simple idea is to cut stars from textures paper and use them to create texture on a gel printing plate (I use Gelli Arts and GelPress). I like to enhance the contrast / contours with a pen. Maybe I will also add more contrast on these cards...
Another super simple idea that I think is wonderful to make with children or simply if you want to have a project idea with (or for) friends. I have a lot of small pieces of my gel monoprints. They are to beautiful to throw away so I keep them all (even the tiniest piece could be used for earrings)!
I added double sided tape on the back, drew a rough star (don't go for perfect!) on the backside and then cut them out.
There are your star sticker!
I glued some stars on small cards with printed background I had at hand (at every time you will find way too many work in progress pieces on my table). Any kind of paper / card would work for this.
But seeing the images now, I think, I will enhance the contrast of the stars (and incorporating them better to the background) with some pens. Either with acrylic paint pens or with polychromos (they work wonderful on acrylic paint).
Of course I kept the plastic backside of the tape! That are wonderful masks for gel plates! (You can guess my problem now, or? Why I have way too much stuff... because you could use everything sometime ^^)
I had more of the small cards with colourful printed backgrounds and only added a neutral, warm colour on top (stone grey from Schmincke Akademie).
Love them! I need to make more of them!
Thank you for joining us for this month's theme challenge at Art Elements! I can't wait to see what everyone made and hope you will have a look too!
Guest Artists
Art Elements Team
