Tide pools - Theme challenge at Art Elements

It is time again for our monthly theme challenge at Art Elements. This month Lesley chose the theme "Tide pools". I don't know what I should say to this theme other than that I believe it is really, really difficult to not find any inspiration in that!

I started playing a little bit with water colour. Experimenting with the effects I get by combining heavily granulating single pigment paints with ones that are not granulating...

...trying out some plant shapes as well as my new diamont silver aqua bronze from Schmincke (yes, so totally worth the money!)...

...and then going for some sketches. I had a look at Instagram for inspiration pictures just to get started and get a feeling for what I like and not.

I was undecided. I am actually playing nearly daily a little bit with my water colours, but not in any direction fitting for the theme. I use this daily play time more as a kind of diary or in combination with some personal note, so I didn't want to force myself to paint for this challenge.

Then I had a long look at my table after seeing  some sneak peaks from other Art Elements team members. Sitting there, looking at pieces of my work, I realized that I am mostly drawn to colours, effects and surfaces that all fit perfectly in the theme "tide pools".

Like I was not really doing anything else! Bowls, spoons, pendants, beads...

I made a tutorial for these glorious crustiness over at Art Elements, have a look here :)

Therefor I wanted to show you some things I made that I thought would fit for this challenge and hoped that while doing this I would get an idea what exactly I want to create.

This years I am mostly working with mixed media, water colours... not so much beads, ceramics, or jewelery. I spend a long time sitting in front of the cupboard where all my bead boxes are (the ones not sitting on or under the table ;) ) and going through all of my beads and art elements for creating jewelery I have. Gosh, it was a little bit like christmas seeing the kind of treasures I haven't looked at for months now!

I made a huge bead soups with fitting colours because I had the idea to finally make some necklaces from all the pendants I have. Didn't work out because in the end I came back to one of my oldest love "Earrings"!

It was a little bit slow at the beginning because my hands had to get their work memory back but after I finished some earrings pairs, all had come back and I realized how much I missed the joy of creating jewelery.

The photos of the earrings were all taken after some heavy rainfall creating a somehow quite fitting background. ;)

I am never sure whether my earrings will find a person who loves them as much as I do, sees the beauty in the single elements included and the stories they tell... but I was often surprised who bought which earrings from me and (sadly) which ones are still in their box waiting for someone to be treasured.

Please have a look what everyone else made for this theme challenge! And just again a thank you to all the guest who participated in this challenge, I can't wait to see all your creations!

And PS: Lesley, thank you for the wonderful theme! :)

Guests:
Raven
Kelly 
Cat
Kathy 
Tammy 
Alyson
Elaine 
Mischelle 
Deborah  
Anita 
Jill
Shirlee
Sarajo 
Melissa 

AE Team Members:
Caroline
Cathy
Claire (you are here)
Jen  
Jenny  
Laney 
Lesley 
Marsha 
Niky
Sue
Lindsay

Assemblage - Component of the month (Art Elements)

For the component of the month at Art Elements, we got wonderful runes made out of bronze by Niky Sayers. The one I got was strength.

She also send a note with all the different meanings: Strength, sacrifical, animal, the Aurochs (bos primigenius) species of wild  ox

It took me a while to decide what to create with it. Also I got a really bad cold, some hardcore drugs with heavy side effects and was "out-of-order" for about two weeks, so also not the best starting point.

But there comes my wonderful/horrorful work table with so much stuff lying around. There is an order from time to time but I am not the one to keep that during creation... or when I only have limited time available, I prefer to use it for creating and not sorting.

This time it was a blessing because in one of the boxes were a lot of book covers I made last year (I showed you them over at Art Elements here). I took the rune and hold it against different book covers until I settled for the ones covered in dark brown leather (it was too thick for book binding but I still like it!).

Then I had a look what else was lying around me and started to create an assemblage of mixed materials to put on the front cover. So no way you can put this little book in a shelf but as an art book, it was never meant to be!

So, there is a branch with roots I found in the park and had to take with me, wonderful snail shells as well as broken shell pieces from Formentera, a hand I made with polymer clay (yes, body parts are also lying around ;) ), tiny semi-precious stones, and then some mixed media kind of paints I made myself (there will be more about this soon over at Art Elements):

I used some wonderful brownish/grayish sketch paper to sew the leaflets (110g/m2) and glued it in with a wonderful green paper with golden dots. Sadly it was too thin even though it didn't appear so.

Last but not least I attached a bone game pieces I got from a secret santa. I made the dangles in the "Use your stash" challenge at Art Elements and was not sure for what to use it. My ideas were earrings or necklace but Jenny (also at Art Elements, see below for her blog!) gave me idea to use it with a book. Thanks again for the idea! You see, I used it :)

And Niky, thank you so much for such a wonderful component that challenged me in the best way!
Please have a look what all the other participants made with Nikys runes.

Guests:

Kelly Rodgers

Deb Fortin

Art Element Members:

Laney Mead

Lesley Watt

Caroline Dewison

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Susan Kennedy

Cathy Spivey Mendola

Jennifer Stout Cameron

Claire Fabian (you are here)

Lindsay M Starr

Niky Sayers