I love Carve December! It is an Instagram challenge started and hosted by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer of Balzer Designs. She provides prompts for each day of the month and people carve stamps (blocks) inspired by those prompts, or whatever. I have generally been one of the “whatever” carvers but this year I am following the prompts and having a lot of fun with it. I am curious if you can guess what the prompts might be based on what I carved. I would love it if you would leave a comment with your ideas.
I have made another paper bag art journal to capture all of the printed goodness.
I used a paper bag art journal to capture the essence of October. It was a jam packed month! I posted a video (reel) on Instagram that you can see here. I wanted to share some still photos as well with more information about the content of the photos.
The paper bags come from a meal subscription service I use called Isthmus Eats and I get 1-2 meals in them most weeks. All the ingredients come with a recipe and they are very tasty but sometimes challenging to make. It has been great to increase the variety in my regular meal rotation. In any case, I have a growing stack of these paper bags and I knew how I wanted to use them. You can see I decided to make a paper bag book with pockets! It got really chunky!
This first page layout includes a Zendala with the first Inktobertangle (Inktober Zentangles) patterns of festune, toodles, seedways and melvina by Zentangle, Inc (first 2), Carla Jooren and Nadine Roller, respectively. Click on the pattern name to go to the instructions on how to draw that Zentangle pattern. The orange print with the eyes is from the resource I made for my Block Printing Fest handout. The background is papers that I have gelli printed in October and that were laying on my work table.
The list of Inktober Tangles prompts is on the next page with a tan phi tile with some of the patterns. The tan tile includes Star Rite by Nina Dreher-Goddertz, Oyvia by Shie Naritomi, and Adriadna by Tomas Padros. When you flip that pocket over you can see the ogee variations I played with. On the right are 2 ogee blocks I printed during my Repeat Pattern Design Deep Dive class with Ali (@3DottedPenguins). I used the ogee shaped spaces to draw in the pattern Lilife by Barbara Steyer. I liked this pattern so much that I carved a little ogee stamp of it and played with it some more. This is layered over some woven gelli prints.
I continued to play with that little ogee stamp on a blue phi tile shaped piece of paper and a little scrap of the blue paper. The tile is on a background of “quilted” gelli printed papers and book pages. It includes the Inktober tangles cochombros by Tania Ferriol Joyer and Ole Ole by Reyes Galindo. The Zendala on the right side is one of my favorite Zentangle patterns, zenith by Zentangle, Inc. It has some similarities with delwhy, another favorite and one that I have carved a bunch of stamps of and I included 3 of the stamps on the Zendala. You can see the Block Printing Fest label and in this pocket I had some of the prints I used in my Block Printing Fest presentation. I put a copy of the handout from my presentation into another pocket. Here is a photo of the stuff from all of the pockets in the book. It includes some Artist Trading Cards I got from Mel Beach.
The page under that pocket includes a Zentangle tile with the patterns Mrth and Tripoli from Zentangle Inc, and Puffle by Sandy Hunter. I carved 2 little tripoli stamps (the triangles) and added some tangled triangles. The triangular Zentangle tile includes the patterns Ing from Zentangle Inc, letterish by Jody Genovese, and they both also include some other patterns that I use frequently.
The next page layout includes 2 ATCs left over from a batch that I created to trade with Mel Beach for the lovely chicken and lady liberty (seen above). Behind that pocket is a print in yellow green and blue inspired by the Block Printing Fest session with Sarah Matthews. There’s also a few of my stamps included here on more gelli prints.
I love how these Zentangled papers turned out! The big grey one includes Middleton by YuRu Chen, Kangular by Tomas Padros, and butria by Ute Andresen. The one on the right on blue paper includes owlpeek by Susan Yeo, Yeed by Midori Furuhashi, quandry by Zentangle Inc, and bownus by Angie Gittles. The page under the pocket is some block printing I did for my presentation for Block Printing Fest and from some block play that Ali Baedecker did during one of the zoom sessions.
As you can see, there was a lot of inspiration and art making in October! I want to thank Stephanie Jennifer for again organizing the collection of patterns for the month. She provides the links to the step outs for all the patterns and it makes it very fun and easy to participate.
Post it somewhere (the refrigerator works if you don’t do social media).
There are other October challenges that have grown up around Inktober and the 2 that I enjoy are PrintInktober and InktoberTangles. Print Inktober isn’t very active this year and it generally includes both gelli prints and block prints and I’m doing both. I’m really focusing on the Zentangle challenge. It is a lively and inspiring community on Instagram and I really enjoy it. I’m always amazed at how quickly my Zentangleing skills improve when I do it every day!
I am also exchanging some artist trading cards (ATCs) with Mel Beach who is the master of ATCs! Quilts are her love language and she is amazing at them. She shares her ATCs all around the world. I mostly only share with her. I have a few from other artists, but I haven’t gotten anything to organize them yet and I just have the energy to make art and post about it on Instagram. And sometimes I can teach or show it or mail a few ATCs to my Instagram friend. And I try to blog about what is going on at least once a month.
I’m so happy with how the Zentangled ATCs turned out! All of the stuff that I’m generating (that I’m not mailing to Mel) is going into a paper bag book that I created. It has lots of pockets and spaces to collage and put Zentangled goodies in.
Day 100 of the 100 Day Project Sunflower to support Ukraine
This year my project was 100 days of color fun. I painted in this coloring page for the last day of my 100 day project. It’s for sale in my Etsy shop and the proceeds of the sales will go to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Emergency Response Fund to support Ukrainian refugees.
Here’s an overview of my 100 day project. Some of the color exploration that I did included mixing different color combinations in different brands of acrylic paint, playing with values of those colors or individual colors, gelli printing a whole rainbow of painted papers, compositions with a focus on value or different ways of making colors harmonize, combing color with Zentangle, much of it took place in the journal I created with Andrea Chebeleu from A Work of Heart Studio and some days just playing with color with whatever media I had at hand. And of course there are circles and flowers. Check me out on Instagram to see my full 100 day project @jeanette.clawson
Jeanette Clawson Art 