art flops | Altered Bits Blog

boy have i been a busy little bee lately! getting ready for a few shows and adding things to the altered bits site over the next two or three days. i’ll have four new collage sheets (witches, bones, darker-themed-alicia-type stuff, as well as some naked ladies and such). apothecary bottles, mico-beads, petree dishes, microscope slides with covers, etc. all coming soon just a little too late for halloween. whoops!

i added three new photoshop textures, or backgrounds — whatever you could want to use them for on the free art page as well:

and last but not least, i’ve added a new tutorial for my “crackled window effect” on the art tutorials page. eventually there will be heaps of free and paid tutorials in both PDF and video format but it’ll take awhile to get them all up. some will be from me, and some from our fellow amazing arty friends so stay tuned.

you know those times when you put yourself fully into making something for someone and it ends up being a big ol’ flop!? well that seems to be my week. first, i was working on this sweet piece for my wonderful friend lisa jurist at mudhound primitives and decided to add a top coat of varnish. i have no idea where i got the image i used but i’d saved it for a long time and it felt soooo right to put it in her piece. about 20 seconds after i brush on the top coat, the image started to bubble, then sloughed off the canvas board! it was a total nightmare. i don’t think there is any way to fix that, so i shall start again. what a jackass i am!

so the very next day, i tried to make something for someone else. total mono-chromatic flop. here, just go ahead and laugh at me, i don’t mind (little hanging ACEO, the flapping flop of an attempt at something sweet):

to make up for it, i started something else for said friend and i felt it was just fine. set it down to dry, tossed my paint-covered baby wipe to the side and went on my merry little way (to watch dexter!). omg. so baby wipe landed on the piece and i could pretend i meant for this to happen but look at all of the black ickiness. i’m sad. so what? send a sweet friend two crap pieces and an IOU? lol. i crack myself up sometimes. i wish there were lots and lots more hours in the day! or that i didn’t have to cut my art time to work (took a month off — bad, bad timing for that one!!).

i did, however, start one and finish another piece that i just so happen to like (both!), so at least i have a 50-50 thing going on this week. will post those later.

off to read emails for the first time in 3 or 4 days, woots! happy creating, friends. 🙂

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P.S. Bunches of us have been particpating in The Art Exchange. If you don’t know what it is, here is the gist: you get an email from one of the players, you send a piece of art of sorts to the person in the #1 slot in the email, you move the #2 person up and replace them with yourself in the #2 spot. Sooo… you end up sending out ONE piece of art, and you forward the email to six people. In turn, you get THIRTY SIX pieces of art in return. A couple of the people I’ve sent this too are having difficulties finding players that aren’t too busy. If you’d like to play, post here or email me so I can get you in touch with someone to get you involved. It’s soooo fun!