Amber Gibbs - Art Journals, Collage Art & Mixed Media Adventures

A few new art journal pages

Hope everyone in the US had a great Thanksgiving. We did! My whole family was in town so we had a great get together. I'm a bit behind in my art journal and my kiddo and I have a nasty cold. Exciting, I know.

Art Journal - Birds and Butterflies

I'm finding more time to journal now. Kavya is very happy to sit with me while I journal and she colors. Well, the art part of journaling. (Writing would be much harder with the non-stop stream of talking we have and the interruptions, so I continue to write in the bathroom and at night.) She has to sit in my lap sometimes and I will read or will play with her plastic animals, but I do get a bit done. I'm so happy to be able to do this again.

I liked this bird page a lot better before the writing - the negative space was important to the flow. But the point of my journals is also to chronicle my life and Kavya's first years.

India 2

One of the amazing things I did in India was to see an ancient Hindu temple. This was my 4th trip to India and the first time I had the opportunity to see a temple or building that I'd studied in my art history courses in college.

We visited the Konark Sun Temple in Orissa. Dating from the 13th c., the entire temple is covered in detailed sculptures carved in sandstone. The design is a chariot, pulled by 6 horses with 12 unique and exquisite wheels.

Sadly, proximity to the ocean and air pollution have not been kind to this temple. This is the only remaining horse. My mother-in-law remembers more horses standing from when she visited 10 or so years ago.

Here is one of the wheels.

I adore the graceful female sculptures from Indian art. They really capture the feminine form well.

You can see a lot more of my photos from the Sun Temple here on Flickr. And the rest of my India photos are also on Flickr.

Art Journal - Sunflower

This is one of those "lots of layers" pages. First attempt at the page I hated, so I covered it with a pretty wrapping paper and scrapbook paper. Then gessoed over that. Then I tried Teesha Moore's method of cutting out letters from magazines to spell something, and that just didn't look right to me. So I pasted this transparency of a sunflower over it and somehow that worked.

I am still sorting through the India pics, will be posting more soon.

India (or why the 2 month blog absence)

We've been in India. No, not for 2 months. But preparing to take a 2 year old to India requires a lot of work. Most of say August. That and trying to get work done in advance of being gone and knowing I wouldn't have a babysitter upon return. (My babysitter is pregnant and expecting in early November so she didn't want to sit through October.)  So that's where I've been.

India was interesting. I've been to India 4 times, this was my 5th time there. First time there with a child. My husband is from India, so to see his family, we must travel to India. Otherwise, India would not be my first choice of vacations with a toddler. Mostly because it is a loooong set of flights. Try this on:

1. Leave at 5AM for the airport
2. Make 7AM flight to Seattle
3. Layover of 5 hours in Seattle
4. 10 hour flight to Frankfurt Germany
5. 4 hour layover in Frankfurt airport
6. 8 hour flight to New Delhi, India

But my kid did really great on the plane. She napped, she played with sticker books. She watched Elmo DVDs. It's just REALLY long.

But once we were there - and finally at our vacation destiation - Puri (which involved another flight and a car drive), we were able to enjoy the beautiful beach. Kavya LOVED the ocean.

I had a lot of fun taking pictures of the unusual things on the beach. I did not, however, get a picture of the camel on the beach. There are a lot of tourist things in Puri, India you'd find on the coast here in the US - tacky shell trinkets, ice cream, sweet vendors - but I've never seen camel rides on the beach.

You can see more of my beach photos on my flicker account.

We also got to visit an old temple (FINALLY) and I took a ton of photos of the beautiful stone carvings. Which I will share with you. Soonish :) And I'll be back to art journals soon too.

Art Journal - Houses

Created this little sketch page purposely ignoring my high school art teacher's futile lessons in perspective. I just wanted to make it be crazy.

I have such a hard time creating this summer. Meh, need to get back into the grooooove.

Summer Heat & Morbid Art

I really like this page - but I know people have this thing about skeletons. They see them as really morbid. And I get that, there is definitely an imagery link between death and skeletons/skulls. But I find them fascinating. Our bones are crucial to so much of our daily lives. They go everywhere with us. Yes, they represent death, but to me they also represent life and the circle of life. This was a lot deeper in my head before I started to type.

Maybe it's the heat. We are in the midst of our summer heat wave. We get one every summer, sometimes it is worse than others. I always try to remember that come winter time, I'll be wishing for 100 degree heat waves. But it never works, I always whine and complain.

But other than ridiculous heat, I love the summer. Hello BERRIES! Hello all sorts of fruit that I love! Time to make ice cream! And sharing it all with a toddler is a lot of fun too. Even when I went berry picking alone with her and she eventually refused to walk and I had to carry her and the berries, it is fun. (Next time I'm taking a wagon!)

Wading Back In

My first set of pages in my new journal. I loved this collage and then I drew on top of it, hated it, added more color, hated it, poured ink all over it and then realized if I added anything else, the media would just start to slide off! So that's how it is now.

Tiny Bird Art

I used these pendant collage sheets by Alpha Stamps to make these inchies (1" square tiles). I know birds are "so 2007" but whatever, I like them. My motto these days is that I only make art for ME. So yeah, BIRDS.

Oh my!

I knew I'd been absent from this blog for a while. But wow, seriously, I have not posted since the beginning of April. That's like, um, 3 months, isn't it?? 

I have excuses. Yep.

Let's see:

1) Life/Work/Baby - all of these things take time. Even tho I only work part time (thankfully), it has a way of consuming all non-baby minutes of my life.

2) Baby is actually now a toddler. And since it became nice outside (in um April), we tackled gardening projects and sampled dirt and leaves and some edibles from around the yard. Unlike last year where she wanted to be solely attached to Mama, this year, she is running around free. It's amazing how fast they grow up, but that first year is a hard one to get through. Now we are almost through year 2!!

3) After I finished my last journal (see that April entry), I lost my journal mojo. I started another journal, but floundered. Now I am starting back up, so hopefully I'll have some new posts soon. I realized I kinda need to get some thoughts out on paper to save my sanity and alleviate anxiety.

Here's something completely unrelated to my excuses. This is a drawing I did in the winter when I decided to work on my drawing skills (one of the few good enough to show you). I colored it in crayon and then did an ink wash. Crayons are pretty baby friendly now that she doesn't put EVERYTHING in her mouth.

Suzi Blu explains Moleskine love in one of her youtube videos. Like she said, if you get it, you get it, if not, there's not much we can say. It's not a big deal if you don't and want to journal in something else. That's the beauty of art journaling, you go your own way.

Anyway, gardening season is winding down for me (more my enthusiasm than the actual season), so I hope to post more. But we've got a big trip coming up (international travel with a toddler, weeeeeeeee! but we want to visit relatives and stuff), so I'm still not sure how much I'll post. This is why I recommend getting a blog reader. I like Google Reader. I used to have bloglines, but I prefer Google Reader now, it's far more reliable.