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

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.