I've been taking an online "summer school" art class by Karyn Gartel (aka Altered Diva) called Softly Spoken and it's all about creating backgrounds for collage work. Just what I needed! This is the first piece I made using acrylic paint, stamps, gesso, colored pencils, charcoal pencil, white grease pencil, and collage images from Karyn. I call this The Caged Bird.



And this is my second one called My Stars. The quote comes from an Emilie Autumn song. Both pieces were done on watercolor paper. Even though I've done a few mixed media collages on canvas, I feel I need to concentrate more on practicing on the paper for now. I have some ideas of pieces I'd like to do, but I need to work on my color combinations. Sometimes they just turn out muddy and brown.



Karyn's blog is listed in the blogs to see on the right. Her workshop information is here. She's an amazing artist!

What else...what else...
I have been contemplating buying a bike. A vintage looking one, robin's egg blue or pink. A cruiser of sorts, although maybe that isn't the best idea since I am surrounded by hills. Nonetheless, I keep telling myself, a bike would be a grand birthday present (Aug 4). Then, after much excitement at the prospect of a new bike I remember...there's no way to get it home.

That's not completely true. My boyfriend and I went bike shopping in early spring. We took my little Ford Focus because a) his car is smaller than mine and houses large speakers in the trunk and b) we believed it could hold anything. We had stuffed a big screen tv in the backseat, a patio table in the trunk, and my whole room (when I moved from Texas) in every nook and cranny of the thing. Surely a bike would fit. That was not the case. A bike is an awkward shape and no matter how many ways we tried to shove it in, it just wouldn't go. Soo...the boyfriend decided to ride it home. I thought he was crazy, as it was getting dark outside and he had to ride it down a busy street with no shoulder! He made it home in about 30 minutes and said he enjoyed the experience. Good for him, but *I'm* not going to ride a bike from Kalamazoo to the house.

I'm wondering if stores deliver. Also, I keep going back in forth in my head whether or not I will really ride it. Sometimes I think I only want one because I love the aesthetics of a vintage bicycle.

Oh! And I must tell you that I had the most delicious dream the other night about eating French macarons. They were purple and tasted like heaven. This weekend I'm going to try my hand at making some. There's a recipe for blueberry ones in the latest Tea Time magazine. You wouldn't believe how excited I was to find that!