Author: Clare at CatsEatDogs

Vintage fold out travel souvenir cards.

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I love vintage postcards and fold out souvenir accordion postcards books are the best!  I picked up this little lot at an estate sale this weekend.  Sixty five little books of geographic and cultural history, all for just over five dollars! They seem to vary in age from the early 1920’s to the sixties and seventies.  Some have prepaid postage for 1 cent!  What a bargain! The colours on the postcards are vivid and some more garish than others. The rocks in the Garden of the Gods postcards are all bright orange and the Seattle skies are all the same fabulous blue! The Seattle folder is full of pictures showing the sights of the region –  ‘today and yesterday’, the ‘today’ photos are from around 1914 I think.  The ‘yesterday’s are from around 1878-1900.  What a great comparison. I bought the cards with a view to painting or drawing on them, but I am not sure I can bring myself to ‘deface’ most of them.  I will probably copy them and work over the copies. …

Weekly Photos 3/52. 2017

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1. We went to Route 66 State Park this weekend and explored in the sunshine! 2. A naturally formed terrarium in an old bottle. 3. Yay for sunshine over the fields. 4. I climbed out of bed early on Saturday to go to a local estate sale and scored this ace tin of buttons and buckles. 5. I also bought a whole fabulous box of vintage travel ‘accordion’ postcards from the same sale.  I bought them to draw and paint on, but I am not sure I can bring myself to! 6 & 7. Two sides of the same painting at the St Louis Art Museum, I love the two colour palettes. 8. One of my favourite paintings at the Art Museum, cakes by Wayne Thiebaud. Happy Monday x

‘I Like’ Friday – some things I like.

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I was visiting my friend Annette at her lovely blog I Give You The Verbs today and she has a great post which is a list of things she likes.  So, I grabbed a cupful of inspiration and here is my list of things I like.  Appropriately on ‘I like’ Friday. Yay. Snapea crisps in black pepper flavor – I just discovered them and they are super duper good! Buying paints in a lovely colour palette, I went to ArtMart for Glow in the Dark paint and came out with a handful of fabulous colours.  I can’t wait to try out the Glow in the Dark! Painting with the above! Reading a good book, I look forward to reading every night and I am so disappointed when I find that I really am not enjoying the book in my hand. I am about to start a new book called ‘We Are Unprepared‘ so I hope it is a good one. Libraries, I hunt out the library wherever I go! Sunshine, it has been so gloomy …

Hand-Made small and mini journals.

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Are you easily influenced? I am and I have been spotting mini art journals all over the interwebs, mainly Instagram and I wanted to make my very own teeny tiny journal. So I did! I have lots of paper ephemera ranging from maps to paper bags via old National Geographic magazines and sports order forms, so I thought I would drag it all out and make a book or five!  You know how it is, once you start, you can’t stop. I started with a couple of small but not mini books, they are about five and a half inches by four inches and some of the pages fold out to make a wider spread. To stitch them together at the spine, I used wax linen and pamphlet stitch. I found a good book at the library with lots of clear instructions called How to make Books by Esther K. Smith which is full of great ideas including the single signature pamphlet or leaflet style book. I cut out three different size mini journals, the …

Weekly Photos 2/52 2017

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I missed week one of weekly photos this year because I was deciding whether to carry on with weekly photos.  I decided, no I was not going to and it threw off my whole blogging week, so I thought I would reinstate the weeklies! 1. I spotted this Old Man’s Beard fungi on a fallen tree this week, apparently they are edible, but even if I was super sure I could eat a wild mushroom, I don’t think I could. 2. The roses on this bush are still pretty even when they are dry and crispy. 3. We had a small ice storm on Friday and lots of schools and businesses were closed.  The trees were coated in a layer of clear ice and these bracket mushrooms also had an ice coat. 4. These berries look dramatic in their frozen cluster. 5. This sculpture on the Delmar Loop looks ready for some ice! 6. Coffee sacks at Blueprint coffee in The Loop.  I had a latte and it was one of the best I have …

‘I like Friday’ 13 things.

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On this icy cold Friday 13th I am sharing thirteen things I have liked this week. The new Hipstamatic lens/film park – Boulder is super cool and I also am loving the Frutiger film which adds the random imagery to your picture like the typewriter on my shed door above! The seeds below are taken with the Boulder pak. Project Runway Junior is rather addictive as usual! Lots of tea in my biggest mug. I have been using my vintage Polaroid Onestep 600 with a Duo-Chrome 600 Yellow film and it is very dramatic.  Instead of the pale tones they are replaced with yellow. Flora Bowley books, YouTube and Creative Bug videos are so inspiring to me at the moment, her method is much freer that I usually do, so I am trying to loosen up in my paintings and art journals. Britt-Marie was Here by Fredrik Backman is another fabulous read by Mr Backman.  So good. After falling in love with the A3 Moleskine sketchbook, I discovered a giant Strathmore 500 series mixed media sketchbook. It …

Get Messy Season of Gifts Week 6. Blind Contour Faces.

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I have a love/hate relationship with blind contour drawing.  It is super fun to do but the results are always at best hilarious, but more often just horrific! On a couple of these I cheated a little and looked every so often.  They are all done using a sumi brush and ink except the last one.   The ones which look like a bald monster were done following the rules and no looking, even when I was filling my brush.  While doing the other two, I peeked a couple of times usually when filling my brush.  I think they retain the free and loose effect, but a little less horror story! The final one is in my handmade journal and I started the page with some vintage dress pattern paper and some pink acrylic paint.  I drew some faces directly onto the page and some onto dry wax paper which I glued over the whole thing.  I also used a water soluble pencil which has dissolved a bit under the matt medium I used to …

Art Journaling. Get Messy Season of Gifts Week 5.

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I have been playing in my Season of Gifts journal and it is filling up nicely.  I am doing a horrible job at following any prompts, so the gift I am appreciating is the gift of being able to create these pages and share them with you. Because the journal is all kinds of different papers, not many spreads have the same paper on both sides.  This one has water colour paper on one side which I painted a galaxy using the Liquitex ‘muted’ inks and a white ink as contrast. The other side is the back of the red pattern paper which is really crinkly.  I added my lady and gave her a gold border then I drew with white pen and inadvertently ended up with a cat/owl creature on her headscarf. I have a feeling this character will show up some more now I have ‘invented’ her, I love the idea of an owl/cat creature! This spread is a magazine cutting of a landscape with a gelli print on dry wax paper glued …

Two 365 Projects for 2017

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I may have taken on too much this year in the way of daily challenges (I hope not!), I have started with two projects which are going to be daily for the whole year.  Look how new and skinny these books look now, I can’t wait to show you a picture of them bulging and messy with paint and pen! I am going to be making a daily doodle, pattern, drawing, collage, whatever comes into my head in my daily Moleskine planner/sketchbook.  This is my ‘quick’ daily art.  The pages are quite thin, so I will not be adding too much media but if I decide to go for it, I can just stick some collage onto the following page.  This diary is aiming to be a freeform art project, my playtime if you will. The page may be relevant to the day or not, I may even just write all over some days, let’s see! The second daily 365 challenge is to make a painting or drawing a day.  This book is bigger and …

Weekly Photos 52/52

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The last collection of photos from 2016!     1. Gingerbread modernist architecture with the addition of Jolly Rancher pillars! 2. My filled art journals from 2016. 3. I have been playing with the gelli plate and dried seeds this week to make some patterns and images to use in journal pages. 4. Blue skies for our New Year’s Day hike at Route 66 State Park. 5. We were looking for old bottles and found all of these shovels. 6. Railway bridge over the Meramec river. 7. Shadow family. 8. Pond, trees and reflections. Well, that was 2016 and here is 2017.  I hope it is a wonderful year for all of us, I am going to try and be regularly creative and record my journey here on the blog. Happy Monday x