Author: Clare at CatsEatDogs

Weekly Photos 28/52

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This has been a week of art and printing and colour!  Just how I like it. It has also been a week of homegrown tomatoes, once they are ripe they need eating, so tomatoes have been popping up in salads, pizza and sauce all week! 1. My first beefsteak tomato which went on a pizza! 2. I thought this van looked like the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine. 3. My first foray into printing this week, I started with a roller print and ended up with gelli plate prints too.  I printed onto lots of paper including this vintage music. 4. Dusk at the end of a dog walk and Pokemon hunt. 5. There are lots of mushrooms in the woods and I liked these star shaped fungi. 6. We had all the weather including a massive storm which we had to wait out in Starbucks, but we were rewarded with this ace rainbow as we walked home. 7. More printing, this time with the gelli plate and some dried honesty seeds. It has been a …

Get Messy Thursday. Season of Introspection Week 6.

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This was the last week of the Get Messy Season of Introspection and I am really happy with the final three spreads of my altered book.  I now have a book which started as a guide to growing avocados from the avocado stone and is now a full and splendid art journal. I made these three pages pretty much simultaneously once I had the back ground to the butterfly page. This background was a total experiment with a cardboard tube and cut up foam stickers to make a print roller.  I used my gelli plate as a palette to apply paint to the roller and it worked really well! As you can see in the pictures I ended up printing lots of things once I got started and once I had used the roller as much as I wanted, I pulled a few prints directly off the gelli plate. One of these prints is also used on the butterfly page at the edges.  I printed on dry deli paper because I like the translucent quality. …

100 Days of Altered Cards 71-80.

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We are almost at the home straight of The 100 Day Project and I was thinking why I like it so much.  I like challenges with prompts and instructions which are usually a month long, but this is a different beast.  Over three months of the same (ish) project which you thought up yourself and only really have yourself accountable for. I post my cards on Instagram every day using the hashtag #100daysofalteredcardsbycatseatdogs and that is pretty much my accountability. I know, I know, it could have been shorter! So, here are ten reasons I like The 100 Day Project so much. 1. The time frame is huge but so satisfying (especially once I got into double digits). 2.The body of work you make is going to be fairly big and hopefully useful 3. You can’t help but land on a style or a way of working which you enjoy. 4. I have learnt to work small. 5. I have learnt to take off the pressure to create something amazing each time.  There is always another go …

Weekly Photos 27/100

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It has been a week of humidity (no surprise there!), early morning dog walks, drawing and Pokemon catching with ‘Pokemon Go’.  Is there anyone not playing this app!? Wherever we go there are kids pointing their phones at random points and swiftly heading off to the next ‘catch’. I snapped some pics to share my week with you.  What have you been up to? 1. On Monday I went with my husband to the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It was a lovely cool morning and the gardens are in bloom in every direction. These lily pads are amazing and the reflection of the cherubs in the water made the photo. 2. My most favorite part of the gardens are the lotus flowers in the Japanese Garden and they were in bloom so I was a happy snappy chappy! I love these flowers so much, they influenced my whole week!  I drew them, painted them and used the colour palette in my art journal. 3. This wet pebble path was strewn with bright leaves. 4. Every time I …

‘I Like’ Friday starring Kale from the Garden!

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A few things that I have been liking this week of thunderstorms, sunshine,  pea soup humidity and humidity. Midori sketchbooks. I was admiring the work of Hey Hooray Design and her sketchbooks looked pretty cool. I noticed the Midori hashtag and went to investigate.  I found the Traveler Notebook inserts with blank pages at Jetpens and ordered a couple.  They are a great size 8″x 4″, tall and skinny!  The paper is not very thick but for pen and pencil drawings and notes, they will be perfect. Puzzle markers. Of course while I was on the JetPens site I could not help but have a browse and I came across these cuties.  Teeny tiny animal markers, they are like tiny post-its.  To be honest I thought they would be bigger (always read the measurement information folks!), but they are just adorable, so I was not disappointed. Neon highlighters and brush pens. I haven’t used my brush pens in a  while so I was pleased to roll them out for the Creative Bug Draw a Day class …

Get Messy Thursday. Season of Introspection Week 5.

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I have been rolling out of bed this week feeling less than motivated to be honest, so when I decided I had better get on with some art journal pages, my heart did not leap. The feeling was more of a ‘what I am going to do on these pages which need filling with art and meaningful journaling?’ Fill them of course! As you know I am not much of a journaler, so I concentrated on the art bit.  I sat myself down gathered my paints and started to think about what to do. One of the prompts from this season was to use a silhouette, so I decided to have a go at that, once the silhouette was down (it took a couple of goes and there may have been some ripped out pages!) What else to add? I left it for a day or two while I worked on another background and when I came back to it I decided to keep it simple, black and white flower doodles for the win. My …

Weekly photos 26/52.

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. 1. I made some tape transfers and couldn’t stop! For these I used regular tape with a matt finish. There is no stick left on the tape but this width is great for glueing in my art journal or onto my 100 day project cards. If you fancy making some here is a quick guide – How to make tape transfers You will need – tape, magazine images, warm water Stick the tape over the image you want to transfer to the tape. Submerge the whole image/tape in warm water for a few seconds. Peel off the tape and gently rub any excess paper from the back of the tape. Don’t rub too hard or crease the tape or you will end up with lines or rubbed off image. When I made the ones in the picture the tape literally floated off the page with the image intact. Glue them down to use as the tape will no longer be sticky. For more in depth instructions you can look at this post by A …

The same, but different. Sketch the same thing in different ways.

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Last week I was in the garden looking at my tomato plants to see if any were ripe and how huge the beefsteaks are getting.  I like to pop into the garden every morning and see how my tomatoes are doing, it is one of my favorite things about the summer. Nothing better than being able to grow your own veg, even if you only have three tomato plants! All of my plants have lots of tomatoes which is a marvelous thing. Anyway, on the day in question, I spotted a dried up leaf mangled up among my little tomatoes.  I went to pull it out when I realized that it was not a leaf, but a dried magnolia flower from my neighbour’s tree.  Perfectly formed, just with brown petals instead of the delicate pink of the fresh version. In all the years I have lived here, I had never noticed these mini wonders.  I began to look all around the tree and I found a handful of crispy flowers. Of course I did what …

100 days of altered cards 51-70

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Only 30 more days to go, one month of the 100 Day Project and all done.  I am enjoying seeing these little cards made into something new.  Now I have a collection of them I am wondering what to do with them when I am done. I think I will put them into a photo style album maybe using the Project Life pages and albums. Looking over them as a whole some have become mini art journal pages.  You can tell when we started to swim at the YMCA as part of our regular summer routine and when the poppies came into bloom in my garden. If you fancy a challenge which is not quite as long as the 100 days, Rachelle at Tinkerlab has a new Tinkersketch prompt list for July.  It is a fun thing to do for a month, the prompts are vague enough to allow you to do your art thing, but there is also enough guidance to keep you going. I think the ‘Swim’ card is my favorite, I just …

Weekly Photos 25/52

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  1. Poppies in my raised flower bed. 2. Honesty plant from an early morning dog walk. 3. Slip n Slide fun! 4.Queen Anne’s Lace. 5. My  Cherokee Purple Tomatoes are getting huge! 6. Mr Toad hiding under a leaf umbrella. Another sweltering week here in the mid-west.  I am excited to see a new poppy in my flower bed every day, they last such a short time, the petals fall and in the morning a new flower has appeared. I am hoping to harvest and sow some seeds from the honesty and grow our own. I hope you had a great week and are keeping cool or warm depending where on earth you are! Happy Monday x