Hope is a thing with feathers...

This is a spread I just finished for an Art Garage Journal RR. The journal owner. Gloria, asked for the artists to "share your vision of Hope and your struggles with hopelessness." I chose the former. :-)
I started with the poem and found the adorable bird somewhere. Its collage, pastels, charcoal. and colored pencils.
I fed this page through my printer after it was colored and embellished. I made sure it was lined up perfectly first. It would have been a disaster if it didn't. Being somewhat dislexic, I have to turn my head upside down and watch the paper come of the printer to understand the orientation. LOL!

Moon Shell Charms

Paper Traders has a charm swap going on and this is my contribution. I started with disc beads made of mother-of-pearl. I sanded them down and stamped a face on one side with archival black ink. I heat set it with an embossing gun and then coated the image with diamond glaze. I made 13 of them...that's how many people are in the swap.
The hard part was teaching myself the basics of jewelry making to add the drop. Its a wrapped seashell.
I think I'm hooked on charms. I'm also making a series of very colorful bottle cap charms. Coming soon!

The array of charms is below.

White on White

This is a themed series of ATC's for a swap at Paper Traders. Anything goes, except color. We could only use white or shades of white. It was very challenging. I tried not to rely too much on variations of texture. Instead I relied on the subtleness of color. I'm not sure I accomplished what I set out to do... but it was an interesting experiment.
I used paper collage, rubber stamping, clear embossing, acrylics mixed with glaze and bits of fiber.
Here's the group of six: