CKC Manchester

Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge and off you go. That's exactly what the Creating Keepsakes Convention was for me. To be surrounded by tons of talent and have the time and space to be creative and my love for papercrafts and scrapbooking is fully recharged. I took 4 classes on Friday and participated in the celebration crop and I took one 2 hours class on Saturday followed by sit and crop for the rest of the day.

My favorite class on Friday was the "Adorable Envelope Album" class and I loved the "Creative Color Techniques 2" class on Saturday. The other classes were okay, but I don't feel like I learn anything when the entire class is based on a kit. I don't need to pay money to sit in a class and make a card or page based on a kit. Anyone can punch pieces out of a piece of paper and glue them down. I really wanted to learn a new technique or layout. Next year, I'll make sure not to take any kit classes. Next year, I will stay for the celebration crop on Saturday, too. I was so sad leaving at 5pm on Saturday. Then again, I did need to rescue Nana from my 2 year old.

Here is one of the pages I made during the celebration crop on Friday night. So fun!

I have to wait until the end of April 2014 to go back to CKC, but I did so much shopping while I was there, it should take me until then to use all the stuff I bought. Can't wait!

Colored Pencil Drawings

I finally recovered the hard drive of my old computer and found all kinds of art that I have done previously. Here are some that I did with a new set of colored pencils. The proportions are off on some of them, but still I love the colors.

Big Heart Kitty

Flying Fish

Goldfish 1

Stained Glass Fish

The Windy Scarf

Snowman 1

Stop Singing Across My Face

More iPastels

If you enjoy creating art on your iPad, I highly recommend iPastels. I use it with my Bamboo stylus and I'm having so much fun with it. The image quality is only for small format printing, but if you're looking to make something like a 4x6 or 5x7, this is prefect. Here are two more pears I drew using the app.

More Fun With iPastels

I'm having so much fun with the iPastels app on my iPad2. There's a pretty short learning curve allowing me to draw fairly decent pictures rather easily. Here are my next two creations I drew by looking at photographs of pears.

Pear #2

Pear #3

Now if I could only figure out why my real pastel drawings don't look this good. I think it's the 'back' button and erase feature. :) I can't wait to do more!

New App - iPastels

So I saw somewhere on Pinterest (where I tend to see everything creative) about an app for my iPad called iPastels. Since I've been doing a lot of pastels, I thought I'd try it. The app is free, so how can you go wrong?

Screen shot of the program.

The app is really easy to use, nothing fancy, just size, hardness, and color with some smudging features, which is pretty much all I use in my regular pastels, so perfect for a beginner like me. Here's the first one I created.

Pretty Dress

Here's the second drawing I did.

Blue Flip Flops

And here's the third one I did. I was starting to get tired, so there's a lot less detail and the hairline is all messed up.

The Running Girl

Anyway, I like that this is on my iPad because that makes this tool very portable without lugging around paper, pastels, gloves, etc.

My Pastel Drawings

I certainly have a lot to learn, but I'm just having so much fun with soft pastels.

 I did this calla lily during my first pastel class. It was a free class at the library, imagine that?

I drew this one almost as soon as I got home from a photograph I took at a botanical garden.

 This was drawn from a photograph I took at an arboretum in Arizona.

 These two I drew from photographs on the web.

This one I drew during an art class at the MFA. Great class and great teacher.

Fun With Photos

Going from these two photographs, I had a lot of fun creating the drawings. One is a trace, one is a sketch, one is a pastel, and one is pen and ink. It's pretty cool how many different drawings you can make from just a few photographs.