I’m on maternity leave – but before I left, I spent some time surfing the web for some great art and craft entertainment – so here are some links I enjoyed, hope you’ll like them too!
Mixed media and paper craft tutorials:
Make an inspiration book from a paper bag
(and from the same blog, make paper bag [...]

I am a HUGE fan of people who can draw and paint, and come up with a final piece that doesn’t look like a preschooler made it. I’m not one of those people. (My husband is, though, and you can check out some of his past work at Southwestern Voodoo.)
Having also spent many, many hours [...]

I can’t embed Suzi Blu’s videos, but you can go visit her YouTube channel and start clicking away. If you’ve ever thought about trying art journaling, collage, or mixed media art, I recommend spending a little time there. Lots of ideas, and clips of her demonstrating a bunch of mixed media and painting techniques.
She’s the [...]

I’ve spent {way too much} time reading other people’s blogs lately, and in the interest of closing a couple of the tabs currently open in my firefox, I’m going to share a few sites I found that I think are worth spending time reading.
First, have you read iHanna’s blog? Because the next two links were [...]

As I was editing some jewelry photos I took outside, I noticed that the blurry backgrounds sometimes look like watercolor or impressionist-style paintings.
Here’s an example:

I added the frame using paint shop pro, to emphasize how it looks like it could be artwork.
I love it when I discover something beautiful by accident like this. My camera [...]

I just had to share these beautiful abstract landscape paintings by Bobbi Chukran. Bobbi is an artist, writer, and crafter living in Texas. I’ve known her in the virtual world for a while, and was excited when she recently decided to start listing her landscapes on etsy. I love them, the colors are so soothing, [...]

The Altered Object: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration by Terry Taylor is a mixed-media art book that is half inspiration, half technique. It has inspiring artist profiles, beautiful photos of mixed media artwork, and tips and techniques for altering objects.
Altering objects to create art is definitely in style these days – you can make very unique, interesting, [...]

Since my husband is an artist, I rarely purchase art for our walls. But I couldn’t resist a couple of sock monkey illustrations (well, prints, not the originals) from Elegant Snobbery. Her style is very different from my husband’s and these are perfect for our baby’s room!
I got a few other goodies too, check it [...]

Thanks to H. Palleiko for this post that pointed me to this article from American Craft on the growing trend toward art that isn’t actually handmade by the artist. It’s an interesting perspective. Since I make (or at the very least assemble) all of the jewelry I sell, and am more familiar with the modern [...]

I was catching up on etsy news and found a link to this great article which lists 100 visual artists on etsy. Of course these are personal favorites of the author, so there are many, many talented artists not represented here, and there is definitely a preference for the style that the author prefers which [...]