Our guest speaker/artist, Marilyn Bishop, gave a very interesting and entertaining program yesterday for our watercolor society. She makes bookmarks from scraps of things - matboard, rice paper, "failed" watercolors, markers, etc. And she had a great display of bookmarks to show us - none of which looked like you'd want to use for bookmarks! They were much too pretty and artfully done. So, I guess you can take bookmarks to a higher artful level than one would think - and she does.
I think we all were thinking of all the little scraps of things we could use on matboard to make these - or something similar - for ourselves.
Using an Elmer's glue stick to paste the watercolor and other bits onto the matboard, she said most of the time is spent thinking about the design. I can see getting lost it lots of bits and pieces and not being able to choose which color, which scrap, etc. Marilyn calls her scraps Strips (longer strips of watercolor paper) and Chips (more squared or rectangle pieces). Loving color and paper, it was fun to watch her create several of these for us during the meeting.
So - do have scraps lying around? Do you have any watercolor painting that didn't quite make it but aren't totally losers? Do you have some matboard scraps or small pieces? Then off you go!
I intend to make a few - but not as bookmarks. I'm going to make them 4" x 6" like postcards. We'll see what I come up with when I start sorting all the bits I have. I even purchased an Elmer's glue stick and some gold, silver, bronze and white markers today to try it.
Of course, I liked all of Marilyn's bookmarks but chose only 2 that I really wanted (2 of the only ones she had in cool colors! ha ha)
This would be a great art-day event to share with your grandkids, who would love putting things together and all you do it stamp, glue, and doodle a bit for embellishments!
Thanks, Marilyn, for an inspiring program :)
10 comments:
Rhonda, thanks for sharing this very cool idea-now I'll have something creative to do with all my failures LOL!! Happy New Year btw.
Oh Rhonda thanks so much for showing us this. I've been frazzling my brain recently trying to think how I could design and make watercolour bookmarks to use up the odd scraps. I couldn't think what to do in that little space. These are really fabulous. What a great idea. Another thing to add to the list of things to do in 2013. Thanks again. Enjoy making yours.
These are gorgeous. What a fabulous way of dealing with watercolours that aren't finished paintings. Wonderfully creative way of dealing with them.
Looking forward to seeing your take on bookmarks some time soon.
These are really cool--I'll wait to see your postcards. I'm seeing lots of new projects for 2013; I think the new years brought new energy.
Those are superb! It is nice to play once in a while, isn't it!
Fabulous! So creative!
Nice!
Hi, Rhonda,
Thank you for sharing the wonderful post and the photos!!
Cheers,wink,wink, Sadami
I'm glad you all enjoyed seeing a little bit of the program and how Marilyn does it. I have 2 postcard-sized pieces done now (it takes time to think and plan and sort and choose what you want on each piece so not a quick put-it-together-and-go type of artwork). Anyway, try it! I know we all have scraps around we can use - get out that stuff you just had to have that you've never used (like stamps, bits of collage paper, watercolors that didn't work - and go for it!)
This design is wicked! You most certainly know how tto keep a reader entertained.
Between your witt and your videos, I was almost moved to start my
own blog (well, almost...HaHa!) Excellent
job. I really loved what you had to say, annd more than that,how
you presented it. Too cool!
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