Tag: Art at home

Elevated Doodles

December 10, 2025

Dear Liza,

Sometimes, instead of a well-thought out, challenging art project, I just want to doodle on the couch with Auntie Bridgett and Grandpa Nelson.

That’s how this series came about. It started with this, a ballpoint pen doodle filled in with colored pencils and patterns. Then I rounded the corners and added some flourishes. I liked how it looked, so I photographed it.

I decided to try and make another one like it, to see each step and share with you. Here’s the doodle. I wasn’t crazy about the wonky corners, but Picasso said that if you hate a piece, keep going.

So I colored it in with Staedtler colored pencils, like the first one. I left some spaces empty for Micron #12 patterns.

Once the spaces were filled in dots and dashes, it started coming together. Almost like a free form quilt.

I thickened up the lines and rounded the corners, and belatedly noticed that these were watercolor pencils I was working with! So I got my brush pen and added the tiniest bit of water… and magic happened!

I get the feeling this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Christmas Cards for Positive Charge

December 4, 2025

Dear Liza,

Our dark, rainy weather has started, but I have a sunny warmth in my heart (and my art closet). Auntie Bridgett and I are making Christmas cards to give away through a local non-profit called Positive Charge. These lovely ladies make sure that folks in rest homes and hospitals get a bit of holiday cheer from people they don’t even know!

I love to make art, but I’m not very consistent. Some days I seem to have a gift, and other days, everything I touch goes to smudges. So to make a bunch of cards, I need a few Grandma Judy proof tricks.

I found this one on several YouTube channels, and gave it a try. It is pretty easy.

Start with a blank greeting card. About an inch or so from the top, measure to find the center and put a tiny pencil dot. About an inch from the bottom, measure and put dots about 3/4” from each edge. Run strips of painter’s tape between the dots to make a Christmas tree sort of triangle. Press the inside edge to get a good seal.

Then comes the fun part! Using whatever paint, sponges, brushes, or other mark-making tools you have, add some color inside the triangle.

Here is acrylic paint applied with a packing material sponge. It is more interesting if there are flecks, dots, or other irregularities.

When you like the look of it, carefully peel the tape off to leave the triangle. You can re-use each piece of tape about three times before it starts ‘leaking’.

Then you decorate your tree! I made several, but have only decorated one so far.

I used UHU to apply circles punched from a fancy Christmas envelope from my dentist’s office for the baubles and star, and some recycled wrapping paper for the base.

These are just the basics. You can add ribbon, glitter, or whatever you like.

Enjoy!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Starting Early on Christmas!

October 29, 2025

Dear Liza,

I love it when two of my favorite people (who don’t even know each other) work together to give me good ideas. Let me explain.

Last week, my ZOOM art teacher Ruthie Inman taught us to make these tiny books.

You cut six strips of white paper 1” wide, then fold and cut 1” sections. Each section will become one book. Make the fold really sharp, then staple at the crease to hold the tiny pages together. Make sure the ‘feet’ of the staple are outside the book, so they will be hidden by the cover.

For the cover, choose slightly heavier decorative paper , and cut it just a bit longer than the book. Apply glue stick and use a bone folder to press it down.

Then fold the extra long edges over the first page to make a ‘dust cover’ edge. Really give this a good fold and press. And voilá, there is your tiny book, about one inch by one inch.

They are easy enough to make, I did 10 in a little more than an hour.

Then came the next favorite person. I was visiting with Auntie Katie and told her about the tiny books. “Could you string them…. Maybe on tiny twinkle lights… to hang on a Christmas tree?” She asked. Katie owns Books with Pictures here in Portland, and can always use pretty decorations.

Of course you could! The awl from my book-making kit (a gift from Ruthie), and a string of tiny lights ( from my SOAK jellyfish costume), and there we have it!

They look best in low light, of course, but very sweet even in normal light, giving the impression of flying, glowing books !

Could these be the newest Christmas tree sensation? Stranger things have happened!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Evolution of a Collage

September 30, 2025

Dear Liza,

I needed to make a cover for my new Journal, and I wanted a collage. It’s a good size, 9x 12, so I had plenty of room to play with. I found a heavy tag backing from an old watercolor tablet to use as my base.

First, I pulled tons of colors and images from my collage boxes and Jennifer Coile’s gift of museum calendars. I trimmed them and laid them down, seeing who played nicely and who didn’t.

This is always a long process with lots of internal dialogue. I will make a decision to include a piece… in this case, that impressionist woman, and it takes a long time before I admit that it’s just not working. She was both getting lost and cluttering up the picture.

So, in goes the Egyptian hippo. Better, clearer, more focused. Still too many images. Pull them out. But where do the flowers go? Up, down? More discussion.

Every piece is chosen, placed, stared at, accused, forgiven, moved and shifted.

The last bit to be decided was the sun ( or moon). I wanted the blue to balance the bright hippo, but it looked too heavy. The circle cut from a rejected paper worked well, and the blue triangle set it off.

When I had stared more, had lunch, looked again and still liked it, it was time to glue it down. I went in sections, the top stripes together first, but not to the base paper.

I glued the hippo and flowers together, but not down yet. This makes placing the focal points less nerve-wracking.

When I was finally willing to commit, it all went together quickly. UHU glue stick, tweezers (so my fingers don’t get so gluey) and voila! Done!

After dinner I came back to admire it, and realized it wasn’t done yet. It felt stagnant. I decided to sleep on it.

By morning, I realized it needed a bit of movement. Again reaching for papers that had been put aside, I punched small dots and used a piece of string to figure out the line I wanted, and glued them down.

Now it was done. A coat of Mod Podge for a top coat and all was ready! Once it was dry I used Mod Podge to give a good adhesion between the heavy tagboard and the original, floppy journal cover. Under heavy books for a few hours, then out to finish drying, and it will be ready by the time I need it.

And this concludes our tour of the creative process.

Love,

Grandma Judy

More Work on the Haunted House

September 23, 2025

Dear Liza,

When the exterior walls were dry, I realized there was too much space between the ‘stones’. I tried coloring the space black, but it looked terrible. I made more streaky-looking bits and glued them over the gaps.

It looks haphazard, and I’m okay with that.

The walls seemed strong enough, so I made some folded paper L- brackets and joined up all the walls. It’s certainly more house-like!

Then it was time to add the roof. I painted some postcards to match the house, and cut them a bit bigger than the house itself. Rather than use tabs, I turned the house upside down and laid down bits of glue-soaked yarn where the walls meet the roof, to give better adhesion. If you look closely, you can see the yarn right there.

I’m going to let it dry overnight and see how it’s holding together in the morning.

As Sister Corita Kent said, “everything is an experiment.”

Love,

Grandma Judy

Trying Some Three-D

September 22, 2025

Dear Liza,

Looking at all the Halloween decorations for sale in the markets, I got inspired to build an illuminated haunted house. I started with old postcards, junk mail, Mod Podge, and a UHU glue stick.

Using pieces of other projects for templates, I cut a door and windows with an Xacto blade.

When they were cut, I put mullions in the windows and joined four of the five sides together, I wanted to keep it flat to work on, so I didn’t close up the ‘house’. To make the walls stronger, I gave the interior walls a coat of white paper applied with Mod Podge.

I wanted the look of old stones for my exterior walls, so I gave some junk mail a streaky coat of acrylic, then cut them into irregular pieces. While you and I were on our ZOOM call, I used the UHU to apply the stones. They needed a brayer rolled over them to make them stick, because the postcard walls still had some flex.

There is still a lot to do. I will continue tomorrow and show you what I’ve got.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Flowers for the Table

August 27, 2025

Dear Liza,

Sometimes I need to make a few tries at a project before I get it right. At our last ZOOM art group, Ruthie Inman had us start this vase of flowers, made with the windows from business envelopes. Mine turned out really tiny, about three inches high, and I wasn’t crazy about it.

The other members of the group used bigger windows from bigger envelopes, and therefore, bigger flowers. I liked theirs better, so I found just such an envelope and gave the project a second chance.

Ruthie also suggested creating surroundings for the vase, to ‘give it a place to be’. So I started building my scene. I started with the inside of that same envelope, which had a striped pattern. I gave it a thin coat of a really pale lavender so it would fade into the background.

It took a few days to draw, cut, and watercolor the flowers, long stemmed yellow and orange daisies. To go with that bright yellow, I found an abstract blue page out of an art magazine for the billowing curtains. It was starting to look like a picture.

I remembered that Shirley, from the ZOOM group, had used blue paper to make the water in her vase. I wanted mine to be transparent, so I mixed some aquamarine acrylic paint with some glue and painted it on the plastic. It stuck!

Then I used the same color for the sky through the window, a soft yellow paper made the window frame, and graph paper made a nice tablecloth.

I now had all the pieces for my picture, but I wasn’t ready to glue anything down yet, because I didn’t like where they were. It felt static, even with the curtains billowing in the wind. So I walked away and thought about it overnight.

The next day I moved the window a bit to the right and the vase a bit to the left, loved it, and glued it down. Finally, I glued the stems into the vase, but left the flowers loose, so they can flop a bit.

Another Ruthie Inman inspiration, all done!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Some Cut and Paste Fun

August 24, 2025

Dear Liza,

I continue to recover from shingles, and as with all recoveries, I have good days and bad days. On bad days I just sleep and watch architectural history videos.

But when I feel better, I do like to make a bit of something, and I use what is laying around. The other day, Auntie Bridgett brought home a great pile of old baseball cards from the 1990s. After I made sure they weren’t going to make me a millionaire, they became collage fodder.

First, I glued the cards together with four edge pieces so they’d be easier to work with. I use UHU because it dries fast and doesn’t make the paper curl. Then I collaged the four as though they were one piece, sticking bits down in whatever way seemed best.

I’d seen something like this done by Zoe Walker in our ZOOM group, and I thought I’d give it a try. I laid four of the cards face down, chose some leftover papers from other projects, and went to it.

There are so many things I love about collage. There’s really no wrong way to do it, just whatever looks right to you. I try a few bits together to see which colors play well together, and wait to put the most detailed bits on near the end.

Once I got to this point, I decided to cut the cards apart and see how they looked.

I liked them! But I was wearing out and they still needed… something.

So I hunted up bits from old magazines to freshen the color, put in dots, and I was done.

I’m not sure what to call them, or where they will go, but I managed to get some rest, stay happy, and use up some scrap paper. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Gelli Cards!

August 12, 2025

Dear Liza,

I am still making lots of mistakes with Gelli printing, because there are dozens of ways to do it wrong! But Ruthie Inman said don’t let a little thing like that stop me, and every now and then I get one right.

These are my favorites from the last few weeks. As you can tell, two used the same sycamore maple leaf and one is some lavender blossoms,

For today’s project, I chose these two to trim up for greeting cards. I couldn’t find a mat that worked with either, so I glued them down by themselves.

Only after I glued it down did I notice the white blotch on the lavender blossom one, but there is always a way to fix it! I pulled out my box of words cut from calendars, J. Peterman catalogues and magazines.

A few snips and careful UHU application (tweezers are best for those of us with short fingernails!)

and this one is ready for a friend who has just moved to a new country.

And that’s my art for today!

Love,

Grandma Judy

More Tiny Art

Dear Liza,

Every time I get together with the ZOOM Art group with Ruthie Inman, I get so full of ideas I could pop.

This past week she showed up these: tiny, accordion folded books that fit in a little tiny box. The samples she showed were people’s’ interpretations of their high school years, with black and white photos and bits and pieces from the fifties for illustrations.



I had a good time in high school. I met Grandpa Nelson there, and Ruthie. I learned a lot about who I am and what I believe in, on the way to becoming who I am. But it was just four years out of 69, and I didn’t want to make a whole art project about it.

First, we cut some heavy paper so it fit into the little Altoid tin. Then we made little hinges from paper and joined the cards together like an accordion.

I decided to start my “Time Capsule” in the 1950s, when I was born. Some old ads and papers worked nicely. Then came the 1960s with the Beatles. I had to rework my High School years because the colors weren’t cohesive with the others. In the re-do, the horse stands for our Mustang mascot .

Since I got married right out of school, the kids came next. Sticking with the vintage ads, I showed our girl and boy….

And started in on the adventures! Traveling to France, learning French, and getting out in the world. I like how it folds up!

I am trying to choose colors that are cohesive so it looks like they belong together. Bridgett tells me this is color theory, which I have always rebelled against. Oh well.

Love,

Grandma Judy