Get Inspired & Creative with Art Challenges! (free online class - #6 of 9)

Let's continue expanding our creativity together with a new art challenge! If you want to get a jump start on the holidays this year, now is the perfect time to jump into my free online class! Come join the fun! : )

Art Challenge #6 (of 9): Get Inspired by Your Loved Ones!

The holidays are just around the corner...it's time to start thinking about holiday cards! I find that when making cards, it's easiest to make one collage that you can copy and use as the main image for all of your holiday cards. So, that's what we're going to do for this week and next week. 

First, take or find photos of all of your loved ones that live in your house. I find it difficult to take one good photo with all of my pets so instead, I found a good, digital photo of each of us, made them all approx. the same size in Photoshop and then printed them out.

Next, decide on the colors you think you'd like to use in your holiday collage and pull out papers, ribbons, images, etc. in those colors. I picked red, green, brown and gold. 

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Next, think about how you're going to bring all of your photos together. I decided that I wanted to make a house shape out of our new Red and White Decorative Papers, our new Red and Brown Decorative Papers and our new Red Peace Ribbon.

Then, I decided to turn all of our photos into twinchies (2" square collages)....so I adhered them with a UHU gluestick to watercolor twinchies.

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Play, play, play! Keep in mind that you can add your own personal touch to decorative papers and wrapping papers. Here I added gold polka dots with a DecoColor Liquid Gold Marker to our brown chandelier paper.

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Since I love adding natural elements to my artwork, I added tiny pine branches. I sewed them into place by first marking the holes with an awl and matt, then sewing them on with a needle and waxed red thread.

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Ta da! My holiday collage! It shows all of the loved ones in my household (me, James, Bruno, Stella, Momo and Inca) displaying various wishes that I cut from our Tell Me a Story collage sheets. At the top, you'll find "wishing you" in one of our Handy Red Labels (our Blog Special this week). And here's what we wish for all of you: art bliss, brilliant ideas, abundant love, glorious walks, happy peace and good health.

Next week, I'm going to play with this collage and see how I can turn it into my holiday cards for this year.

Art Challenge #6 (or 9) SUMMARY: Get Inspired by Your Loved Ones! Find or take photos of you and your loved ones and make a holiday collage with them in any way you'd like. OPTIONAL: add polka dots and/or add something from nature. OPTIONAL: show us how you turn your collage into your holiday cards.

How To Play in This Art Challenge: Scan your collage and post it online to your blog, flickr account, website or our YahooGroup (Photos section: "Helga's Blog: #6 Weekly Art Challenge").

Next, click on "Comments" at the bottom of this post and leave a note with a link to your collage so I know where to see it online. In addition, please link back to my blog. 

Deadline: Tuesday morning, December 1, 2009 (you have 2 weeks for this challenge)

Prizes: My cute kitties will randomly pick 3 participants and they will each get to pick 3 free ARTchix sheets of their choice! Hooray!

Winners & Next Art Challenge To Be Announced: Wednesday, December 2, 2009

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WINNERS from Last Week's Art Challenge

Hooray for the wonderful, creative 10 artists that played in the fifth part of our online class: Get Inspired by Things that You Enjoy! So many creative ways to play with packaging! You can see most of them in our YahooGroup (Photos section: "Helga's Blog: #5 Weekly Art Challenge").   My kitty, Inca, picked 3 winners which will each get 3 free ARTchix sheets of their choice. Hooray! Here's who she picked:

I printed all of the artists' names, cut them out, spread them out on a table and put a treat next to each name. Then Inca got to pick 3 treats to gobble down! The name that was attached to that treat won! What fun! Congrats to Bonnie, Sabine and Laury! 

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Here's your Weekly Dose of Cuteness! Little Inca loves it when I make a big mess on my art table (which I most certainly did while I was making my fun holiday collage for this week).

Comments

[Jennifer Rogers- Daniels]

HI Helga,
I love your Holiday collage card! I wanna try and do this one since I am still on vacation from work!
I posted some RR pages using the Her Words sheet and my first try with Dreamboxes. What do you think?
By the way, YOU are looking like a supermodel in that photo in your collage. Just gorgeous!
Hugs,
Jennifer R.D.
http://artisticallydesigneddiversions.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-works.html

[Peggy B]

I hope it is ok...my first attempt at collage art was done over 30 years ago, and I am using that for my challenge this week.
I will note any details in my email to you all! It was such fun to do for my late Mother on Mother's Day 1978.
Here it is..
http://www.flickr.com/

[Linda]

Ok I came up with something though it's definitely a rough draft! The photos I cropped and resized leave alot to be desired but I needed to get the idea on paper.
Helga your family house is the perfect Christmas card!!!And that sweet Inca on the last pic looks like such the princess-she needs a crown!

[laury55]

Hi Helga
your artchix collage sheets arrived today...love them, can't wait to use in my artwork
thanks a lot
Laurence

[Bonnie Ashurst]

Helga and family,
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
The 9th: A put together kit called a shelf. Painted it gold and added a few brush strokes of red. Glued a piece of one of my #1 squares to the back of shelf.
Added other pieces from my other sheets we made. Then a couple of my own bits. Love my scottie dog collection and now these two will have a place to
show off.
Thanks Helga for this wonderful project you have helped us through. I have thoroughly enjoyed everyone.
In Friendship, Bonnie