Vol. 6, No. 10, March 14, 2026

Week 10

Day 64 - For Read Across America week, we had dress up days. Today was neon day. I wore a neon green t-shirt with a neon pink sweatshirt and a neon orange headband.

Day 65 - Catching up on card making.

Day 66 - First Saturday of the month means that it was Coffee Talk at church.

Day 67 - Scrambled omelets for breakfast means lots of eggshells. - I tried to make a clover.

Day 68 - Board meeting tonight.

Day 69 - Choir concert tonight.

Day 70 - Financial planning meeting today.

Vol. 6, No. 7, February 21, 2026

Week 7

Day 43 - Edible

With juice from pickled beets, pea flower tea, and lemon juice, I made an array of edible paints. It was fun to mix the paints and watch them dry on the paper. I never really knew what the finally color would be.

Day 44 - Shadow

After a quick search online for 'shadow art' I decided to try this one. They did a snowman on a blue background which was cuter, but my trees on a scrap of green paper served my needs.

Day 45 - Heart Shaped

A piece of junk mail had a beautiful heart on it. Why work harder when you can use your resources?

Day 46 - Green

With green acrylics and a sparkly green crayon on green paper, a created a scraped paint painting.

Day 47 - Soft

I pulled out the soft pastels and created a stencil using a heart corner punch. I then stenciled directly onto the background paper for my collage. I forgot to take a picture of the finished artwork before I made the collage, so here is a picture of the stencil instead.

Day 48 - Broken

I thought of ways of adding something broken to my artwork, but I didn't have any good options readily available. That's when I found a piece of plastic and thought I would draw cracks over it to look like a broken screen. Ultimately I decided to put the cracked design on a piece of shipping tape so that I wouldn't have to do any gluing. The texture under the crack is from the silicone mat i put the tape on while I drew.

Day 49 - Stick

I burned the end of a stick and drew stick people.

Vol. 6, No. 4, January 31, 2026

Week 4

Day 22 - Pattern

Today, I emptied some marker boxes. I decided to recycle one and draw Zentangle patterns on it. For inspiration, I looked at the handout I will be giving to my 5th grade students to use for their project.

Day 23 - Pretty

Today, I was cleaning out some paint pallets and I decided to to put the leftover paint to use. I went crazy, painting abstract designs, not even bothering to wash my brush. One stroke looked like a flower, and soon a small garden of pretty flowers had appeared.

Day 24 - Rough

One fun thing about acrylic paint is that is thick and can add a lot of rough texture to a painting. This is a corner of my "pretty" painting, that I layered clumps of mostly dried paint.

Day 25 - Lots

The 2nd graders are learning about Yayoi Kusama. She puts lots of dots in her art. I drew this mushroom by making lots of small dots with a ultra fine point sharpie.

Day 26 - Strong

Mushrooms seemed like a fun theme to continue. This mushroom was painted using very strong coffee. 

Day 27 - Hanging 

Using a scrap of newspaper that had been used as a messy mat, I created a paper chain of miniature flowers that I could hang.

Day 28 - Brittle

More mushrooms. These mushrooms were drawn of a dry, brittle leaf with a glue pen and sprinkled with glitter. The leaf was so brittle that it was breaking under the pressure of the pen.

Vol. 6, No. 1, January 10, 2026

The blog is back! My goal for the year is to make/find one small artwork everyday following the prompts provided in the Wild Kids Magazine Photo Challenge. At the end of the week, I will use those artworks to create a 3"x3" collage. I hope to put those 52 collages together into one large artwork at the end of the year.

Bonus Week

I realized after making this initial collage that I should have waited a full 7 days. Therefore, I incorporated the scraps from this bonus collage into my Week 1 collage.

Week 1

Day 1 - New

I decided to look through my art supplies and find something I had never used before. I found a KiwiCo Tinker Crate Spin Art Machine that was given to my many years ago that I had assembled, but never used. Fortunately, the paint still worked and the spin art was easy to make.

Day 2 - Broken

I always tell my students "broken crayons still color". So for this project, I pulled out my bin of broken "naked" crayons. I chose the same 4 colors I had used for the spin art, grated them on the the paper and placed it on a hot plate to warm. I also colored directly on the paper while it was heating.

Day 3 - Bark

This one took me a minute to figure out, but then I remembered that I has some birch logs in the garage that have been waiting to be used. I peeled off a small section of bark and then slowly peeled that apart into thinner sheets. After washing, drying and pressing the birch bark papers, they were ready to use.

Day 4 - Leaf

I considered doing a texture rubbing of a leaf, but then I remembered my collection of pressed flowers and leaves. I pulled out the box and carefully looked through each paper towel selecting my favorite leaves; I couldn't choose just one. I am fairly certain that some, if not all, of these leaves are relics of my childhood (pre-2007) harvested, placed between paper towels, and pressed within the pages of a JcPenny catalog with assistance from Granny, my maternal grandmother.

Day 5 - Shadow

I knew that I had some Nature Print Paper somewhere I my art supplies, and I was so excited when I finally found it. While cyanotype isn't exactly shadows, it does require the sun and essentially makes a print of the shadow of the objects laid on top of the paper. This is a print that I had made years ago and is ready for repurposing.

Day 6 - Rock

I had a snow (ice) day today, so I decided it was a good time to do a task that I had been putting off. When I travel to new places, I like to collect some sand to remember it and layer the sand in jars. It is fun to see the layers of different colors. Today I added 6 more layers of sand collected from various sites I visted while traveling to the east coast in September. The most course and rocky of these sands was collect from Lake Ontario, so that is what I will use in my collage.

Day 7 - Speckled

I went back to paint today finding some paint markers to make a quick splatter painting. I stuck to the same color scheme of blue, green, orange, and yellow that came with the spin art for a unified look to the final collage.