This week's Illustration Friday exercise, "signs," sent me off into a weird, dark-ish place that is, nevertheless, wildly amusing to me. Scarym huh?

Anyway, I call this one "Sign of the Times."

This week's Inspire Me Thursday prompt is "circles."

Almost immediately, I got this image in my head and sketched it out a couple of times in my journal before I decided to use chalk on red rosin paper.

I made the circles, outlined them with a black Sharpie, then decided I wanted a higher contrast and some dimension to the piece. So I cut out the circle things, arranged them a little differently than the original composition, and adhered them to a piece of scrap watercolor paper with 3D adhesive dots.

I call it "Blue Moon."

This is an ancestor nicho I made a while back. It features my mother's high school graduation photo. She was born on 5/15/1922 and gave birth to me 38 years later on 5/15/1960.

That makes me 47 today, and my mom would have been 85. Every year on our birthday, the first thing either of us thought to do was wish the other a happy birthday.

"Happy birthday, Mom," I would say to her.

"Happy birthday, Baby," she would reply.

She passed away on December 17, 2003. Since then, I've had a rough time celebrating my birthday. Still, today, I took the day off from work, spent time with my sweetie, and made art. I enjoyed the day in my own way, and I only cried a little.

I miss you, Mom. Happy birthday.

The Illustration Friday prompt this week, "citrus," sent me flying to my oil crayons. After swirling and smooshing around for a while, I came up with a composition that reminded me a little of an icon. A few smudges became eyes, nose, mouth, hair, and -- voila! -- Saint Citrusian, patron of lemonade stand owners, was born!

The Inspire Me Thursday prompt this week is "silence," a quality this odd little washed-up garden gnome has in spades. I chose to photograph him in black and white, hoping to capture the strange austerity of his uncharacteristic colorlessness.

Inspire Me Thursday Challenge: Word Art

I spent the weekend starting and stopping a number of "serious" attempts at this week's challenge. I kept getting tangled up in the metaphorical and conotative connections between words and the things and ideas they represent. Finally, I got a little silly with this challenge and played like a kid with my gel pens. I am reminded of one of my favorite lines from an episode of the television series Northern Exposure: "Words are a heavy thing . . . they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn't fly."

Inspire Me Thursday Challenge: Abstract

This abstract painting began as an almost-discarded piece of watercolor paper on which I'd done some color swatches when I was working on another piece. I recycled it into the basis for this challenege.

Inspire Me Thursday Challenge: Faraway Places

"Vacation in Paradise"
I found this rather uninteresting photograph taken from a footbridge across an unidentified river. I altered it by soaking the photo in water, sanding some of the surface areas, then adding color with Lyra watercolor crayons, which I mixed and dispersed with my Niji brushes. I mounted the photo on a piece of cheap watercolor paper for stability.

The Chosen One

This page developed from one of Juliana Coles's exercises. The assignment was to imagine yourself as "the chosen one." I had with me, by coincidence, the photocopy of my kindergarten picture. I imagined my "temple" as a simple house with rooms to celebrate each of the epiphanies of my life, times when I truly felt special, chosen, touched by something divine and greater than myself: shopping for an Easter dress with my grandmother when I was 5, "altering" my first book at age 7 and being told for the first time about artists like Marcel Duchamp, spending a rainy Saturday with my Aunt Helen when I was 12, setting off on a cross-country journey when I was 20, and falling in love with my dear, sweet Damon when I was 43. I haven't yet translated this piece into a finished work, but I want to, so I will. Like it says on the page, "I am aware of my power."

Strange Geography

This is the cover of my "junk" journal, the composition book I carry around in my journal bag. I use it to capture things quickly, not really a place for fully developed art, but for first drafts, ideas, and experiments. I had it with me at ArtFest 2005 when I took Extreme Journaling with Juliana Coles.

I make art.

I made this art for a local art show. It took second place overall in mixed media and sold. I don't lnow who bought it. That makes me a little crazy sometimes, because I want to talk to them and find out what made them like enough to buy it.

The piece is made from plumber's tape and slug tape over foam core, hand tooled with embossed patterns, words and such, then finished with a patina of india ink.

Sometimes my best ATCs happen when I'm just goofing off. For this one, I tore some strips of scrap from a magazine ad for the background and added a couple of simple elements and hand-written text. It reads: "When we have nothing else, hope can give us wings."