Wednesday, February 27, 2008

artistic inspiration

Recently I've been spending alot of time browsing the handmade goods on Etsy.
I find it to be a wealth of inspiration. So much so that I've gotten back to some other art forms that had been shoved to the wayside by my newfound love of knitting. A few years ago I discovered woodburning- or pyrography if you want to be really geeky about it- and just loved it. There's something so haunting about the finished product that I just love. Perfect examples can be seen in my favorites list which is linked in the sidebar as Beautiful Things. There are a couple of tagua nut pendants that are done with a combination of burning and oil painting that I just adore and have inspired me to try my hand at something similar. I bought some tagua nut slices and took my cheapo wood burning tool to a couple. My results have been less than what I hoped for and I think part of the issue is that my tool is just inadequate. It's the $10 dollar variety from a craft store. I'm going to keep at it though and see where it goes. I went and got a piece of basswood to practice on and found that it's much easier to get nice results from that than the tagua.

I've discovered through Esty that something called Art Cards Editions Originals (ACEOs) are very popular. Basically any kind of art in a 2.5 x 3.5 inch trading card format are really popular collectors items right now. I've been looking for a way to make money from home and I'm going to try to plug into that market and see how it goes. I've almost finished my first piece which is a combination of knitting and embroidery. It's cute. Not exactly how I pictured it in my mind but it's been a learning experience. I'm having a lot of fun brainstorming and being inspired.

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