Leaffy art

Being in love with StumbleUpon is a great thing! It has led me to discover these amazing artworks by Lorezon Duran. Apparently he washes than dries the leaf to cut out these awesome artworks.

Wordless Wednesday - How do you see this?

via Kyira Hauer

Patterns and Patterns

Patterns are really cool! Lately I've been paying more close attention to patterns. The colorful kind are the ones that stand out to me the most. So here is a compilation of some patterns that I found and really liked. What type of patterns are you fond of?

Credit (from top left): Pattern and Co., Unknow (via Kaela Graham), Hope for the best, Inhale...Exhale

Wordless Wednesday - Do you know what this is?

Generate Your Own Color Palette

This is a tool that I am sure a lot of you will find helpful and fun to play around with. A couple of posts back I shared about Design Seed and the amazing color palettes they have. To my surprise I found out an easy way of doing it on Pinterest (via Pepper Ferguson).

With the Color Palette Generator from DeGreave, you can easily find the palette of colors used on any image on the internet. All you have to do is upload the link and it automatically generates the colors for you. I thought the Nena Sanchez painting was a good one to try out. So there you have my experiment. At the bottom you can see what I made out of it for myself using Photoshop.

How are you planning to use this tool?

The stairs everyone calls inspirational

After sharing the beautiful stairs in the Queen's House in London (check it out here) I started paying more attention to stairs. Recently I found the Holsteiner stairs on Pinterest.

As I searched the internet about these steps I found that many described it as "inspirational", can you disagree with them? It was painted by Horst Glasker and can be found in Wuppertal, Germany.

I joined Pinterest not too long ago and totally love it. If you have an account I would totally like to connect with you there. Also please share your link in the comment section so we can all share our pins.

The Art Share Project

Have you heard about 'The Art Share Project" already? It is this really cool idea of some notebooks being passed from one artist to the other. Each one of them leaving a mark on it by doing a drawing, painting, photo or any other type of art in them. When they are done with their art they share it online at artshareproject.com. 

Here are some of the latest submissions to the notebooks.

With the goal of creating a sense of community among others, I believe it is a great idea to inspire the world through these notebooks. The countries that already have notebooks going at the moment are USA and Italy. They are also looking on starting it in more countries.

So if your an artist, get involved! If you are not comfortable participating yet, head on to the website and check out the different artwork shared by others.

Related posts: 

- Blank page challenge

- Vintage collages

Blowing the yellow balloon

Could not hold back from posting this. There is not much to see in it, yet the combination of nothing with a little bit of something triggers something. It makes you long for more. The color tones just add to the WOW factor.

Max Wagner is the artist behind this wonderful work of art officially called "Balloon". Cost: $25 for a Letter size print with a Max Wagner signature on the back.

Shoe decor

Hello all, check out these fun way of storing shoes. Not only does it get them organized and away from the floor, but it also very decorative. That is of course if you have nice looking shoes that are clean.

Credit goes to Shannon Scovell for designing it for DesignPhiladelphia 2008, a student work exibition of Philadelphia's education courses.

Flower scribbles

Well thought out scribbles by Jan Weiss. They would really look nice in a variety of different interiors. These 4 are just some that I wanted to share, but really I love all of his work. Best thing about them is that you can get them for as low as $29.99 on AllPosters.

If you see beauty in everything.....

As someone grows to appreciate art, they can see the even the little ugly things others disregard as beautiful. Like these old doors. They might not be something people will buy, but there is some kind of beauty in them. 

"If you see beauty in everything, you are an artist." 

Not sure where I first heard this quote, but I am learning that it is so true as I look at artists around me.

The power of orange

Colors can be a great source of inspiration. It can be used when designing interior spaces like the "African meets neon" series in the "Add colors everywhere" post, or it can also be used to inspire an artworks, songs, movies or our mood.

The color orange is usually associated with the sun, joy and power. Feelings of enthusiasm and creativity are provoked through this color and it has been said to stimulate brain activity. So it is a wonderful color to start an artistic, productive weekend. 

Kate Spade New York has an orange inspired video that you can see above. Since I placed us all in the collage mood this week, there is an orange inspired collage. Lastly, what is an orange inspired post without an actual orange.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Eye candy bombing

 Image credit: Picocool | Olek | BNPS

In a time when the media is filled with terrorist attacks and suicide bombing we have people doing a different type of bombing. Yarn bombing. You heard it right. It is a phenomenon happening in London, Morocco, Russia and other parts of the world. It is simply put people decorating public places with colorful knitted or crocheted pieces of yarn. A removable type of graffiti. Unlike real bombing where people actually get hurt, yarn bombing does not hurt anyone. Unless you have some kind of yarn phobia of course.

According to Wikipedia it first started in Texas and since spread to other places. Some claim that release of the book Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti was the main source to spread this phenomenon to all the corners of the earth.

There are some that do this type of artwork to make a statement, whereas there are some that does it just for the fun of it. Such is the case of Olek, an artist that clearly got annoyed with the Charging Bull in Wall Street. On Christmas eve she decorated it pink and purple and videotaped herself doing so.

As I was researching this I found that there is a whole world of these type of bombers. They have even declared June 11th as the official yarn bombing day. There will be events all over to celebrate this day.

Is this your kind of thing? Then be sure to save the date.

Crochet on your ears

Check out these handmade crocheted headphones from 'Uncommongoods'. Creative way to listen to music and I'm sure it keeps your ears warm. They are priced at $35 if you were wondering.

Get the most out of your keyboard

It comes in different color shapes and sizes. Used to be part of a computer, but now even phones and other gadgets have it. You might already guess it, the keyboard.

There is not much special about the keyboard, for most it is simply another way to use their hands and communicate something. Nonetheless there are more characters than just the QWERTY alphabet keys. These other symbols can create nice designs to make your text more decorated.

~`!@#$%^&*()_+-=|{[}]\"?':;/><.,

Above you can see the variety of different characters. Nothing interesting right? Until you come across people that create things like this:

_--_                                     _--_
/#()# #\         0             0         /# #()#\
|()##  \#\_       \           /       _/#/  ##()|
|#()##-=###\_      \         /      _/###=-##()#|
 \#()#-=##  #\_     \       /     _/#  ##=-#()#/
  |#()#--==### \_    \     /    _/ ###==--#()#|
  |#()##--=#    #\_   \!!!/   _/#    #=--##()#|
   \#()##---===####\   O|O   /####===---##()#/
    |#()#____==#####\ / Y \ /#####==____#()#|
     \###______######|\/#\/|######______###/
        ()#O#/      ##\_#_/##      \#O#()
       ()#O#(__-===###/ _ \###===-__)#O#()
      ()#O#(   #  ###_(_|_)_###  #   )#O#()
      ()#O(---#__###/ (_|_) \###__#---)O#()
      ()#O#( / / ##/  (_|_)  \## \ \ )#O#()
      ()##O#\_/  #/   (_|_)   \#  \_/#O##()
       \)##OO#\ -)    (_|_)    (- /#OO##(/
        )//##OOO*|    / | \    |*OOO##\\(
        |/_####_/    ( /X\ )    \_####_\|
       /X/ \__/       \___/       \__/ \X\
      (#/                               \#)

Aside from that you can simply decorate with the curly braces {like this} or you can use a stylish text generator to create something (¯`·.¸¸.-> °º lιĸe тнιѕ º° <-.¸¸.·´¯).

Even tough you cannot use these in professional letters, it is something that can be played around with when writing fun things online. While browsing the net for interesting ASCII artwork, I cam across these three. I won't have the patience to create these but they certainly are nice to look at.

Vintage collages

While being a dance student, I had different classmates that were very much into collages. They introduced me to it and opened my eyes to the collage world.

Though I have not made much myself, they always fascinate me. Here are some vintage ones I found while browsing on Flickr. All of these are from a group that was learning to do collage basics with vintage paper.

Open Atelier Curacao 2011

Today I spend the day visiting different ateliers on the island. They opened their workplaces for the public for these two days. So far it has been a true inspiration to me and just makes me want to create more. Here are some of my favorites. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Top left: No title by Ailsa Anastatia
Top right: Stone tribe sculpture by Ashley Mauricia
Bottom left: Tender II by Midzy Longuevergne
Bottom right: No title by Tanya Haynes

Performance artwork

*If you were looking for this post yesterday, it got deleted by Blogger so I posted it again today. Sorry for the inconvenience.

These crazy artworks are done by a man named Tony Orrico. He describes himself as a "performer, visual artist and dancer". By some he is nicknamed the human spirograph for the artwork he does while spinning around on the ground. As for me I believe that name limits him, since he does much more than just that. He also creates some artworks with lines (a spirograph is unable to do this).

His creation process is almost like a ritual with him spending countless hours in deep concentration. The movement of his body, tapping of his feet and the graphite going over the paper creates a distinct music that helps to keep him going.

Orrico appreciates it when his audience can be a part of the creation process, because to him the creation process is just as important as the final product. On his website you can see the dimensions of each of his work as well as how much time he took to create it.

If you have the time you can also check out some videos of his creation process. Like the one where he created the artwork on the bottom or an interview with him explaining 'Penwald: 2: 8 circles at the National Academy of Siences in Washington, DC.

Into the blue

Looking at these pictures you might think that they are awesome underwater photographs. Well, they are actually paintings using mostly oil to complete. The artist Eric Zener from California uses the art of photorealism to achieve these paintings that look exactly like photographs. This type of artwork is done by taking photographs to assemble all the information needed to do a very realistic painting.

I can't pick a favorite. Can you?


Today I guest post on Beach Coast Style about Curacao beaches. Check it out.

Tree crazy

Trees has always been my favorite thing to draw. I have been striving to draw them nicely for years without much luck. Maybe I should take some tips from Lawrence Yang. He is the artist behind these wonderful tree paintings. Some of these have been sold already but his prices range from $200 to $1000. Couldn't choose a favorite so I posted a few. Check out his gallery for more artwork.