- Debbie Gaetz, Bella Carta
Vesta Abel's Spirit Doll Greeting Card
Vesta Abel brought her artistic talents to Art 'n Soul in Lacey, WA a couple of weeks ago. She led us through 3 amazing classes. One of them was learning to make Spirit Doll greeting cards. The journey was pure art for the soul. I didn't complete any of the cards until I came home; I just now finished one of them. I have two additional cards ready for completion.
The colors come from Magenta's Nuance, a powdered watercolor with immense color power. Vesta says out of all of the powdered watercolors she has used, she finds Magenta's the easiest to use and the best for her art projects. The colors were applied to the cheapest white copy paper. Archival ink and metallic paint was also used. I didn't think my colors stayed very "bright and vivid" when I dried them with a heat tool; however, once the paper was adhered to a black A2 card base, the color was immediately vivid. In other words, it "popped!"
Instead of the black triangular paper she gave us for the body, I decided to something else with this card by using bits of "this and that" lying around the studio in various places. The body is a wooden toothpick wrapped in a piece of washi paper that has a Magenta peel off sticker applied to it and colored with metallic gel pen from long ago. The face is a polymer clay piece made by Vesta that she gave to each of us for our Spirit Doll cards. The hair is from waxed linen thread. The hair accents are toothpicks with small beads. The collar under the face is an old bat bead I had from a long ago Halloween project. Because the colored paper was adhered unevenly on the base card, I used Magenta peel-off border stickers for a frame.
I'll have more to post in the coming days as I finish them, along with the journal cover. If you have the opportunity to take an art class from Vesta, be sure to sign up. It is amazing all of the little ways she uses different mediums with little or no expense.
I started late today because I stayed up to watch the University of Washington Huskies play the University of Arizona last night. It was a tight game all the way through and into over-time, but the Huskies won their game against UA since many years ago. It was worth staying up for! I love my Dawgs!
Thank you for stopping in.