Ready for April

April made a fool out of me on Friday and started a day early, at least for where I was with my art calendar for the Calendar Challenge.  Thank goodness today is Saturday and a catch-up day!  Here is my completed March calendar and the April calendar prepared for a wonderful month of art and adventures.  Recognize the patterned paper I used?  Yep!  It's the insides of business envelopes.  Love how there are so many patterns.

Calendar Challenge - March

Good grief! Can it be a week into March already? I'm a little late posting my completed February page to the Calendar Challenge group.  My March page is up to date, though.  I love the preparation stages.  My favorite thing to do is prep the background.  I use gesso, craft acrylic paints, stamps and markers.  The daily squares are punched from patterned papers and then lightly coated with diluted gesso to blend the colors and give a nice surface for writing and drawing.  I write and doodle with markers and gel pens.   Color and highlighting were added by using my new favorite toys - oil pastels.

Calendar Challenge and Happy New Year!

I've been admiring the art calendar pages posted by fellow-blogger, Jill, at Third Age Musings, and decided I would take the challenge to do a calendar this year.  Instructions for joining are posted at Jill's site.

At left is my first attempt, which has now been bound, using the "Bind-it" machine that I splurged on last year.  There are pre-gessoed pages for the rest of the months of 2011.  This month's background was painted with a mixture of acrylic paint and gesso.  Then I punched squares out of patterned papers and pasted them in, and then decorated the page with more paint and rubber stamps.  I plan to use the space on the left margin to state my "Priorities" for the month of January.  Instead of making the usual resolutions to get healthy, etc. this year, I made just one resolution.  That is to set priorities each month in the areas of my life that need attention.  I think I can keep that one for more than one month!  The calendar pages will help me remember, because I will be looking at it every day when I write or draw something each day.

Here's to a new start on another wonderful year for you and for me!!