Christine Adolph Designs

National Scrapbook Day

I will be in Sherman Oaks next weekend at Creative Paradise Scrapbook store  celebrating National Scrapbook Day. Come by on  Saturday May 6 from 12:00-4:00.  I will be making this pretty Mother's Day card with the first 50 people who arrive and when we are done with the make and take I will be showing some papercrafting samples using my line . Hope to see you there!

Women helping Women

I am so excited to be a part of a fundraiser that is going to help  the organization Women for Women. It is such a great cause and I am  honored to be  involved in  helping to raise money for this organization. There are some amazing and very well known women in the scrapbook industry who are going to be participating.  Check out the details here: www.karenrussell.typepad.com

Studio Friday (Sparkle, Shimmer & Shine)

For the past four years FOIL has been a signature component in my work. I never really liked the stuff before, thought it was too garish. One of the reasons was because the only foils that I had seen were really bad holigraphic foils and brassy golds. In 2002 I started working with a fiber artist in Laguna Beach named Cheryl Stone and she was an expert in this obscure form of printmaking called Foil Imaging and she was using an Iowa Foil Printer to produce gorgeous artwork, she also exposed me to some really great colors. They are very hard to find and have to be purchased in huge bulk (400 feet at a time) **I am currently working on getting a line of some of these awesome colors out to the consumer and will post that info on the blog in a few months when it is all ready** Through extensive work and a lot of trial and error  I have come up with some innovative uses of the foil and have many techniques that I now use in my art. This particular piece I used a background of rice paper and I used  Luma condensed watercolors to create the background I then collaged my patterned foils (a technique I call foil fusing) to the background of the dyed paper using polymer medium and an iron.

This summer I am going to do some step out type photos and directions on the blog, so if this doesnt make sense now it will when you see a step by step. Stay tuned...

This a my basket of colors. Below are my scraps, I don't get rid of them until all the foil is off the sheet. One small sheet will last a long time. As you can see I have a lifetime supply:)

See more on this topic at  STUDIO FRIDAY .

Vacation Memories

I have created a few photo albums of our traveling art studio and vacation photo's. There are so many wonderful memories we have of early morning walks at Rocky Point collecting seashells, meeting Jack Johnson, riding horses along the beach they filmed the tv show LOST, seeing all the famous North Shore beaches, going to an easter sunrise service at Waimea Bay, spending time without the stress of life. Vacations are a so important and this was our first big one with just our little family and it was well worth all the saving through the year to make it happen. We are already saving for the next trip:).

Here is a photo album with our travel journals , this activity was a highlight for me. I remember when the kids were both in the toddler years I dreamed of the time we could all sit around the table together and paint.  We each have such different styles in our jounals, I love that.

Here  is another  album of selected photos from the trip.

This is the beach close to were they film LOST.

Back to Life.....

Arrived home late last night. I am still amazed that we have just been on this adventure to the North Shore of Hawaii. The house we rented was TERRIFIC and was situated in a plumeria field. One of the highlights for us was the art studio we set up in the Lanai. We each had a 6x6 journal and everyday we sat together and did pages about our day. I will share more pages from all of our journals later and photos too.  Right now I have to get back to real life.

Signing off for a week

We are taking the paints, sketchbook, surfboard and the kidlets and are taking a break for a week.  No computer (or access to one) or working for a whole glorious week.

Have fun with your family this weekend and have a blessed Easter.

Aloha!! See you in a week!

Surfing Art

Surfing is a big part of our life and our community. The passion and connection that a surfer has to the ocean and the waves is hard to understand unless you either are a surfer or you are married to a surfer. I am one who is married to a surfer, a really, really good surfer! Surfing  is even a part of his job as an advertising art director for one of the top Surf clothing brands.

About nine and a half  years ago we did this series of collages together and I recently asked him to find them so that I could post them here. These are significant for many reasons. First, this is when we began to use collage more freely as a part of our work. Second,this period of time in our life and marriage I was pregnant with our first child and we were fresh out of college, with an abundance of student loans and no solid careers (or even jobs) yet, just dreams. We did these pieces one night before an interview that my husband had at an ad agency.

This was before we had a computer and the raw tactile quality of these is so refreshing to me. I did the painted textures and the photo transfers, and he put the structures together and helped compose the collages. As you can see this is when I began using my junk mail envelopes in my collages, see this previous post  to see what I am talking about. One of my favorite things in these collages are the bits of tattered and torn poster fragments layered in here and there. We had taken a trip to Paris that summer and came home with a bag of torn fragments of layers of posters that we had "aquired" while waiting
for the subway.

This was a great project for us and this helped my hubby get his job at the ad agency and it also helped me to get some jobs in the surf industry designing posters and t-shirts and some swimwear fabric.

I am so glad that we have our visual history in journals, sketchbooks and past art to look back and remember how we got to today.

I have recently launched  a new sports brand of scrapbook paper (called SPORTS XTREME) it is just beginning to get into the stores this month.  Surf and Skate  are the first themes for this brand. 

Although this type of work may seem like a huge departure from my pretty foil papers  and butterfly stickers  it really isnt that much of a jump for me considering my earlier roots swim/surf industry. Interesting how things cycle around, don't you think?

Brownies & Butterfly(stitch)

This is today:) Makin brownies. Notice the forehead, we had a dancing accident the other day.