Inspired Ideas: The Christmas Issue

Inspired Ideas is an online ezine I just found out about via Elizabeth Dulemba’s blog. It has 168 pages plus an appendix... click here to check it out:

It’s full of creative and unusual craft projects such as a Christmas village made of recycled cereal boxes, a yarn ball wreath, cookie cutter jewelry designed by a gallery of crafters, artists, and bloggers including Mary Engelbreit. The brainchild of Amy Powers, it is an impressive example of innovative publishing... and it’s free!

Happy browsing!

Great source for vintage graphics

I was looking for an image of a doily, and stumbled over The Graphics Fairy blog. If you need pre-1923 images, here are thousands of copyright-free engravings, playing cards, postcards, advertisements, etc. It’s well-organized with categories, plus a search box. Speaking of ads, there are plenty, but it’s worth it for these goodies.

Check out this wonderfully bizzarre pair of scissors:

Enjoy!

My Teacher Is a Dinosaur free coloring page

Yesterday I received copies of my fall picture book and they look great. The full title is My Teacher Is a Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Poems, Jokes, Riddles, & Amazing Facts. It takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the history of life on Earth starting 4 1/2 billion years ago... not bad for only 48 pages, right? For more info including reviews, please check out this page.


These previous blog posts tell a little about the behind-the-scenes activity. I also wrote about doing the research for this book on I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) here and here. Last but not least, here is my I.N.K. post about how to write jokes and riddles.


I haven’t forgotten about the coloring page... here it is!

Click on the image to enlarge it then print it out with a horizontal orientation and get out your crayons. (Did you know there is a Crayola set with 96 colors!?!) Or drag it off the web page to your desktop. Feel free to send it to any kids you know that love dinosaurs. If anyone sends me a photo of a colored-in page, I’ll post it here. Or, post it on my author page on Facebook!


Thanks, y’all!

Inspired by Photos free PDF book available

On the left is a detail of one of my images from Inspired by Photos. It’s a PDF you can download that has 60 copyright-free photos donated by ten fiber artists. They are Dena Crain, Claire Fenton, Martha Ginn, Loreen Leedy, Linda Matthews, Christine Predd, Kim Ritter, Louise Schiele, Emmie Seaman, and Virginia Spiegel. Click here to download it.

Since these images are copyright-free, you can crop them, change the colors, scribble on them, print them on paper of fabric... whatever suits your artistic fancy. Besides cropping the moth image, I used the Curves feature in Photoshop to play with the colors. There are several posts on my blog about digital manipulation, just look underTopics on the sidebar for Photoshop Tip.
This is the cover of the PDF book; it’s 105 pages long, and includes inspirational quotes from each artist, plus links to their web site or blog.

Here are details of two more of my photos, a tree frog hiding in a bird house, and spring flowers somewhere in Switzerland.
Each artist’s photos are quite different, so have fun browsing through them and visiting the various web sites.

And by all means have a happy and creative Monday. I’m going to work on a home made painting box for outdoor expeditions among other things, because the picture book I’ve been slaving over for months is FINISHED! (Need I say yahoo?!)