Have you ever looked at a picture of flowers and it instantly brightened up your day? That’s what this photo did to me. It was taken by Flora Forager, a self-proclaimed “botanical artist, painter, writer, nature lover, [and] light seeker.” Using flower petals, leaves, and other natural materials she finds in her garden or in urban areas, Flora Forager creates dreamy scenes.
She’s based in Seattle but she’s been vacationing in Venice. You can follow her on Instagram, here.
Below are a few more of her poppy pictures.
You can buy one of Flora’s prints over on her website. (Isn’t chamomile tea the cutest?) She also has a journal you can pick up over on Amazon.
Though I’m a grown woman, nearing the age of 40, I still find children’s art to be quite charming. Whether you’re looking for pieces for your nursery or just for the inner child in you, I hope you’ll enjoy these twelve pieces of wall art. These are (almost) all very affordable.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, especially when you’re dealing with photography. What should I shoot? Is there something I should concentrate on? Over on Pinterest, I found this great list of “prompts” or themes that give you an idea of what you could be shooting. It was created by Stephanie Clark from the blog Behind the Camera and Dreaming.
“As part of supporting and encouraging our 365 group my co-hosts and I thought it would be a good idea to have a weekly (optional) prompt or inspiration to help us stay creative in our photography and boost us out of our funks! We proposed the idea to the group and made a list of 52 prompts! I decided that we should make our prompts pretty, so here is a list of prompts by week and an inspiration printable for inspiring your photography.”
Currently, we’re in week 24, so this week it’s all about dad! I like how the list incorporates holidays. For instance, the first week of the year is “resolution” for New Year’s and the last week of the year is “joy, hope and peace” for Christmas.
In my daily shooting, I hope to incorporate these prompts. You’ll see a hint of them in my weekly wrap up posts, Life Unfolding, which are up on Fridays. You can download a printable 8×10 of this sheet, here.
Winners of the 2016 Fine Art Photography Awards (FAFA) were recently announced and David Tortora and Jaime Travezan won in the overall Professional category with their series Flora. A celebration of nature, it shows a nude woman surrounding by a sea of vibrant flowers. The Awards received more than 3,994 submissions from 83 countries around the world and winners were selected by a highly acclaimed panel of international judges including one of my favorites, Kilian Schönberger. (He photographed that beautiful blue forest in Belgium.) The FAPA mission is to celebrate Fine Art photography and to discover emerging talent from around the world.
In the Flora series, three out of the five pictures were NSFW. You can see it in its entirety here.
Bavaria, Germany-born artist Jürgen Lingl-Rebetez is an artist that creates majestic animal sculptures by carefully applying a chainsaw to wood. The 44-year-old spent his early childhood dabbling in art, he drew and painted everything he could set his eyes on which included animals, buildings, people, buildings and landscapes. At the age of 20, after graduating from Josef-Effner Grammar School, he exhibited for the first time in a gallery in Dachau. After his mandatory civil service in Schönbrunn, Lingl-Rebetez became a wood sculptor apprentice to Master Hans-Joachim Seitfudem. In 1996, Jürgen Lingl-Rebetez moved to Switzerland and worked as an independent artist. It was then that he began creating works with a chainsaw. His sculptures take on the appearance of drawings, however, they’re made with a chainsaw in a three dimensional space.
Talk about some mad Etch A Sketch skills! One of the most iconic paintings of all time, Georges Seurat’s 1884 painting, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” was just recreated by artist Jane Labowitch not with a pen or pencil but with an Etch A Sketch. Sitting in front of the actual painting at The Art Institute of Chicago, it took the artist eight hours spread over four days to make the beautiful waterfront scene.
She told the Chicagoist that this isn’t the first time she’s used Etch A Sketch for art. “I’ve been pretty consistently using an Etch A Sketch as an artistic medium since I first started playing with the toy when I was four,” she said.
The artist holds a BFA in Illustration from Chicago’s American Academy of Art and works as a professional illustrator. She initially planned to recreate the painting using a digital image but then heard that the painting would be temporarily moved to a wall facing a well-placed bench. This led her to deciding to Etch A Sketch in person. Passersby noticed. “I met people from all over the world who had stories to share about how they had an Etch A Sketch when they were a kid, too.”
What’s next? Labowitch plans on recreating another Art Institute treasure, Marc Chagall’s “America Windows.” Can’t wait to see more.
If you’d like to learn more about Georges Seurat’s famous painting, Mental Floss has an interesting article that lists 15 things you may not know about it.
Update: We got in touch with the artist to ask her a few questions.
How has the response been to your Seurat Etch A Sketch?
The response to my Seurat Etch A Sketch has been explosive! It’s blown me away. So far I have been interviewed for CBS Chicago radio and a few online news articles. I was in the RedEye today. Tomorrow I am going to be on NPR and I will be on Fox 32 news on Sunday morning! On Monday I am going to be on WGN radio. It’s been a whirlwind media circuit and I am so so grateful that my art is being so well-received!
What’s the secret to creating such detailed Etch A Sketches?
The secret to creating such detailed Etch A Sketch art is patience! It is important to take your time to make sure that you don’t misjudge proportions. I spent arguably as much time staring at the painting as I did rendering it on my Etch A Sketch, to make sure that I wasn’t missing any important details.
What’s the biggest challenge in creating these?
The biggest challenge is making sure that everything stays proportional, meaning that nothing is too big or far apart from other things in relation to it. This is difficult to do, because there is no way to map out or sketch the final drawing before you begin. The fact that everything is all connected with one line adds an interesting challenge, too, because you have to come up with creative ways to make everything connect without it being distracting.
Do you have any plans to create Van Gogh’s Starry Night?
I actually have made Van Gogh’s Starry Night, on a pocket (small) Etch A Sketch! Here’s a link to it. I gave it to my mom for Christmas in 2014, as it is one of her favorite paintings, and I have never given her an original Etch A Sketch rendition of mine before. I would love to re-visit Starry Night on the classic (large) Etch A Sketch, though! It’s one of my all-time favorite paintings.
You can follow Labowitch’s work on Facebook where she goes by the name Princess Etch A Sketch.
via [Chicagoist]
First image, photoshopped by MagnuPI on Reddit
Artist team Sophie Mouton-Perrat and Frédéric Guibrunet have each worked with paper for over a decade, but in different ways. When they first met in 2007, they decided to combine their skills in paper making together to create ethereal paper sculptures that light up like lamps. Mouton-Perrat attended art school where she learned about paper and how to create papier-mâché. Guibrunet graduated with a degree in chemistry and, in contrast, is self-taught in paper-making. Just a year after they met, they were creating unique light sculptures, while Guibrunet developed the lower parts, Mouton-Perrat shaped the top, figurative parts. How amazing would it be to see these in person?
How time has flown by! It’s been three and a half years since I first discovered the work of artist Anna Gillespie when I stumbled upon her figurative sculpture Taste the Rain. (It’s still one of favorite sculptures of all time.) Using bark and mixed media, she created a life-size, six-and-a-half foot tall human completely immersed in nature. I was surprised to find out that the piece was part of an ongoing series of work using natural materials that fell from trees like leaves, bark, and acorns. As she told me then, “For this piece, I found the bark in a wood near my home in the south west of England, from a fallen tree. All these works try to express a moment of connection to nature and this particular piece is about trying to draw the viewer into recalling what it feels like to stand out in the rain and engage their senses.”
A few weeks after that post, I wrote another one on her full body of work. That was back in 2012, and since that time, Gillespie has created even more astonishing figurative sculptures. The pieces here were all made with bronze and most of them are as new as last year. She’s now showing a selection of her work in a new exhibition starting May 16 at Beaux Arts in Bath, UK. Makes me want to take a trip out there just to see these in person.
Above: Between The Shores, Bronze Ed. of 9 H:78 x W:85 x D:22cm
L’Enfant, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:41 x W:24 x D:40cm
Trust, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:196 x W:68 x D:46cm
Let It Rain, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:82 x W:28 x D:28cm
The Ties That Bind, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:47 x W:72 x D:16cm
Rescue Me, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:105 x W:87 x D:16cm
Dappled Sleep, Bronze, Ed. of 6, H:135 x W:45 x D:36cm
The Waiting, Mixed Media for Bronze, H:47 x W:119 x D:14cm
Let Heaven Go, Bronze, Ed. of 5, H:223 x W:60 x D:60cm
I love this piece called Big Bang Kiss by Lora Zombie. The self-taught painter from Russia has this raw, grungy style that’s unmistakable. I love the way she incorporates splashes of color. When you buy one of her prints, she’ll hand sign it. The offer ends today, Monday, April 25th at 11:59 pm EST. Is it time to scoop up another print?
The online preview of Camilla D’Errico’s new series Dances With Dreams was just released and it includes so many sweet and surreal paintings. The upcoming show begins on April 23 and runs through May 21 at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. The Canadian painter is completely self taught! (How inspiring, right?) She is among a group of female artists, which include Audrey Kawasaki, Amy Sol and Stella Im Hultberg, who paint beautiful young girls in the Pop Surrealism category.
Hello, I’m Alice Yoo! I’m founder and CEO of Skylar Yoo, a company dedicated to inspiring and empowering women to be bold. We sell apparel, art prints and accessories to the modern feminist.
In my former life, I was editor-in-chief of the art and culture blog My Modern Met, which I founded back in 2007. I curated and wrote about art, design and photography for more than seven years. (In fact, I published over 7,000 articles which were seen by millions of people worldwide.) I’m also co-author of a book called For Love: 25 Heartwarming Celebrations of Humanity, which is on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
I live in southern California along with my husband and my two toddler boys.
This blog is about what I love, the tough experiences that I’ve learned from, and my journey as a second time entrepreneur. Right now, I’m in the midst of a 365 day challenge, to read one book a day. If you share my passions or want to learn some cool new facts, come along for the ride. I hope to inspire, educate and entertain you!
