Circle Art

 Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

     Today I have a spread from my Greece travel journal that I am sharing for Valerie's Geometric Forms challenge at Art Journal Journey.  The left side of the spread is from the Acropolis Museum and the right side from the Acroplis itself.

The right hand page has lots of geometry. There is the big rectangle of the book page (that is part of the background and of course I had to buy a used book printed in Greek) as well as the rectangle of the vintage  black and white postcard I added. There are also 3 circles with the gold embossing. Those were from coasters at the hotel we stayed at. I recycled them  and cut away the outer white around the rings.

You can also see my ticket for the Acropolis. It has some cool blue geometric forms on it also.

The left side of the spread is about my visit to the Acroplis Museum. I included the 2 tickets I bought online and printed off just for this journal page. I also included a bookmark and a chopped up postcard both which I picked up in the gift shop. 

The vase was stamped, colored and fussy cut.

I also have one more tag for Sandie's Anything Goes challenge at Tag Tuesday. It also have some circles on it.

I hope that poor woman's thoughts and life stop feeling like they are going round and round. Grin.

     I embossed  most of the background and then inked it. I also used a different embossing folder and embossed the circles and some white paper before I used an old punch to make the circle.  I inked those also. I cut out the number from a sheet of printed paper, added the Art by Marlene lady, and wrote in the round and round words.

That's all for me. Have a super rest of your day.

Art and When Food is Art too

 Hi everyone. I hope your weekend is going well.

      Some of you asked if the cats and dogs in Friday's post were strays, and I don't really have an answer to that. I did see cats waiting to get inside of doors, and I did see people feeding cats in places where there were no doors. I am not certain about the dog photos either. They looked in good health, and perhaps they could have just been pets of employees just hanging out. I did see a few dogs I suspected were strays, and that made me very sad. Both of my dogs were rescue dogs from the southern US, and it's not just a problem in other places. I think Miss Maddie was one of those strays that wandered around and managed to evade being caught for a while. She had a very stressful time adjusting to being in the house when we got her, and she was good at escaping places. She could even get herself out of a dog crate if you weren't careful.  We don't know her backstory at all, and not that we know too much about Pete, but we do know he was rescued as a young puppy being left out in a box. 

       OK, enough about dogs and cats.

     Today I have 2 pages, both from my Greece Travel Journal with geometric forms on them. I am linking up to Valerie's challenge at Art Journal Journey.  My first page is all about the evil eyes you see for sale when visiting Greece. These are popular tourist kitsch souvenirs that are supposed to keep bad things from happening to you.

Now that you are refreshed about what evil eyes look like, here's my  journal page.

     My background is blue cardstock. I started by sticking down the big evil eye in the middle that says Greece on it.  It's a sticker I picked up in my travels. Then I created six smaller evil eyes. I started with a couple of paper punches to make the blue and white outer edges. I didn't have a punch small enough for the light blue ring, but I did have some page reinforcers (you know, the little sticky rings that you put around hole punched notebook pages). They were the right size so I stuck those down, used a blue paint paint to color them and then added a black Sharpie dot in the middle.

     Once I had these evil eyes glued down, I used a white paint pen to make the strings they are hanging from. I added the kitty chipboard image at the bottom and decided not to add any details to him. I also decided to make a brick floor for him to walk across, similar to a brick pattern I saw while on my trip.

     And here's the other page that I made. It's not a very exciting page, but it does have a big square in the middle.

I wrote down some of the foods (there was so much good food) I ate while traveling, and I created this  middle square based on a sign we saw while in a small town north of Athens. 

     I used this sign as a rough inspiration for my page. On my page the square is the cardboard from  inside of a fat quarter that I recently bought (and used to make this journal's cover).  To copy the words from the sign, I used sticker letters based on what I had, nor did I worry about matching this sign exactly, except for the actual words.

      We ate lunch at the restaurant with the sign out front, and we had a fabulous meal. It was our most expensive meal of the whole trip, but well worth it.  Since the menu was only in Greek, and the owner's English was limited (but better than our Greek), he took us right into the kitchen to show us what was available for food.  Plus, his wife had made the special of the day, and she gave me a big spoonful to taste to see if we wanted any of that.

We started with salad.

And here was a special.  It was shrimp in a tomato with vegetable sauce. 

Then we had some langostinos (little lobsters that are crayfish sized)  served with this to die for mustard-butter sauce.

Then we finished with some grilled flounder.

We ate so much food, but it was all very very delicious. The good thing is we didn't need dinner that night either.

Then the owner brought out this delicious little bite of dessert.

After all that food, we had to close our eyes for a few minutes and soak up the sun,

and watch a ferry boat take some passengers in from and then out to one of the Aegean islands. 

I hope I didn't make you hungry. I certainly made myself want this meal again. 😏

I'm linking up to Gillena's  Sunday Smiles also. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Athena

Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. I hope you're having a nice week so far.

I've been working on a travel journal from my trip to Greece, and I have a page that works not only in my journal, but also for Valerie's Geometric Forms challenge at Art Journal Journey.

You can see squares, circles and a few other geometric shapes on my page. 

Athena is the ancient Greek goddess who is associated with the city of Athens. The Parthenon on the Acropolis is dedicated to her.  That's why I added the various columns to my page (even though they don't all look  like the columns on the Parthenon). 

She is often seen carrying a sword and shield, and although I have no swords, the circular immigration stamped images refer to the shield. One item she is connected to are olive trees, and even though I didn't add any  olive trees on my  page, I do have some olive branches surrounding some of circled stamped immigration images as well as the ancient face image.  She is also associated with owls, and so I have  stamped a few on my page.  One other thing she is associated with are snakes, and if you look carefully at her sleeve, you can see that it is edged with at least 1 snake 

I cut that Athena image from a postcard I bought at the Acropolis Museum. This statue was memorable, but sadly no photos were allowed in the area where I saw it. I had already been told once not to take any photos ( because I didn't see the sign that said that), and to avoid another angry sounding order, I bought the postcard instead. 

Athena's father was Zeus, and the story goes she was born from his forehead. I saw online that she takes her name from the city of Athens, but I also read that it used to be believed that the city took that name from her. According to Mia, who is a native, she says that Athens is named after Athena, and she knows that better than me. 😏

To make my page I used graph style craft paper as well as black card stock. The columns are an older Cottage Cutz die, and the gold crown border is another oldie from Cheery Lynn. I stamped images from AALL & Create and Judikins as well as the big owl that is a very old Ornatum stamp.  I finished by spraying my page with a bit of gold mica spray.

For those of you sick of Athens photos, I am just about ready to move on to other's from my trip, but first, here's a few more assorted Athens photos to wrap up my post.

These next 2 photos are a few items excavated while a subway tunnel was being built.

My 2 traveling companions were discussing the Greek alphabet, which we all more or less knew from our science backgrounds. Yet some of the lower case letters were not as easily recognized, and it drew attention at the subway exit sign.

Roman arches beneath the Acropolis

 as well as seats in an old amphitheater. 

This is a cool shadow.

And I love seeing images carved into stone like this Greek writing. There are 2 more examples further down in this post.

The sun was hitting this Roman columns just right.

Another walkway I was impressed with.

Hadrian's library, another Roman ruin in Greece.

And they had an interesting exhibit in the Acropolis Museum about the colors used in ancient Greek art/ statues.

This could be a page for Valerie's Geomtric Forms challenge at AJJ, but it actually some ancient Greek coins unearthed at the Acropolis.

And finally, the view from our lunch at the Acropolis Museum cafe. We decided it was nice so we'd eat outside. If you look carefully you can see the same statue of Athena  that is on my page on the building on the lower left. Well she is on the museum sign hanging on the building. 

Have a great day!