New Treasures

In my last post I told you I would share images of some of the fun treasures I acquired at The IDEA Store in Champaign, Illinois. Today’s the day!

Magazines sold by the pound

Upolstery sample book – 75 cents!

Maps, pages, lettering by the pound

In additional to fun things to use for art projects they also had functional items like these:

CD covers, stencils, small storage bottles

Then there were just so many odds & ends, old & new, to sort through!

old stamps, old watch piece, old compasses

electronic parts, assorted metal pieces

old wood (perhaps from disassembled desks?), old clothes pins, rust metal pieces

Slides, various dominoes, beads from jewelry, tacks, metal buttons, alphabet tags, glass tiles

I’m sure five artists could visit there and come away with five entirely different bags full of things.

So, who wants to go there for a field trip?

Lynne

Words into Art

I am facinated by words & language and frequently like to include it in my artwork.  Today I was doing a little surfing and found this cool new website (well, new for me…you may have known about it a long time ago!)…it’s called Wordle.  According to their site:

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

You can change fonts, colors, layout, etc….it’s a fun little gadget to play with! I made this image by inputting my artist statement:

 

"Artist Statement" Wordle

Anyhow, the next time you want to present your words or message in a new way or even if you just want to spend a few minutes “playing” give Wordle a try!