My Wanderlust journey

Hi there folks. Many of you, like me, are enjoying the Wanderlust online course organised by Kasia and Jamie from Artist Trading Post. I'm the first to admit that I am no where near up to date with all the challenges and prompts, but I never intended to keep up with the weekly tutorials. I signed up because there were many teachers involved who I already greatly admire or would love to learn from. I knew there would be classes that I wouldn't get involved in. Life is too fast for me to explore avenues I'm not really interested in. So, I was really looking forward to this particular class with Birgit Koopsen. I love her style particularly her way of creating negative space by concealing a lot of the positive! Her work has heavily influenced my art journaling. I wasn't disappointed. It was a great tutorial. I dropped all my other projects - despite deadlines looming- and got stuck in. This is the result. I'm not wholly pleased with the end result but I really enjoyed the process.

I haven't got a laser printer so I knew I wouldn't be able to use a laser print image for my focal point as Birgit did. However, I have wanted to use this gorgeous girl image from a PaperArtsy set, designed by Clare Lloyd, ECL09, for some time So here was the perfect opportunity. Now I needed to gather supplies. I've been using Fresco chalk paints a lot recently (again by PaperArtsy) but I needed heavy body brights for this so chose to use a mix of Dina Wakley heavy body acrylics by Ranger and a few Golden Fluids eg transparent yellow iron oxide, titanium white and Titan buff. I love blending various colours to produce a background but I really enjoy using Birgit's prompt of starting with a 'mop up page'. This is great because it sort of makes your colour decision for you! At least to start with. So armed with my vintage music book that I'm using for my Wanderlust journey and an army of paint I set to! What fun.

This was my starter page. Already lots of colour and no brown!! These colours are probably Fresco chalks. Certainly that pink looks like it could be Bougainvillea - a firm favourite! But I had no worries then adding more colours on top in true Birgit Koopsen style! 

Lots of warm colours added to the existing blue on the page. I love using reds, pinks, oranges, so painted these liberally across the spread. A bit of finger dabbing along the way, just layering up and remembering to dry layers in between. Finally added a layer of turquoise and lime but tried to leave some of the music showing underneath. Not sure how well that lasted but the intention was there. 

Now here is where I deviated a little from Birgit's tutorial. I love using texture and mixing up the media. I didn't go too mad as I wanted to try and stay at least close to the guidance in the tutorial. So here you can see a cut out of one of Clare's girls, just to give me an idea for positioning, and added strips of vintage text and scraped some 3D transparent Gel medium (Golden) through a stencil across the page. This is lovely and glossy when it dries and adds a bit of shine to the final result. 

Next was the fun part. Using the same colours and some cut 'n dry, I pushed paint through a variety of stencils, also using the paint to stamp text and images all over the page. I also made use of black and 

white paint with various sizes of bottle tops/caps to add dark and light tones. Delicious. I love making a very busy background for this technique! 

My final addition, and not included in Birgit's tutorial (but learned in a previous class I took with her in Paris at Version Scrap) was to drip some pigment inks down the page. I had added some orange neocolour which I hoped the inks would resist but it didn't seem to work on this occasion. Oh well. Here I used Aladine Izink inks: turquoise and orchid. They add a shimmery lustre to the page which I love, especially where it catches on the glossy gel texture. I also added a Winsor and Newton  drawing ink: Amarillo Naranjo. A gorgeous rusty orange ink, forgetting it was waterbased, but it helped later on when I wanted to add orange to white titanium in the cover up! Which is next! 

The next step is not for the faint-hearted. Whereas Birgit stamped out various circle images to paint around, I used my preferred technique of drawing a variety of circle and sun ray shapes to maintain the layer underneath. I then stamped the girl image, all with black Archival ink.  I made up a skin tone and painted over the face to eliminate the background. Next I needed to paint over the existing background only leaving the shapes I'd drawn previously. In the class Birgit's background was very pale. I usually make my background all one colour and very dark, by using a deep blue or Paynes Grey etc. but I had a go applying mainly white with very little colour added. I didn't like it. I needed more colour. So, again using the colours I'd used so far I set about filling the spaces with a mix of white and colour. I love the surprising result when you do this. It makes the original, bright background really pop against the negative space created. I also love the way my original background transforms the hair in the girl image. Now, I needed to finish it by drawing around the circles, finishing the face, adding more stamping and finishing with some doodling, generally with black and white pigment pens. 

The face took some time! I'm hopeless colouring in faces with paint. I've watched Leandra Franich and Tracy Scott do this so easily, but for some reason, I really find it difficult. However, I persevered - but please see this as a step along a long journey I still need to take before I get close to being able to do this well.  The lettering was rushed and therefore not positioned well on the page but I had got to a point where I just wanted to finish it. I can see a lot in this that I like but I can also see areas I need to avoid next time. But I loved the journey -I'm  learning all the time! Hope you're having as much fun as I am. Thankyou so much for dropping by! 

Penny For My Thoughts

Hi there! Two posts in a week is a rare event for me but I'm excited to get going with the planner/journal I created with the lovely, uber-talented Kate Crane last weekend at the Ministry of Mixology event organised by Di Oliver and her husband from Tando Creative Crafts. For those of you who know me and/or follow my infrequent blog, you will know that I'm a great fan of Kate as I love her painting and teaching style. So, I didn't sign up to learn anything new but the chance to coincide another class with Kate (I've done several) use some unfamiliar (DecoArt) products, together with a weekend break with my lovely friend-in-crafting, Linda Reagan, was too tempting to resist. It was a good weekend overall. I much preferred the workshop with Kate to the Andy Skinner class we took on the Sunday which I found slow going. Having said that, it did help me to understand different ways of using a lot of my Golden/DecoArt products and I learned some new techniques which is always a good thing. So, why am I rambling on about a weekend class I took? Well, in order to make myself post more regularly, and hopefully gain a few more followers, I've decided to post the process of further developing the planner/journal we (Linda and I) started in Kate's class. The kit was especially made for this class and comprised a front and back cover and two tabbed inserts made from the fabulous thick grey board that Tando are famous for. Two rings are used to bind the covers and inserts. Kate also provided zillions of  different 'pages' for painting and journaling on. I'm afraid I didn't take a 'before' picture but these Kate Crane kits are available from Tando to buy so you can see them on their website: www.tando-creative.co.uk. (Sorry, haven't learned to hyper-link yet. Working on it). But, here they are painted along Kate Crane guidelines comprising my favourite colours, lots of layers, stencils, stamps and doodles. I love art journaling and this is where I'm most confident in my art work. Thankyou Kate Crane for your continued inspiration! Some of the class managed to paint the reverse of their covers too but I like to spend a lot of time on layering and blending colours so was happy to take my time knowing I can easily complete these at home.

Thus, the reason for this blog post. It will be fun to show and explain how I continue to add to and develop the covers and inside pages over a series of posts. As DecoArt were sponsoring this event, we used their products throughout the weekend. I like them. They come close to the quality of Golden paints/gels which are my absolute preference although I have a wide selection of Amsterdams, Fresco chalks, Kaisercraft, Liquitex, Daler-Rowney, Ranger: Dyan Reavely's, Dina Wakely's etc. The colours used here, if I remember rightly are: Quinacridone Magenta, Transparent yellow iron oxide, medium grey and touches of cobalt teal hue. Black and white has been added too.  We were given a mini circle stencil to add layers, keeping to the same colours. I then used a variety of Kate's hand cut stamps and Paperartsy minis which are always my go-to stamps. I keep them with me wherever  I journal. But it does mean they crop up regularly on my pages. These took me almost all day! But I'm always in a happy place when I journal in this style. In the last half hour we created some backgrounds on some of the inside paper/card Kate supplied us with. Can't wait to add to these. This was a simple, time-worn process of placing small dabs of acrylic paint on the craft sheet, squirting water into the paint and swooshing the paper/card through the watery mixture. Delicious results. But this is as far as I got on Saturday.  

The photo above is a double page spread, where one side has been cut down to create a pocket page. But more of that still to come! The cute stamp in the corner is a new one designed by Kate for Stampotique. Her new range will shortly be available to buy from www.afth.co.uk This is a signature image for Kate so it's no surprise to see it transformed into a stamp. A must have! 

So, what have I done since returning home? Very little actually. I did buy another two tabbed page inserts from Tando so I have gessoed those. I have also collected various pieces of recycled card and cut them to size to create different surfaces to work on. I'm also intending to add more flaps and pockets as I go along. 

Here is what it looks like at the moment when I combine the pages and before I develop it any further.

I do hope you like what you see so far and might be interested in following my progress as I develop and transform my little journal (Kate made hers into a planner) with a variety of mixed media. It's title will be: 'Penny For My Thoughts'. I would love to know if you stopped by. Please leave details of your own blogs so I can return the visit! 

A quick post

Hi everyone! It's ages since I last blogged but it's still chaos here while the pipe leak under the kitchen floor continues to be sorted. We have chosen the floor tiles but now have to wait for the tiler to lay them. At least the pipe is mended and the floor re concreted. Hopefully, it will all be completed soon and we can stop 'camping' in the lounge! Dining room floor still needs levelling before new underlay and carpet can be cleaned. Will we ever be back to normal?? Not sure it will be done before Easter. Hey ho! But at least I can squeeze into the limited space I have left in the craft room to escape and make art. I've been busy making lots and lots of birthday cards as I'm fed up of leaving it till the last minute then begrudging the limited time I have left myself to make a friend a card! I loved making these! Used a combination of Stampendous, PaperArtsy and Crafty Individuals stamps, old and new. I also used various background stamps: Crafty Individuals CI- 430, Indigo Blu: CDB1 (Circle Dot background), PA HP1501EZ. The text stamps also include Hero Arts and Dark Room Door.

1. 

The Crafty Individuals floral stamp is CI- 385, designed by Linda Edwards. I really love it. It's the stamp shown in the bottom left hand corner card coloured in greens and yellows. The poppy one next to it in yellow, pink and purple is from one of the new PA stamp sets: HP1605. A lovely new assortment of gorgeous images! Almost all the others is an assortment of randomly chosen JoFy floral stamps, selected from a range of her sets. I have so many of her sets I can't remember which sets I've selected from lol! To create the background and colour the images I've used 'Wink of Stella' pens. I watched a demo by Sheena Douglas who made a washy background using Spectrum Noir Sparkle pens to create a multi coloured background. She scribbled the pens directly onto the paper then blended the colour out with a water brush. It leaves a lovely sparkly wash across the paper. So I tried the same with these gorgeous sparkly pens. I added more colours and they blended beautifully with each other, overlapping to create more colours. Now it took some experimenting to find a watercolour paper that would allow for a good blending of the colours and not leave streaks. Amazingly, the only one that worked was the cheapest watercolour pad that I'd bought from 'The Works' for my Grandfairies to paint on! 'Crawford and Black'. I tried Ranger, Crafters Companion, PA and even Arches hot pressed. None of these blended the streaks out! So, there we are! Lots of cards in stock for all the birthdays still to come. The photos certainly show how bright and Spring-like the colours are but I haven't managed to catch the sparkle. You'll just have to believe me that it's there and it's gorgeous!

Hope you like them. I would appreciate you leaving a comment just so I know who has popped by! Have a great weekend!

A mini mail art challenge

Just a quick post today to offer a bit of info as to how I made my mini envies and little ATCs to go inside them. This was for a challenge I set at the beginning of January for the Mini Marvel webpage group that I host. The challenge was to create 5 mini envies on a particular theme and to send one to 5 swap partners. It's been great fun and the quality of the art work is fabulous! Here are my completed envies. I chose a 'Cat' theme.

The envelopes are the smallest W.H.Smiths sell, I think. Just slightly larger than an ATC size. I am a little worried that the postie will actually deliver these, but life is all about challenges, right? The Cat stamps are by Katzelcraft. Cute aren't they? I bought these from 'That's Crafty'. I was in the middle of chaos when I completed these due to a water pipe leak in the kitchen and dining room so was limited for space at the time. Therefore, I stuck to just a few resources. Ordinarily I would use paint - my favourite medium, but on this occasion I resorted to Ranger TH dye ink pads as they were easily accessible. After gessoing each little mini brown envie, both sides, I used Tim's technique of squishing the ink pad down on the craft mat and squirting water on it before swooshing the envies through a variety of colours. I love this technique because the result is always varied and interesting. Doing both sides means a lot of waiting for things to dry or heavy use of the heat gun! They did become very wet at times but I think the gesso helped a lot. I then used various stencils and some of Kate Crane's hand made stamps to create the backgrounds using a variety of dye ink pads and Archival in complementary colours. Then I stamped the cats on both sides and used my lovely prisma coloured pencils over the top of the existing layers. I added some labels from a 7Gypsies sticker sheet  and then stuck on the labels. Finally I added borders around the envies and the label. 

Now, there was no expectation to put anything inside each of the envelopes, and some of the ladies taking part have included things and some haven't. However, I wanted to make ATCs to put inside mine, so I did.

I only needed 5 but I always like to make extra ' just in case'. This time I used one of my favourite little cat stamps ever! This is designed by Clare Lloyd for PaperArtsy. It's from the ECL07 collection. I love this set. Here:

The hats are from a Hat cube stamp by Stampotique. Love them! Still using Ranger TH dye ink pads and Leandra's corner, corner, side technique, I quickly added a mix of colours to each ATC. I then used one of Clare Lloyd's new stencils to add layers over the inks.

This is such a versatile stencil. I'm using it all the time! I then used a couple of PaperArtsy mini stamps and Emma Godfrey's scribble circle from one of her new stamp sets for PaperArtsy, EEG15, to build up the background. When these were dry, I mixed some Golden light modelling paste first with PA Fresco Bubble Gum, then South Pacific, and pressed this through a PA number stencil: PSO21. Love that stencil too! 

So, all that remained was to colour my hats and cats, which I did with my prismacolours, add some doodling and they were finished. All ready now to go inside their envies and put in the post. Fingers crossed they all arrive safely! 

Thankyou so much for stopping by. I would love you to leave a comment so I know who you are and so I can visit your blogs too! 

'Fessing up!

Hi everyone! The time has come for me to acknowledge that my craft addiction has become seriously out of hand or I'm in desperate need of a TV programme to step in and offer me a Craft Room Makeover! ( pause while I dream about how that would look ahhhh). Now I know that this will look like a catastrophic 'mess' to all of you, but believe me when I say that I know where everything is! Well apart from a replacement bulb for my Daylight lamp. I know I put it somewhere!! So, with some shame and a very red face, I post photos of my craft room which has replaced the third out of four bedrooms in the house. However, this doesn't include the 'overspill' into our Master bedroom for the four chests of PaperArtsy stamps! As well as a three drawer trolley of beloved, can't-live-without, rubber stamps mounted on wood! Well many of them are priceless heirlooms! Stampington, Stampers Anonymous, Tin Pan Alley, The Artful Stamper,  Stamp in the Hand etc. Well, ( deep breath) here goes.... Negative comments I could do without as I already know those, but commiserations for my predicament and suggestions as to how I can solve my storage needs alongside contact details of any TV producers interested in doing Craft Room Makeovers will be very gratefully received - lol.

Well they do say that acknowledging you have a problem is a first step to solving it! I would appreciate no references to the various current programmes on TV about people with a problem of hoarding. There are no bags of rubbish, dog faeces or old food in this little enclave! Secretly, of course, I love it. It's my escape. And honestly, the rest of the house is immaculate - well, apart from the study! But that's another story... 

Thanks for stopping by. I would love to read your comments - I think!! 

PaperArtsy /Clare Lloyd new stamps and stencils!

What an exciting week with lots of luscious new stamp, paint and stencil releases from PaperArtsy and we are only on the 3rd night! Tonight I'm so pleased and privileged to post alongside PA to show my samples that I made with Clare Lloyd's fabulous new stamps and - 'Ta-Da' - new stencils too! This has been a complete pleasure. I adore these new stamps and love the flexibility of the new stencils.
I was given just one of the new stencils which, as you can see, has been well used! I love it. Here it is with her gorgeous girls!

Our team were given five colours to play with. And joy of joys, this included my all time favourite: Bougainvillea. These colours blend/contrast so well, I had a ball playing around with these. No paint left in any of the bottles though, especially after making several Gelli plate mono prints for backgrounds and embellishments. Here they are:

And now here are the samples I made for Clare. The guidelines are very exact as these need to be a certain size to fit on sample boards for shows. We were offered a template for a 12" square layout and  I generally kept to this. The largest is 11"x5", a couple of 7"x5" both landscape and portrait and then smaller sizes again. I have also made some 6" x 6" greetings cards but will post about those later in
 the week as there won't be room here tonight!

I adore Clare's girls and now she has a DVD out with Traplet Publishing showing us all how to create a Clare look-a-like! I love the hairstyles as they are great fun to colour in or stamp on mono prints. I really played around with hair colours on these samples! I tended to mix both stamp sets to create these samples and I urge you to buy both sets as the variety allows even more creativity. As the colouring speaks for itself, I will focus on how I created the backgrounds. On this sample below, I used the vaseline resist technique. This is very simple. After painting the first colour, which here was Mermaid Fresco chalk paint, you just smear small patches of Vaseline across the substrate. I waited a little while before then painting the second colour, Bougainvillea, over the top. The areas where you have smeared the Vaseline resists the new colour thus creating a striking distressed background. 

The trim around her neck is made with the flower on ECL09, but just the central petals. I just added coloured pearls on top. Her 'dress' is cut out from the Gelli plate prints I made with the paints. Don't you just love that cute little bird? It's from ECL10. I also mixed the texts from both stamp sets here. 

I really love the different elements on Clare's stamp sets, especially on ECL09. So I played around using these to make washi tape strips as you can see in this sample:

 On the next sample, I used masking tape and theses different elements again to create a 'wallpaper' background for one of the girls:

This time I stamped the face from ECL10 on one of the Gelli prints I had made, also using Clare's stencil. I just love that butterfly and due to its 'open' design will be useful for so many projects. Here, I again stamped on a Gelli print but I'm also using it for zentangling. The next sample focuses completely on Clare's stencil:

My favourite technique again of painting over the background to reveal the main image. I used all 

five colours in the original background, all elements of the stencil and various stamps from the two sets. I also added a few doodles before placing Clare's stencil over it and drawing the outline of the flower head and making leaves from the ovals. Then it's a simple but daring process to paint around this image. That bougainvillea really pops against the Bora Bora! I painted a similar 'art journal' style background on the next sample and added several of the butterflies stamped on a Gelli print.

So cute. I'm going to be using that butterfly - a lot! Now the largest sample I made using the girl's face from ECL10. This face is so gorgeous to play with due to it's symmetry. It also gave me the opportunity to add a body and dress which, on this occasion and something I rarely do, I cut from a sheet of scrap booking paper. But, of course, the embellishments are made with Clare's stamps and the odd pearl or two! 

Using Antarctic, Mermaid (completely run out of now 'cos I love it so much) and Candy Floss, I made a patchwork background and used a couple of elements on the stencil to tie all the squares together. The elements on that stencil are so flexible! I love the dots being well spaced apart with large circles too. Lots to play with. Her hair ribbon is again cut from one of the Gelli plate backgrounds I'd made earlier. I just love her bougainvillea hair! With all the hair colouring and faces, I started with Fresco paints but finished with my beloved Prismacolours. Amazingly there is a matching colour to nearly all of Leandra's paints! But then again, I do have the whole set of prismas! 

My final sample for tonight is where I used just part of the girl's face from ECL09. I think these faces lend themselves to partial stamping as if they are peeping round the corner. I've used them like this on my greetings cards which I will post later in the week.