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For today's Wednesday Stamper I am finally using one of the wonderful unmounted stamps from Stampattack. He's mounted on striped K&Company scrapbook paper and embellished with a couple of photo corners and some rub-ons from 7 Gypsies and Making Memories.
Have a great day, Everyone!
Finally, I'm doing another ISMAKI design! I love the ISMAKI layouts, but often my Mondays are too full to fit them in. This card is for my cousin Vicki who collects bears. We're lucky if we get to see each other more than once or twice a year. She'll be here tomorrow, so this card will accompany a little gift, since we rarely see each other on Christmas or birthdays.
The bear is an older stamp from PSX called "Waving Teddy. He was stamped with walnut distress ink and colored with Prismacolors and Sansodor. His buttons are gold leaf pen. Papers are from Creating Keepsakes and My Mind's Eye. The text is a Studio G design from Hampton Art. It's stamped in colorbox pink pigment ink and embossed with tattered rose distress embossing powder.
Have a great week, Everyone!
The theme for today's Saturday's Workout is "make it embossed", and I have a new technique to share!!
The dots paper is handmade. My new technique comes out of a happy mistake. I meant to color the dots on the stamp individually, using assorted colorbox pigment inks. But by mistake, I inked the entire stamp with VersaMark. And a thought occurred to me...might the sticky VersaMark provide a good base for the colorbox ink? So, I left the VersaMark on the stamp and went ahead and inked the dots individually with various colors as originally planned, right on top of the VersaMark. WOW! It took much less pigment ink to get full, bright coverage on the stamp, and cleaning the stamp was amazingly easy since the pigment ink was laying on top of the VersaMark! These were now highly colored and very sticky dots, which made embossing a really easy task, because the powder stuck beautifully! Better than ever before! And the color really pops!
All stamps used are from Stampotique Originals: "Dots", Star Balloon", and "Bunny and Hopscotch Cube". The background for the bunny is colored with chalks and watercolors. The ferns are my watercolor doodles. Flowers are from Close To My Heart, and are colored with a citrus Adirondack acrylic dabber. Flower centers are decorated with Art Institute glitter.
OK, so why an Easter card now? Tonight, millions of Orthodox Christians worldwide will celebrate Pascha. Xristos Anesti! to the Greeks, Xristos Voskrese! to the Russians, and a blessed Easter to all those who speak English. At midnight tonight, all over the world, candles will be lit in dark churches. Each in our own languages we will proclaim Christ is risen. For my mother's family, it was Xristos Voskrese. For mine it is Xristos Anesti.
Whether or not you celebrate Easter, may all of you and your loved ones be blessed with health and prosperity!
Today's TGIF requires the use of acetate. I don't know why this is, but every time I use acetate in a piece I also end up using one of the many clear resin manga stickers that I got at the Comicon (comic book and manga convention) I attended with my kids. And then I bought more of them at the Matsuri celebration in February. I think it may be because they are clear, and the acetate allows them to retain their clarity. I really don't know, but I am sure that I love every opportunity to use acetate and the little manga resins.
This figure is called Nana, from the book Nana by Ai Yazawa. The sheet of acetate is recycled from an acetate container that originally housed three plastic canisters of large paper flowers by Making Memories. (I'm still green, Rosie!) I'm not sure what I like better, the flowers and canisters or the acetate box that they came in. I began by sponging around the perimeter with citrus and cloudy blue acrylic Adirondack dabbers. Next came K&Company die-cut stickers, from both the classic silhouettes and the urban collections. Then I positioned Nana and glued flowers from Making Memories and Close to My Heart randomly around the piece. I colored a few of them with the Adirondack dabbers, but the bright aqua flowers came in that color. Some Art Institute glitter in the center of the flowers finished it.
Have a great day, Everyone! Kali Anastasi to all the Greeks! Sunday is Orthodox Easter, and we begin celebrating tomorrow night at midnight! Xristos Anesti! Xristos Voskrese!
Here's my offering for today's 4X4 Friday challenge, "florals".
The little girl is a stamp included in the new "vintage collection" from TJ Designs. She was stamped onto a 3-1/2" X 3-1/2" piece of glossy cardstock with black Staz-On, then masked, and was overstamped with Tin Can Mail's "hydrangea and text" stamp with mushroom Adirondack ink. The piece was then colored with an assortment of Adirondack lights and a couple of shades of distress ink, using Ranger's brush tip pen nibs and sponge applicators. It was mounted onto black cardstock, then floral paper, then a 4X4 piece of black cardstock.
Have a great day, Everyone!
This week's Wednesday Stamper is all about insects as a sign of the new life brought by spring. The challenge is to create something that depicts what is felt by the thought of insects. I chose to focus on the the theme of new life. Just last week we discovered the beginnings of a Mud Dauber Wasp's nest in the corner of our front door. Mud Daubers don't make hives, they mold mud into tiny cells, and do it very quickly. When we left the house early in the morning, there was no nest. By the time we returned, close to noon, there were the beginnings of two small cells made of mud, and plastered to the bottom corner of the door. Had we seen this anywhere else, we probably would have left it alone. But wasps living on the outside of our front door?....That's a little too close, even for Mud Daubers who rarely attack like other wasps, so we cleared it off while the wasps were away.
For this piece, I've made my doorway to spring. It is a doorway of opportunity: The opportunity that comes with a life renewed. My only insect stamps were bees, but that's close enough. You can imagine the brown of the wasp cells in the color of the door. The blue-green panel housing the metal flower are the color of grass and trees and the blindingly bright sunshine of a desert spring.
Bee stamps are from PSX and Artful Illusions. They were stamped with Staz-On black, colored with Lemonade Adirondack Lights, cut out and adhered with dimensional tape. The light brown cardstock was stamped in walnut distress ink with Hero Arts manuscript background stamp. The same stamp was used on the blue-green cardstock, stamped in Tsukineko's Brilliance white pigment ink, and embossed with JudiKins White Diamonds. I embossed a one inch metal square with a flower template from Paula Hallinan Littleton Co., using the PaperCraft tool kit from the Punch Bunch (I LOVE this set of tools!) and roughed-up the area around the flowers with some cross-hatching and scratches, then touched on some Adirondack alcohol ink in "stream". The door handle is a brad that I got in a small grab bag last August at Art Unraveled. I colored it with various alcohol inks several months ago, sealed it with gloss medium and then had no idea what I would do with it until today.
I hope that the doorways of spring open onto renewed energy and beauty in all of your lives!
The theme for Layers of Color's first challenge is "humorous", and ArtyGirlz is asking for "handmade backgrounds". Colorful Norbert fits both. I'm breaking my own rule, here. I require myself to make separate pieces for each challenge and not to "double-up". I don't care if anyone else does it, it's just that for me, my personal challenge for myself is to make a separate piece for each. But I'm more than a little tired tonight, and Norbert works both places.
On top of the two aforementioned challenges, there's a personal one, as well. Rosie Rowe--Altered (t)Art and Stuff wants me to "go green" for earth day. Believe me, Rosie, I WANT to go green! Truly! But I'm afraid that a re-cycled tag is as green as this one gets, unless you count a few of the lines and dots I made with a Sharpie (*ouch* Bad joke). I'm staying indoors today as I'm allergic to my blooming olive (green) tree.
Norbert is a stamp called "Jolly Guy" from Catslife Press. I stamped him with Nick Bantock yellow ink on white cardstock and cut him out. He's glued to a hand-made background of periwinkle acrylic paint and gesso scraped onto a former shipping tag with an old credit card and spread criss-cross with a dry brush. The tag is overstamped with Paperbag Studios "numbers diagram" and Hero Arts "manuscript background" in mushroom Adirondack ink. Norbert and the text are decorated with a variety of colored fine line Sharpie pens. And further "greening it up", the ribbons are recycled from a tossed-out mardi-gras ornament. The whole thing is sitting on a yellow gingham sheet from Paper Pizazz. The white stuff around the yellow gingham is a photoshop brush I added for atmosphere...I am tired...
Oh, and one more thing...if you have time, take a peek one post back. There's some wonderful art from Dani Rogall--Stampingwitch and Crissi and Julie of ArtyGirls to delight the eyes!
Have a good night's sleep Everyone! I know I will!!
This has been an amazing day! I really don't know where to start, so I'll begin with opening my e-mail this morning and finding that wonderful Rosie had selected and posted my Gypsy Arch on Inspirational! You really should take a look at the entire Inspirational blog, and stop by often. Some of the most beautiful things I've seen have been selected and showcased there.
My next e-mail message this morning was from Dani. She made two wonderful pieces of art for a personal swap that we're in. First, here's her fabulous ATC triptych...
...and this gorgeous house shaped collage, both of which I just received in the post!
Both pieces are incredible! The texture and beautiful attention to detail is amazing. I wish you could see them in person! I'll wait to show you what I have made for Dani until she receives them.
But that's not all...there's still more! The fabulous set of unmounted stamps that I won in the ArtyGirlz challenge drawing arrived, and Crissi and Julie included this wonderful card that I just had to show!
And I have one more nice surprise to share with you. I just finished re-arranging and adding some new sidebar items. If you take a look at the page from SewSomerset, you'll see a FABULOUS quilt at the top of the page...it belongs to the incredibly talented Frieda Oxenham. I am so honored to share the same page with Frieda's amazing work!
So you can see that it has been quite a wonderful day! Full of nice surprises! It's late, but I'm not stopping for the day until I've had a chance to make something for today's ArtyGirlz challenge, so be sure to stop by again later!
This was fun! Today's TMTA theme is "water sprites and/or mermaids". There are two things that I've been wanting to do again: burn images, and digitally alter them. Today I did both.
The image was originally a swimmer, courtesy of Art-E-Zine, that I altered in Photoshop with a pen tablet. After printing and cropping, I burnt the edges with candle flame and stitched it to an ATC size piece of watercolor paper that had been treated with the salt and watercolor technique a few months ago, and added the beads. I scanned it, so it blurred a bit because of the dimensional beads.
Have a great week, Everyone!
Well, not really. This isn't me, and this isn't my doll. But it is the theme for this week's Gothic Arches, so with a little artistic license, this has become "My Doll and Me".
I spent almost all of the refunded money I got for the workshop that was canceled this weekend on inks! I already had a few colors, but most were of the same value, so I added Adirondack Lights to my collection in order to get a range of value as well as hue. I'm so glad I did. I LOVE them!
The background for this piece is on matte photo paper and includes sweeps of salmon and juniper Adirondack Lights with a shadow of peeled paint Distress Ink. The swirls, dots and blades of grass were made with Sharpie pens, and Hero Arts manuscript background was stamped in mushroom Adirondack ink. The image is from Somerset Studio's clipart collection CD. I mounted the finished arch on pink Bazzill cardstock.
Hope you all had a wonderful weekend!
Saturday's Workout's first theme is "It's all distressed", so I covered a piece of coated matte cardstock with a layer of Adirondack lights, then added distress inks in mustard seed and tea dye to complete the look. Inkadinkadoo's butterfly was stamped with black Staz-On and colored with Marvy markers. The text is a rub-on from Making Memories. Behind the butterfly, the Acanthus stamp by Rubber Stamped was stamped with Adirondack earthtones in "bottle", and the pieces were mounted onto contrasting cardstock.
Congratulations to Sandy and Heike for their new challenge blog! This piece is for you and all the beauty you inspire!!
What an absolutely fun theme!! I realized when making this piece for 4X4 Friday that I rarely use purple in my work. What a shame! It's a gorgeous, regal color, and perfect for the circus! I started a circus quilt about a year and a half ago. I still plan to finish it. So far, it's really glittery and beautiful. But, I haven't been able to get excited about fabric lately...just a phase I'm going through, certainly, but gotta get that mojo working before I can finish it successfully. My paper passion however, is endless! No problem there, and no problem combining fabric and fibers into collage pieces. It's the all-fabric thing that I'm currently in a slump over. Oh well, this too shall pass. . .
Today's piece is made with clown images from Artful Illusions. The pony is from Jolee's Boutique, purple glittery paper from DCWV, and text on black cardstock is hand scribed with Art Institute gourmet glitters.
Have a wonderful weekend, Everyone!
Poor Norbert. If any of you have ever seen the old BBC TV series, "The Prisoner", then Norbert may remind you of "Number 4". My kids thought so, and suggested I get a bicycle stamp to go with him.
Speaking of stamps, this is my unlucky/lucky day. Unlucky, because a workshop that I had been looking forward to for months was canceled. It would have been today and tomorrow. Lucky, because I NEED the free time, and, I get to spend my refund on supplies...hooray!
And speaking of supplies, I've learned a lesson that I thought I'd pass along, for what it's worth. If there are a number of "must haves" on your shopping list, always, always, buy the oldest item first! Some of my favorites that I passed over till later in order to get that cool new item, have, alas, been discontinued. Now I must spend hours that I can't spare, browsing internet shops and suppliers to see if these things are still in-stock somewhere in the world...sometimes, only to find them from a remote place, get all excited, and then be told, "Sorry, we don't ship to the U.S." Argh! My fault entirely. So my new buzz phrase is: "Shop old and often".
"Norbert", created for TGIF, is actually a fairly old stamp from Catslife Press titled "Jolly Guy". He was stamped on matte photo paper in Staz-On black, after I printed the text. The monogram and flower are from 7Gypsies. All the rest was done with distress inks and a black micron pen.
Have a great weekend, Everyone!
Here's my WS offering. Thanks, Belinda, for the wonderful inspiration! It helped me get my mojo back!!
Image is courtesy of Belinda Schneider. Stamps used are a Kelly Panacci border stamped with Nick Bantock brown ink, and a Heidi Grace swirl, colored and stamped with black Marvy marker. Text, bottles and glasses on the tray are cut from a magazine. Glittery mask is a dimensional sticker from Jolee's Boutique, and the dots around the swirl stamp were made with the same black Marvy marker used to color the stamp.
So put your feet up, mix yourself something wonderful to sip, and look at all the other fabulous creations made for this challenge!!
