Monthly Archives: March 2011

Clematis card

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Remember the clematis pictures? Well, I worked out how to mount them to make a greetings card 🙂

Mounted picture of clematis

I marked and then cut a rectangular frame (green section), and cut out all the background outside of the frame. I then matted that onto black card with a narrow border. That was then matted onto hand-coloured glossy card with wider margins, before mounting the whole thing onto a square, textured white card. The glossy card was sprayed with Adirondack Color Wash (cranberry, wild plum and denim), then water to merge and activate the colours, and then a sheet of kitchen roll laid onto it and then pulled off leaving the quilted texture in the wet ink. I’m rather pleased with the results 🙂

Art Journaling Workshop

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I’ve just spent a fab day being taught all things art journal by Anneliese Bates, certified Ranger educator, designer and mixed media artist, and real nice with it 😉 The session covered backgrounds, layering, decoupage, doodling, writing, and what to write. Copious ideas and inspiration with all the materials required. I would recommend any future workshops – great inspiration and value for money. As to my work today – well pics of that may arise as the pages get ‘finished’.

More information on Anneliese’s workshops at her new website www.creativejourneyworkshops.co.uk

Glossy Background Variations

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This is this month’s project for a card crafting workshop afternoon I teach on the third Saturday of each month in Leicester, UK. See my ‘about me’ page for more details.

Distress ink was applied to an A4 sheet of glossy card using a brayer: broken china, dusty concord and worn lipstick. I then cut the sheet into quarters and left one quarter as was [flowers]. The second quarter I sprayed with water and allowed to dry, giving a speckled bleached look [butterflies]. The third quarter I wiped some of the ink off with a baby wipe, before using a scrunched up vinyl glove to apply the same colour inks from the pad to the card to get a wrinkled look on a bleached out background [lily/gems]. The final piece was dabbed with a scrunched up moist baby wipe, again producing a bleached effect [tree]. Each piece was cut in half again (ie eight pieces from one A4 sheet). Images were stamped on with either black or opaque white Stazon ink, and matted onto bazzill cardstock. The tree foliage in this example was added after stamping the tree silhouette by dabbing ink on using the scrunched up vinyl glove (a scrunched up plastic bag or cling film would work as well). The gems on this occasion are dabs of Stickles glue in coordinating colours – but hotfix rhinestones or self-adhesive gems would work far better.

Tim Holtz configurations shadowbox

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Here’s this afternoon’s work – lining and taping a small Tim Holtz configurations shadowbox. I’m aiming for the box to be filled with ephemera evoking Victorian times with a steampunk feel to it. Quite pleased with it so far, but found the tissue tape to be less adherent than I would have liked. Three of the boxes are lined with paper of my own making – using various Tim Holtz stamps and distress inks: I inked the stamp with the same colour pad as I then used to swirl colour on with foam application tool. The tone-on-tone gives it a nice aged look.

Art Journaling – napkin decoupage

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I’m discovering art journaling, and so far am just doing the backgrounds. Today I tried ‘napkin decoupage’ – taking the printed layer off a two or three ply napkin and then using a matte gel multi-medium sticking it to the page. So here’s the result! The rose image is from a napkin (Cath Kidston,John Lewis) and the rest is acrylic paint applied with a baby wipe into my Moleskine sketch book – I gesso’d the page first. The large burgundy area next to the rose image resulted from the page delaminating under gesso and heat and the top layer of the page peeling off leaving a much more absorbent core exposed. Adds to the distressed look.