Card Craft
Twelve Tags of 2012 – September

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I’ve been playing with various options of putting colour onto metal – here are the results! I’ll be showing how to do them at the Manic Stamper Craft Club on Saturday.

The tags are first covered with metal foil tape (really thin foil – serves me right for going to the local poundstore!) and then I used a small embossing ball tool to emboss the outlines. Rub over the whole tag with black acrylic paint, and then wait for it to almost dry before rubbing off the paint from the tag – it should catch in the outlines. Add colour with acrylic inks (I used a paintbrush), Promarkers or alcohol inks (I used the Adirondack alcohol ink pen filled with blending solution to pick up dried alcohol inks from a palette). I love the aged look to the metal caused by the black acrylic, and the translucent colour from the Promarkers/alcohol inks. The acrylic inks are more luminous due to their opacity. By the way, alcohol seems to denature acrylic, so if your black coating doesn’t work out, wipe over with alcohol hand gel and try again!

And as a bonus, I’m publishing the forget-me-not doodle as a tangle pattern 🙂

3D Projects
Pearlised custom patterned card

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The design challenge over at WOW! Embossing Powder blog this month is ‘monochromatic’ and featuring their fabulous pearlescent powders. This is what I came up with, and if you’d like to find out how I made the pearlescent background card/gift box lid pop over and read my post.

 

Card Craft
Which watercolour effect?

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I’ve been playing with various watercolour effects, out of curiosity more than any thing! Thought I’d share the results, just in case someone else might be interested… All of them feature a Stampendous stamp (Cling Poppy Scene #CRM234).

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Other Art Pieces/Techniques
Distress palette distress!

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Well, I thought I had it covered… I took my distress ink palette with me on holiday, intending to do some distress water colouring while I was away. I popped it in a bag with a piece of kitchen towel, sealed it up, placed in flat in a box, flat in the car boot and off we went. It seems that somewhere along the 4 hour drive to Holyhead, the ferry crossing to Ireland and 1.5 hours driving in Ireland there was sufficient rock and roll to slosh things about a bit:

Needless to say, I didn’t get any water colour done with this palette – I had to use my distress markers instead. I decided not to waste the lovely colours and used an adaptation of my paper towel printing technique to produce lots of lovely coloured napkins for backgrounds and decoupage:

I have several plies of the oranges, the blues and the greens ready for my collages and bits and bobs. After I’d rescued and used what I could, I set to washing up the mess and replacing the colour swatches on the lid. As you’d expect, all the inks rinsed off the plastic leaving no residues, unlike the stickers which left their adhesive behind – no matter, it just helps the next ones stick more! A couple of hours later, and my palette is restored:

A happy accident? Time will tell as I use up the various bits of kitchen paper I used to blot up the  mess in my artwork – watch this space! I would also like to find a thin sheet of silicone/rubber to seal the palette for the next trip – or thin one inch rubber washers to stick onto the lid. The palette is great, both in construction and price – but it sooo isn’t water tight! I’ve also learnt to only use half a dropper full of ink in each well rather than the full one I did first time round!

 

Design Team Projects
My art in the USA

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It’s a bit late in the day for you to go and see – but a piece of my art was at the CHA Summer 2012 show in Rosemont, IL (I think that’s Chicago) last week. Here’s a pic of the WOW! Embossing Powder stand – look for the bus image on the right next to the Union Jack (which by the way is also made from embossing powder):

That’s Suzy Solorzano West – the WOW! Marketing Coordinator for the USA from whose Facebook page I nicked the image as I wasn’t flown across to take my own 😉

Well that there bus pic is 2ft square, and ‘painted’ with embossing powders, taking about 8 hours in all to complete. I made it on four white coated hardboard sections so that it could be packed for the trip. The white hardboard was slightly textured, so took the embossing pen and powders well without too much cling and available in sheets from B&Q – I had them cut it down into roughly 12″x12″ squares. The brief for the piece was ‘iconic image of Britain’. Lovely to see it in pride of place 🙂

 

Original Designs
Creevagh – tangle pattern

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I’m back from a holiday in Ireland, and while there I put pencil to paper and designed four new tangle patterns from scratch. They’re all named after places we visited during the stay. I’m also a bit out of touch with what patterns are out there (including my own!) – so if any are the same, or similar, apologies, and let me know!

I’ve enjoyed playing with the negative spaces on these, and this one can be embellished by emphasising the circles.

Next week: ‘Monaghan’.

 

Other Art Pieces/Techniques
Graphics & Illustration – Exhibition Piece

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This is the last post based on my end-of-first-year exhibition pieces. Today’s is the graphics and illustration project – we had four sessions to create a collage based on the portrait and work of our chosen artist. I developed several collages, based on thumbnail images of the myriad works of Jacek Yerka, courtesy of a Google search. The two I chose to take forward were a simple cut and paste montage of as many thumbnails that would fit on an A4 sheet, and a number of thumbnails mounted on acetate hoops circling an image of the artist photocopied from one of his books (to represent his images being inspired by his dreams). I then researched and mocked up a magazine cover and article (based on Artists and Illustrators March 2012 magazine) and a book cover dust jacket using a photo of the 3D whirling dreams montage and a scan of the A4 montage.