Let's party!!!

These prints are inspired by the very talented Andy Skinner. I love my prints, but they don’t come even close to the artworks of Andy. I loved the process and the outcome so I decided to play a bit with different colors. 

mixed media canvas

After watching a video from Peggy from CropStop I was intrigued by mixed media. I never really attempted a mixed media project, so I gave it a go. I did a similar project, but with materials I already had in my stash. I’m quite pleased with the result, although my son (aged 3.5) doesn’t like the butterflies, got to love a child’s honesty :-)

canvas with layers of paper, stamps, die cuts, modelling paste...

 

detail of butterfly stamps.

alpha/dictionary challenge - G is for glitter

Over at The Craft Barn we were challenged to use the letter G this fortnight. I came across a couple of interesting words but somehow the word glitter sprong out and stuck ( to everything :-)).

I used girly pink and purple for the background. I just had bought this gorgeous girl stamp the other day (see my post about the craft fair ) and it was perfect for this page. Colored her with Derwent coloursoft pencils, cut out the dress and added some bling.

I have some troubles with sticking the stars and the girl on to the page, don't know quite why, maybe it is the glitter or perhaps I should have sprayed the hairspray at the end???

This page won the challenge, jippie!!!

craft fair haul

Hi there,

I hope you had a nice day,  I had a SUPER day!!!
I went to the annual craft fair in Mechelen and came home with loads of goodies, yippie!
I got a huge amount of stamps

lots of new paints to play with my gelli plate

these gorgeous napkins

and speaking of gorgeous, this paperset, brads and stamps from "simply gorjuss"( they really deserve the name)

Can't wait to get some playtime with my new toys, 
but I'll need to tidy up my studio first :-(

alpha/dictionary challenge - letter V

Who could have thought (besides the smart brains over at The Craft Barn) that just by browsing an ordinary dictionary, you could be so inspired. Me not, that’s for sure, or I would have done it much sooner.

I decided to do the challenges which I need to catch up with in the same order as they came out.

So I started out by reading the V-pages and found so many words that inspired me, in the end  I went with the word ‘verbal’ and this is how it turned out:

Because I’m feeling so inspired I don’t  want to leave it at just this page, so I grabbed my art journal and continued with the other V-words that screamed (not just spoke) out to me. One of those words was valentine:

The background was made using my gelli plate, this was the first time I printed directly into my journal, but will definitely be doing this more in the future as I like the result.

Still words on my to do list: volcano, vintage, Victorian, Venetian, view.

Will keep you posted on the progress I make.

clutter vs creativity

Does your desk look something like this?

and you think you really need to clean up.

WAIT, there is GREAT news:

According to a scientific study done at the University of Minnesota, working in a cluttered environment makes you more creative! They observed that untidy people are more likely to come up with interesting and creative ideas and that cluttered environments make people more likely to try new things.

alpha/dictionary challenge

While browsing the net I stumbled onto a blog challenge held by The Craft Barn, the alpha/dictionary challenge.

For the challenge you need to alter a dictionary or use pages out of a dictionary; every 2 weeks they post a letter (not in alphabetically order and sometimes with a twist) and away you go with altering. 

The challenge is already running from January and they are almost finished, currently they are on challenge 18 (out of the 26), so I need to catch up a lot. But altering a book was still on my to try list, so I went to the thrift store and got myself an oxford english dictionary and started challenge 18, which is the letter Z. 

To my surprise there were only 2 pages on the letter Z, I scanned trough the words and came across the word Zinnia, as English is not my native language I didn’t really know this word. I did some research and found out that these are beautiful flowers; this inspired me to do a spread about the flower fairy Zinnia:

sunset city skyline

I started this page last night and am overwhelmed with the result so far. 

So much that I need to go to the art supply store and get me a rectangular shaped canvas to put this on, that's how much I like it.

I'm guessing this is gonna be one of those pages of procrastination :-)

procrastinating...

This week was all about finishing art journal pages.
I don't seem to be afraid of a white page: I spray, stencil, paint something on but then stop.
I procrastinate, overthink everything and can't seem to progress with the page. So now I just said to myself stop thinking and just do.
And I must say I'm pretty satisfied with the results

Here I had sprayed some stencils from Crafters workshop. I picked up by glueing some parts of doilies and leaves to the page, gave it a wash with gesso and then all of a sudden the word "flourish" came to me. So I added the definition and made these flowers out of bookpages

On this page I only had stamped the brick wall using an embossing folder, the rest was still blank. I had this idea in my head of creating a butterfly out of a bunge of small butterflies. So I used this page for it and I sprayed a sunrise and pasted a dozen of butterflies on top of it.

This page started out with the black page where I already had a stencilled image with metallic paint, I cleaned of my stencil on the white page. So I took this further into a night&day theme.

Originally this page was something totally different, but I didn't like it, so I gessod over it and redone it. I had bought these napkins with embossed circles on it a while ago and glued that to the page, then I just HAD to go with the circles. These butterflies were lying there and screaming out to me to be used. I'm very glad that I did redo this page, because now I'm very pleased with the result.

This is the last page I have to take on. The problem that I have is that I already like it the way it is, but I know/feel it isn't finshed. I'm afraid of ruin what I already have when I add something.

I will show the result when I've figured out where to go from here.
Until next time, bye for now.

tablemats

For a garden party I decided to make some colorful tablemats.
I bought some plain offwhite tablemats and added color with my...
good friend THE GELLIPLATE, how did you guess???

Here is one of my favourites:

gelli print and stamps.

Even my son had a go and I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the results:

I laminated them so they can be used over and over again.

Bon appetit!

note: I will be linking this post to September’s Colorful Gelli Print Party!
If you haven't already, go and check it out!!!

Birthday calendar - September

For the month September I used a technique that is so simple but gives magnificent results.
Just spray some different colors sprayink  ( I used some of my homemade shimmerpaints: paint/water/perfect pearls by Ranger) on a piece of cardstock

lay a piece of cling film over it and wrinkle it

Peal of the cling film and dab of the excess paint with kitchenpaper ( repeat the process if necessary):

 I just love how it looks like marble.

Just LOVE those butterflies!!!