Great mail from Inkwell-Coffee and Art in the Morning

I found an envelope of really fun mail in my mailbox yesterday...yay!  It was from Dede, known as Inkwell on Ustream.  She streams a couple times a week and has some giveaways and I won a great postcard that Kare had sent in for Dede to give away.  Here it is:

I love it!  Love the humor - cracks me up.  Thanks so much Kare and Dede!

Dede's Ustreams are alot of fun.  And she is an awesome artist and shares so much with us.  You can find her HERE on Ustream.  An especially fun stream she did not too long ago was Coffee and Concrete Art in the Morning where she made some decorated background papers in her driveway.  It was a blast to watch!
And lucky me - she sent a piece of that background paper along with the postcard.  Check this out:

Thanks so much Dede!  I love it!  See you on Ustream.  You are a sweetheart for all you do and all you give away!   And I LOVE your laughter!
Hope everyone has a creative day!

Stencilage Journal Pages

I've been having a lot of fun playing with stencils.  They are especially fun to use with some of the sprays out now - Glimmer Mists and Color Washes are a couple.  Stencils are also fun to play with with spouncers or foam brushes and paint or ink.

My very talented friend, Paula, aka Journal Artista, is hosting a contest and will be giving away some Crafter Workshop stencils.  To be eligible to be in the drawing for a stencil you need to make some art using a stencil and share a link to it on her blog Linky.  You can read all about it on her blog HERE.

Back to the fun I've been having...here's a page I finished today:

The background is all craft acrylic paints,  The design in the upper left corner and lower right corner were made with a Tattered Angels stencil.  I kinda grunged them up with some extra paint and Color Wash spray.  Decorated the background with dots made with pencil eraser, circle made with rx bottle and some stenciled flowers with a stencil I made with the Tim Holtz Alterations Tattered Florals die.  I never completely plan my journal pages, kinda let them evolve as I go.  And this time I had some die cut flowers laying around on my art table, as well as a couple scraps of colorful watercolor paper.  I liked how the bright colors looked with the dark blue so played around with placement and glued stuff down with matte medium.  Looked through a list I keep of words and quotes to use in my journal someday and decided "If not now, when?" was a good choice.

Guess maybe I use prompts backwards...most people pick a prompt, then do the art.  I sometimes know what I want to say on the page, but usually I do the art and then decide what it's saying to me.

I'm really liking that Tattered Florals die.  Here's some more stenciling with it:

And still more:

These both came about with what us Journal Artista Ustream friends call Paulaisms.  "Use what is around you on your art table".  Probably not her exact words but close.

For the gold and blue page I was painting book pages with watercolors and then die cutting the flowers.  After cutting out the yellow ones I set the leftover paper aside and it was on top of the book page I had painted blue.  Looked pretty cool!  So an idea was born!  I painted the gold background, glued the blue page down, then the yellow.  Looked sort of plain so added some cut out flowers.  Still needed something so used some of the die scrap as stencils abd sprayed with bright blue spray I made by mixing Glacier Glimmer Mist with some bright blue Memories reinker ink.  

I used matte medium for gluing down all the pieces on these pages.

The green page started out as a background page I was going to post to show the stencils.  In addition to the flowers I also used sequin waste (or also called Punchinella) to stencil the dots.  I did that first, then put the flowers down and sprayed over them with Color Wash.  (fyi - I get my sequin waste HERE)  I love sequin waste and use it all the time.
Here's the background page:

   I got a magazine in the mail today and saw an ad with those ribbon flowers (do you all look through magazines thinking "I could use that in an art project!"?  sometimes the ads catch my attention more than the rest of the magazine).  Right away I was trying to think what to do with those and thought the bright colors would be great on that green background.  So while watching the Artistic Bikers Thursday Ustream from the fabulous Oasis Studio I fussy cut the flowers.  And Blade was talking about summertime and things that represent summer so I thought summertime would be the perfect title for this page.  I've been wanting to see how ledger paper would feed through my printer so once I got the text how I wanted it I printed a page out of an old ledger book I got off ebay for 99 cents awhile back.  Worked out great and I'm really happy with the page.
You can get links to The Artistic Biker Ustream and YouTube from his blog HERE.

And if you want to see more stencil art,  check out a page I did a little while ago - Click Here
This page was definately Paula inspired with the many layers added to it!

Thanks Paula and Blade for all the inspiration I get from both of you!

If you read all the way through to here I applaud you.  If not, I understand, it got pretty long.  Hope you enjoyed the pictures!

More Text Messaging - GPP Street Team Crusade No. 43

Here's another page of text from magazines for this months Crusade (read about the Crusade here):

 

I put an assortment of words down all dif directions.  Then painted over the whole page with Golden Fluid Acrylics in GreenGold and rubbed it off some words to make them stand out a little more.  The words going every which way made me think of directions so then I used a compass mask (made by Tim Holtz) over the word "west".  Again using Golden Fluid Acrylics, this time in Phtalo Green.  I also used the reverse parts of the mask on the page and also some circles using various bottle and jar lids.  I'm not sure what else I'll do to this page but it'll be good for a future background.

Thanks for taking a look!

Molokai - swimming the good life!

Thought I'd update you on my betta, Molokai, after originally posting about him in May when he first came to live with us.  You can see the original post here.

He's doing great, seems happy.  I've never had a fish before (except maybe a brief experience in early teens with a goldfish - i sort of remember marking a grave with sticks in the woods next to our house in Montana) so not sure how to tell if he's happy?  He seems to swim around alot, interact a little, and love to make threatening faces and body motions at the handsome betta that visits him in the mirror.

As you can see, I even decorate his aquarium with the art background papers I love to make.  You can see my original posts about the deli paper backgrounds and links to Marilyn Rocks' great video tutorials here and here. 

My cat, Maui, seems to enjoy having Molokai around to watch.

Or is she thinking about dinner?  Hmmmm...

More backgrounds

As promised in last night's post, here's some more backgrounds I made using dry wax deli paper.

This one on the left, I applied back ground colors using sponges. Then applied some white paint drops and scribbles direct from the bottle and drug a toothed tool through them. I found an old plastic sheets of stencils that had the fish on it. 1st I tried the fish with dark blue acrylic and a sponge but had too much paint so it made a mess, esp. of the middle one. Wasn't sure what to do but later while driving the Redbox to take dvds back I thought of going over them again with white pigment ink so they would have a blue outline to make up for the mess. I really like how it turned out!

For these 3 purple designs I was playing around with dots. For the largest dots I used a big round sponge. The 2nd size I cut a circle out of a big thick sponge like you buy for washing your car. In both cases I painted a dark purple back ground, let that dry. Then put some of the same purple out on a styro foam tray and added a little white and mixed well and stamped the first color. Then added some more white and stamped the 2nd color of dot. The one with silver is a silver background. Then I layed sequin waste (also called punchinella) over it and brushed on purple paint.

FYI - I get my sequin waste from one of my fav online shops SkyBluePink.

This sheet I put down a dark blue solid back ground. Then played around with a couple dif colors and a foam roller like you get in the paint section at any hardware or home improvement store. The splotchhes of color are where I dipped the edge of the roller in paint and

just got a spot and rolled it on the paper. I esp like how the white triangles look...prob couldn't get a that exact effect again if I tried!

Thanks for taking a look! Hope these inspire you to try some creative ideas! I think I'll go play with ideas for a journal page using the background sheet with the fish on it.

Background papers

As I stated in my profile, I sometimes enjoy the process of making art as much or more than the actual art I create. Lately I've been making background papers and really having fun! I've been using drywax deli paper (holds together when wet and paint doesn't soak through) and was inspired by Marilyn's post on her blog with video . Thanks for the inspiration Marilyn!



The one to the left shows 3 papers, one made by dragging a toothed tool I made by cutting notches in an old credit card and dragging it through we paint. The bright green is over a turquoise color and various techniques then used to scrape some of the bright green off so underneath color shows through. Blue with white is layers of colors for the background then splotches of paints on a foam roller to make the splotches. I used craft acrylic paints for all of these.






These next two were made by putting down a layer of color and letting it dry completely.
Then applied another color over the top. While top layer was wet I applied a dry clean stamp to it and picked up the top layer of color leaving the image in the underneath layer of color. I love how these turned out!





















I have a few more to share but blogger and I are not cooperating with one another with downloading photos tonight so I'll share them another time soon. (sometimes I'm just a low tech gal in a high tech world - lol!)

Thanks so much for taking a look at my blog!