Dylusions Facebook Challenge January

Hi all!  Is anyone else snowed in?  We are getting huge snow falls today.  I've shoveled my driveway twice today and I know it needs it again but I got carried away in my craft room again so it'll have to wait till morning.  Not looking forward to seeing how much snow will be out there at that time.  The joys of winter.  We sure are making up for the brown Christmas we had earlier.

Well, I thought since I was home for most of the day today I would work on the January Dylusions facebook challenge.  The challenge this month is a tribute to another artsy crafter who sadly passed away.  I did not know her but I have lost enough beautiful souls in my life that I could certainly relate to this feeling.  I immediately had an idea of what I wanted to do for this page, there was no hesitation at all.  The challenge needed to include the color yellow, wings and flowers.

I immediately went to my lady stencil from Dylusions, sorry I have no idea of the top of my head what the stencils name is.  I used 4 Dylusion color sprays and a variety of other stencils for my background.  I randomly sprayed the background with the sprays.  I then took my stencil and with a pencil traced the image onto the page.  I took gesso and faded out the whole background leaving the female silhouette as the vibrant backdrop.  Next I used my charcoal pencil to outline the image. I grabbed a range of gelato colors... white, pink, yellow and blended some color around the page to soften the color of the background some more. I found another stencil with wings and added the wings to the image with a texture paste in a graphite color.  It has some beautiful sparkle in the paste that you can't see in the photo.   I found the sentiment that I wanted to use and stamped it onto some white paper and cut it out and set it aside for later.  I also had just purchased a dandelion stencil that I really wanted to use for this challenge.  It's not exactly a flower in the way that most people see flowers but at one point it was a flower and when it goes to seed the beautiful little seeds float up in the sky light as a feather and free!!!  There is such a correlation to me between an angel with wings and the freedom of the floating seeds.  I used my Ferro in a teal color for the dandelions and Stazon stormy sky ink for the individual floating seeds.   I initially tried to do the dandelions in a white paste but it just didn't show up again the bright colors of the background so I opted for a stunning teal/blue color that would give the page another pop of color.  I glued down the strips of the sentiment.  Lastly, I took iced coffee gelato and blended it around the edges of the pages to frame it.

I love this page and I truly hope that I did the tribute justice.  This page speaks to me and beside it being done for the challenge I also want to dedicate this page to those who I have lost as well.  Thank you for checking out my page.

A little help from my friends...

Hello again!  ;)  It has been far to cold to leave the house.  If you are anywhere in Canada right now you are probably sympathizing right now.  Holy cold!  I really was planning on doing some grocery shopping today, but hey... who needs to eat!  I'd rather be warm.  LOL  So, I took advantage of the time at home and got my tree down, did a tiny amount of cleaning and then well....my craft room was calling my name every time I walked past, so a person can only say no a few times before the craft room wins.  LOL

You know how I mentioned the other day about loving the napkins for decoupaging... today it certainly wasn't working in my favor.  Each time I tried to fix it I was making it worse.  Oh my....good thing perseverance won.  Still not my favorite finish but it did help the end result to some degree.  I like the idea of the page though.  I took many different inspirations from Pinterest ranging from France Papillon to Roben-Marie Smith and threw in my own twist.  :)

I started to prep my page with a script stamp from Indigo Blue and used 4 different colors of archival ink to create a variegated background in colors.  I then took some gesso and a credit card and created random swipes with the gesso so as not to cover the whole page.  I then took two Distress sprays in Scattered Straw and Rusty Hinge in isolated areas and water to cause the color to spread.  You can see around the edges where there was no gesso cause the color is darker and really soaked into the paper.  I used gelatos around the edges in chocolate and in blue aqua.  I took my napkin image that I cut out and used my matte medium to decoupage it down.  This is where the fun began.  The medium which is water based started to pick up the spray color from below and it smeared and really darkened my napkin image so that the light sepia look I was going for ended up almost disappearing into the background.  Grrrr... so, lets take another image and cut it out and put it directly over top once it was dry and then there should be anymore color to smear and maybe the image would show up better.  Nope... hmmmm.  So, brilliant me thought OK, I'll take another napkin and use the three layers instead of the one and seal that down at one time so that the white of the other two layers would lighten up the look.  Well... I got bubbles and bumps and the image really didn't appear much lighter.  In fact, it looked worse... much worse.  Oh man... I was going to leave it but then thought, well if I do a white gesso wash overtop of the image and cut out another single sheet of the image and seal that down overtop of the white wash then for sure it would be lighter!  Ah huh... SUCCESS!!!  Except now there is this white halo effect around the image.  After I had already snapped the photo I did go back in once it was dry and used my FC Pitt pen in brown and shade the white out a bit so that it integrated into the background better.  I then sealed down the baking soda can images in the other corner.  I wanted to do circles and used my Finnibar stencil to create large circles with my acrylic white paint.  I used gelatos to shade in the same blue and an orange inside the circle.  I used black gelato to shade around the circles.  I decided I needed more circles.  So I took the same stencil and some molding paste and laid down smaller circles.  Once dry, I used the gelato blue aqua again to color the smaller circles and I outlined them with a light sepia charcoal pencil and a stump to blend.  Looking at the picture I think I might go back and add some gesso or white acrylic paint overtop of the smaller blue circles to lighten them up a bit.  Last I took my sentiment stamp and inked with archival ink.

I really wanted more white space than I ended up with but that's ok.  I'm trying to incorporate more white space into some of my pages.  I really have this tendency to fill in all the gaps.  I love how it looks when other artists do pages with white space.  I need a bit more practice in that department.  Keep practicing I guess.

If you popped in from facebook or pinterest to take a look at my blog I'd love to hear from you.  Leave a message for me and say Hi.  Would love to hear from you.  Have a great night and maybe I'll be able to find some time to do another page this next week.  :)


 

Play time...

Happy New Year to you all!  I hope everyone had a wonderful Xmas season.  I have no clue where 2014 went to but somewhere along the way it came and went.  I finally had an opportunity to sit down today and get into my play room and work on my art journal again.  Pinterest is all great but I needed to get in there and get my fingers messy!  It has been so long since I have been able to find time to get in there and I had a blast.  As per my usual, I had no clue what I was going to do until I got in there, and even then I still had no clue what I was doing or where I was going with the pages.  LOL  But I guess that is what makes art journaling so personal and unique.  :)

My first page started with some strips of washi tape including down the spine and some Lyndy Stamp Gang sprays.  Last summer I found a whole pile of really cute napkins, I'm a sucker for napkins and I wanted to use them in my art work.  So, I took one of my napkins and separated the layers. I used my matte medium and sealed down the images that I had torn into pieces to use throughout the page.  I love how you can't see the seams anywhere, the napkin vanished and all that was left was the images.  So cool!  I then took some white embossing paste and a stencil to create some texture around the page and then found another stencil to use and I used my Wendy Vecchi gold embossing paste.  Stunning product.  Lastly, I grabbed a back piece of the napkin and stamped on my sentiment and then sealed it down as well.  This was probably one of the fasted pages I have done in a long time, and I love the end result.  :)

This next page was a lot of layering because I was not feeling it at all!  However, that being said I am loving the final page.  :)  I used a TH distress stain in old paper and stained the whole page as a starting point.  Then I took one of my Crafter Workshop stencils which I used on the bottom left side and used another distress stain in Aged Mahogany.  I misted the backside lightly with water and did a ghosting effect on the opposite page.  I took TH distress paint in Evergreen Bough and made a few swipes vertically on the right side and some circles on the left to mimic florals.   So far, looking horrendous!  I then did a white wash gesso over top to soften the effect and I was loving it.  The circles smudged slightly which was cool cause it created a bit more color texture.  The gesso also picked up some of the Old Paper stain and it created some greenish hues as well.  I went back over the circles again with more paint.  I swiped some Age Mahogany distress paint onto some paper and cut out a heart for the right side.  And I used my punch to make the smaller hearts.  Painted them and adhered.  I used gelatos in Chocolate to shade around the hearts.  I pulled out my Christy Riopel stencil and some Wendy Vecchi black embossing paste and placed the word Adore down the side of the page over the heart.  I wasn't so sure about my placement but just decided to go for it and I love how it looks.  I had to use several mediums of white for highlighting around the work because of all the products I used varied and not all the pens worked in all areas, so the white effect was created with my Uniball gel pen, my Fabre Castel pitt pen, a white charcoal pencil and a Sharpie white water based pen.  That was a challenge.  Next I took white and black dimensional paints and added swirls around the blue circles and some highlights on the big heart.  I also used the fine writing tip and wrote the words peace, love and harmony on the left with the dimensional paints.  I took my newest favorite stencil and my Ferro in Iron and created some more texture.  Yes... I am loving this page.   

My last page... ohhhhhh....the challenge.  I wanted to do a resist with gesso.  So I grabbed a stencil I bought at Michael's a while back and gesso'd on the plain paper on both sides.  Then I took some Lyndy Stamp Gang sprays in a soft pastels and sprayed the colors over the page.  I took a baby wipe to remove the color from the gesso'd flower.  OK... not bad.  Now what!  I decided to pull out my Twinkling H2O's and color over the gesso for the flowers.  WHOA.... nope.  Well, let's try spraying more over top!  OhOH...it reactivated the whole page and there was so serious bleeding happening.  Not working for me.  Needed to tone that down a bunch.  So I grabbed more gesso and a credit card and started to scrape the gesso on and this created some smudging and softening of the colors.  Ok, now we are getting somewhere!  My plan was to use the birdcage on this page.  That was the only thing that I knew that I really wanted to use.  So I took my birdcage stencil and some black embossing paste and created my cage.  I found a canvas bird I have had for ages, colored it with distess stains, water and a brush.  And stuck it down once the paste was dry.  I grabbed my Dylusion leaves stamps and created greenery around the page with Archival inks.  I did shading with Gelato's and charcoal pencil on the leaves and around the cage.  I added my sentiment to the center of the space.  I decided last minute to add a flower to the cage because I had smudged my embossing paste and made a bit of a mess... so I needed to cover it up.  Don't mind the flower too much.  :)

Tahdah... It felt so good to get creative again.  Even when things don't always turn out the way you think they might.  It's late and past my bedtime.  :)  Have a wonderfully creative year and I hope to see and hear from you as this new year goes forward!

Hugs to you all.