Do not conform...

Spent a wonderful afternoon with my SIL again, teaching her techniques for her bible art journaling.  She completed her first page and I was so proud of what she had done.  She is really developing some awesome talents.  :)  While I was there to answer her questions and explain different mediums to her and how to use them, I worked on a page that I started a couple of weeks ago.   This page is inspired by Tracy Scott and her style designs.  I love her pages.

I had initially sprayed some blue thru a stencil but I found that the blue was darker than I was looking for so I gesso'd back over top and the gesso picked up on the blue and smudged the color underneath.  I liked how it softened the hard edges of the harlequin pattern.  I then did my face and colored it, added some script stamp in archival ink, but once I got past that point I was stumped.  So the page sat for a couple of weeks while I took a step back for a bit.  When I came back to it, the harlequin pattern reminded me of a page that Tracy had done not long ago and I knew that it would be my inspiration to complete mine.  So, I used acrylic paints to paint in the diamond shapes in random.  I then took my sketch and wash pencil and drew in the flower centers and petals.  I did a primer base of titanium white and then used my Neocolors to color in the flowers.  I finished off around the pattern and flowers with charcoal and smudged it to create shading.  The black dots in the center of the flower is from IzInks and a stylus.  I finished off the page with a stamp.  :)

Hope you enjoy!  And thank you to Tracy for the inspiration I needed to complete this page!  :)

Spending a little time with my friend!

Good friends, good wine and some ink and what can get better than that?  A whole day just playing, talking, laughing and having some fun with one of my best friends.  She's not a scrapbooker, she doesn't do art journaling but she saw my Prima sprays the other day and she just wanted to get her hands on them and do some spraying.  LOL  Sure!  So we planned a day and had some fun.  ;)  Her first page that she started on she picked some pretty vibrant colors, pinks blues teals... so not her.  LOL  I could tell she wasn't feeling it, but she went ahead and added some stamps and she really wasn't feeling it.  LOL  So, I suggested that she just put it aside and start on a new page.  It was like she was kind of feeling bad for using product on a page and wasting it, but it's only a bit of spray and gesso!  So while she proceeded on grabbing colors that were more to her taste, I took her page that I thought was a great base for a cool page and continued on with it.  Here, is the end result of a collaborated effort.  :)

I continued to add more sprays, build layers and outlined the bubbles she didn't like.  I colored in the face.  Added some metallic gelatos and more sprays.  And this is what came of it.  I think she created such a great starting point and I wanted her to see how something can change by continuing to build on it.  :)   

                         

          

These are her next 2 pages she did with the sprays and some stamps!  I am so proud of her for trying something so totally out of her comfort zone.   She did such a great job and honestly the photos do not do them justice at all.  They are so intense with depth and metallic shine.  The photos actually look like they have a lot of white on them but in real they don't.  I think she did great!   She's already looking forward to the next time she can get her hands on some sprays.  :)  Whoohoo... another play buddy.  :)

This page I took some Dylusion paints and some Liquitex paints and started to smear them onto the page with my fingers randomly in both vertical and horizontal sweeps.  I then took a Lyndi Stamp Gang gold spray and misted it over top.  The gold grabbed onto the white and created these cool gold sweeps of color and left the white where I didn't spray.  Again, the shimmer is hard to see in the photo.  I used some white acrylic paint to start and made circles with my finger and then used my Neocolors II and drew circles of color and wet my finger to color in the circles.  I created the black outlines with a diluted acrylic paint to make it nice and fluid and a script paint brush.  The stamps are Tim Holtz hashtags.  I bordered the edge of the page with an archival coffee brown ink and blending tool to finish off the page.  :)  I wasn't feeling this page as I went thru it for some reason but I love the end result and even more so today after I've had a chance to back away from it for a bit.  :)

I have another page on the go but haven't completed it yet so that will have to be finished on another day!  My fun for the weekend is over for now since I have a whole house to clean, laundry to do, and some groceries to get for my upcoming work week.  If I really hustle today I might be able to squeeze in a bit more play time tonight... we'll see.  ;)

Have a great upcoming week and I'll see you when I get a chance to sit down and have some Art time again.  :)  Love to hear from you and comments always make my day.  :)  Thanks for visiting!

Our happy scrappy mess!!!

 

Taking advantage of the weekend!

Do you ever find that there just isn't enough time in the day or week to get everything done that needs to get done and still have time to play and have some fun?  Sometimes it feels like a catch 22 when you work so hard to be able to buy the stuff you want, like ohhhhh say.... craft supplies!!!, but then you are so tired and time is so limited to actually do the things you love.   I am finding myself being more aware of my busy schedule and planning ahead when I can to make that time so I can indulge in doing things that make me happy.  But you know, it's not just about making me happy, it is therapy.  Anyone, who suffers from depression even a little bit knows that they need to really work hard on keeping themselves in a happy space, and for me one of the things that really helps me is my art.  So, this past weekend was for exactly that and I had planned 2 days specifically for that purpose.  :)   Lets jump in and I'll show you what I was up to!  :)

Yesterday, I had a friend come over who wanted to try her hand at just spraying paper and having some fun.  LOL  Well, it didn't take long and she was having a blast with sprays, inks, stamps... LOL  While she played I worked on my stuff.  The first page I had started the night before after finishing my last blog entry and completed it yesterday.

I grabbed some of my Prima sprays and sprayed them over a gesso'd page.  I love how the sprays pitted over the gesso almost like the same effect you get with sprinkling salt over top.  I started off with some brown in the two corners but felt it need just a little something else so I went back over top and sprayed some purple.  Winner!  I found that the brown underneath helped tone down the brightness of the purple which was perfect.  

Next up... pick out some stamps.  Because of the pitting, it reminded me of underwater bubbles, so I choose the Dylusions stamp sets to create an underwater scene.  These sea creatures are so much fun!  

I wanted to use my pencils so that I would start using some mediums that I have shelved and not used in some time.  These pencils were one of those items.  My goal is to start using at least one thing that I haven't used in a while or at all per page.  We'll see how I do with that in the upcoming projects.  LOL  

Almost done.  I sprayed some paper and stamped the saying onto it, cut it out and sealed it down with some gel matte medium.  Next, I needed to add some white to the page to highlight they eyes and some bubbles.  I used a White Out pen for the fishies and a white charcoal pencil for the bubbles. I used a charcoal soft white so they bubbles were there but not so obviously that they looked the same as the white eyes of the fish.  I found the gel pen didn't want to write on the background.  Not sure why.  I also used some charcoal black to frame the words.  

And there we go.  My page is done.  I contemplated doing some shading within the seaweed but I didn't want to darken the page too much.  I may go back later and do that... not sure yet. Should I or shouldn't I, that is the question.  If I do, I'll add the revised photo below.   

Thanks for stopping by again.  Let me know if you think I should add more shading.  I'm really undecided on that.  :)   Have a great day and I'm off to add a few more photos on my next entry of time spent with my GF just playing and having some fun.  :)  

Explore Dream Discover

Had me some fun today at my local scrapbook store and of course couldn't come home without something new.  LOL   I made several mistakes on this page but had to go with the flow cause once it was done there was no going back.  In the end, I think it turned out pretty OK.  I always have fun experimenting and seeing what comes of it.  It is such a great lesson in learning to let go and being imperfect.

 

I started with some Gelatos on a page prepped with gesso.  I sprayed some water onto the craft sheet and used a sponge that I picked up at the dollar store and dipped into the water a bit to dampen the sponge and blend the gelatos together.  Don't get too much water into the sponge or it will dilute the color too much.  I found that happened to me in a few spots so after it was blended with the sponge I dried it and went back over with some of the pink and peach and dry blended with my finger to intensify the color a bit more.  :)

Next, I took 3 colors from the Prima sprays (Love these sprays) and some water and sprayed over the gelato background and let it marble.  Because the gelatos are kind of waxy the sprays marble really well because it acts like a resist underneath and the colors run together really well.  I used my heat gun to help dry it faster.

This is a new stencil I got and wanted to use it on this page.  I used an acrylic paint and a sponge to apply the color thru.

                     

                     

I wanted to use my new Dylusions paints.  So I grabbed a stencil and sponged color thru.  I found the green a lot brighter than I was really aiming for once it was in place so I thought I'd take one of the Prima sprays and offset the stencil and spray some thru to create a dimensional look.  Well, that didn't work so good because once again with the waxy base created a resist and the spray seemed muddled and uneven.  Kind of looked like crap and I had to find a way to correct.

                                      

Well, let's do some experimenting.  I took some clear embossing paste onto my craft sheet and sprayed some spray on and mixed them together to create what I was hoping would be a transparent green shimmery paste.  Yeh well...no.  I placed the stencil back over top of the original green paint and spread the paste thru.  Wow... dark!  Ohoh...  well, it's done so let us do the other side.  Eech... oh boy... now what.

I grabbed another green spray and sprayed to bottom of the page really heavy with the spray and tipped it to create runs which I was hoping to use as stems for flowers.  You'll notice that the color of the dark green/black leaves have a lighter shimmery effect.  The spray pooled and ran over the waxy colored background from the gelato's but clung to the embossing paste.  Cool!  Back on track...

I sketched a few flowers in with a sketch and wash pencil and painted white acrylic paint and then took my Neocolors and some water to create water colors and colored my flower petals.










   

 











I finished off the flowers by outlining with some charcoal pencil and added a stamp to the top of the page.  The leaves still felt wrong so I thought I'd try adding some perfect pearls on them to make them pop a bit more.  They just still seemed so dark.  I took two different perfect pearls and blended them over top with my fingers.

The final result.  

Think my next page will be a bit more simple.  This was definitely a longer process than I had originally planned, but learn from our mistakes and move forward.   Have a great night and see you on the flip side when I am back with my next project.  :)

Somehow I lost my signature.  Oops.  Nighty night.  xo

To art or to clean... ART wins.

This is going to be a really fast blog and unfortunately with no tutorial this time added.   Long days at work and little time to play.  I manager to do a few quick pages with my new Neocolors II and I bought some Prima Color Bloom sprays to try them out.  Love them!  So, I just needed some do some art before time got away on me again and another long stretch of no fun faded away.  Hubby thankfully has gone back to work after a long layoff so my time to just spend a couple of hours for myself opened up and I took full advantage.  I don't know about you, but as I get older time just goes by faster and I seem busier than ever before.  I don't really think I am, but my perception seems to tell me so.   I was so tickled when I stepped away from home on my day off to run some errands and my parcel was sitting on my doorstep for my Neo's!  OMG... the estimated delivery was for the following Monday.  I giggled like a school girl as I grabbed my package and without delay opened it to reveal my new play tools!  Eek...  Why is it that something as simple as crayons can make a grown woman giddy?  So, of course, I had to play!  I couldn't have them sitting there looking at me while I went about my day cleaning and stuff without opening them to play some!  LOL  Ok, well that's my story... and I'm sticking to it.  LOL

My first page was just a fast easy page I whipped up in the morning just to get some Art action happening.  I had this page in my head for such a long time but hadn't had the time to do it.  So, a fast easy gesso, Dylusion sprays, Prima spray and stamps.

And my next page... well I took a page I had started quite some time ago that I was not liking and this is where my Neo's came in to play and transformed my horrible page into something spectacular!  Love my new Neo's!  They were worth every penny.  :)

Well, I know I'm excited about playing with the Neo's so I hope looking at the fun colors and the whimsy of this page brings you as much of a smile as it did me playing with them.  :)  Have a great night and drop me a line.  :)