WOYWW #288: Georgie goes mixed-media!

Hello Everyone! I'm here for another round of What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday courtesy of Julia Dunnit on the Stamping Ground.

My plan of trying to keep my work space tidy is going relatively well. I spend 10 minutes each day putting things away, ONLY to bring them out again the next day. Oh well, at least I have a clear work surface, which I find very inviting! Here's a photo I took of my desk/dining table on Tuesday evening with a few items of interest labelled.

Let's walk through my desk in an anti-clockwise direction:

1. This is the project I worked on all day on Tuesday. I'm not ready to reveal it yet, though if you look at item No. 2, you might get an idea of what it is! (Update: you can now see the completed project here.)
2. Yes, I admit it, I buy my Christmas cards! But I'm very picky and can take weeks to hunt down the perfect one! These are from WHSmith.
3. Is it too early to have a glass of wine at 5pm on a Tuesday?
4. I bought this mini easel at The Works on Saturday. It's great for displaying smaller items. It was only £1,99 including a mini canvas. I think I'll need some more of these!
5. And finally, the subject of today's blog post: Georgie!

I found out last week, much to my amazement, that I had won Annie Claxton's giveaway on her blog. She's one of our very own deskers, who designed an entire stamp set called Georgie. You can see her demonstrate it in this video. Georgie is very versatile and comes with a lot of accessories. When I found out that I had won, I knew I wanted to do a whimsical project with this set. I decided to do a mixed media board and turn Georgie into a princess with a castle, a crown, long hair and a long dress! 

I used the stiff board cover off a notebook as my substrate, which I covered with book paper and patterned paper.  Then I added a layer of colour using Caran D'ache Neocolor II crayons and distressed it with white acrylic paint applied with a brayer.  I added some of the colour back with the Neocolors later. I cut Georgie and the castle shape from watercolour card, which I shaded with the Neocolors as well. I used some tissue paper to create texture for the path. I also used the flower stamp and one of the butterflies from the set. When everything was stuck in place, I shaded around the elements with a black Faber-Castell Pitt Brush pen.

I had a lot of fun playing with Georgie, I hope you like the results! If you would like to purchase this wonderful stamp set, here's a link to Annie's Etsy Shop.

Sunday Sentiments #6: Broken Wings

It seem ages since my last Sunday Sentiments post! Five weeks ago exactly because, quite unusually, November had five Sundays! But here we are in December with Christmas visible on the horizon. Perhaps I should have prepared something more seasonal, but my muse wanted to do this, and who am I to argue with her?!

This month's quote originates from a 1980's pop song. Those of you of a certain age might remember a band called Mr Mister.  They had a few hits and then suddenly disappeared into obscurity. I thought one of the lines from their song Broken Wings suited my project perfectly.

"Take these broken wings and learn to fly again"

To me, this quote carries the profound message that no matter what life dishes out, we have the ability to deal with the situation and carry on. If we fail at something, our wings may be broken, but we can recover and learn from our mistakes and succeed next time. If things don't go according to plan in our lives, and we're disillusioned or heartbroken, we can still pull ourselves together and soar towards the sky with sheer determination! This might take time, but we should never doubt our ability to succeed one day. 

I created this project on a canvas board. I first collaged  some raffle tickets and dictionary pages with gel medium and added some stamped images as well. 

Next, I used Caran D'ache Neocolor II water-soluble wax crayons to add some colour. I chose a yellow/orange/red colour scheme as shown below.

This seemed too strong and bright for a background so I muted the textures and colours by brayering some white and unbleached titanium acrylics on top. This is what I ended up with:

On top of this I introduced a strong magenta tone in the form of stenciling before adding the following elements:

• face made from polymer clay with a silicone mould, which I purchased on eBay. I dusted the clay shape with mica powders before backing. Afterwards I added some features to the face with permanent markers. 
• a metal crown charm (also purchased on eBay)
• wings cut from a heart shaped doily (I saw this idea somewhere on the Internet)
• a book page mounted on a chipboard shape for a dress to give some dimension to the body
• two strips for legs cut from chipboard and covered with stripy tissue tape (washi tape)
• dotted tissue tape to "anchor" the figure and to balance the top part of the design
• an image transfer of a dragonfly. I used CitraSolv to transfer a computer printout onto rice paper, and then cut around it. Rice paper is less translucent than tissue paper, but it still lets some of the underlying textures through and works great with this type of image transfer because it is highly absorbent. 
• word strips for the title printed from the computer 

I inked the edges of some of the elements before adhering with gel medium and shaded the outline with black brush tip Pitt markers from Faber Castell. I also inked the edge of the canvas. As a finishing touch I lightened the design with some script stamping using white acrylics. 

That's it really! Here's the finished project and some close-up photography to show the layers:

I hope you enjoyed this walk-through of my project. If you have a sentiment to share this month, please use the link below to attach your post. I hope to see lots of you join!

An InLinkz Link-up

Art Journal Page: Santa's Car

This page was inspired by the Word of Inspiration Wednesday challenge in the Kraafters Kommunity on Google+. The word to inspire us this week is SNOW. That lovely white stuff I haven't seen in the last couple of years!

Don't you just love a snowy scene, especially on a clear night when the moon and the stars illuminate the snow cover making it sparkle! I wanted to evoke this feeling with my page, which is titled "Santa's Car" based on the stamp of the same name that I used by Clarity Stamp.

The basic idea for this layout came from Christina Lorraine Young's video here.

This was a quick and simple project for me. I started by smudging some dark blue paint around for the sky and brayered over it with white acrylics. I cut some pieces of book paper for the hills and gessoed them. I added some triangles cut from patterned paper for the trees and a printout of a photo of the moon off the internet. I stamped the image of the car on a separate piece of paper, cut around the shape and adhered it with gel medium. I coloured it with oil pastels and used a white pen for some highlights. I used tiny dots of Stickles glitter glue for the stars and splattered some watered down white acrylics to imitate falling snow.

I Am Exactly Where I Need To Be

This is a journal page I created after watching one of  Tamara Laporte's free training videos. What I like about Tam's method is that she combines art with the healing aspects of creating. She uses art to help us deal with our fears, insecurities and traumas in the past. Her videos are quite long as she talks you through the creative and healing process in real time. She's very informal and she makes you feel like you visited her in her own home for a private lesson. It fees like she's talking directly to you. A bit like a virtual friend, really!

You can sign up for her free course on her website here. The direct URL to the course is here, but I don't think this link will work until you have signed up and logged in.

You start this lesson by jotting down your negative thoughts and then painting over them. As you build your page, your negative thoughts magically disappear and a positive affirmation emerges. My negative thoughts were centered around my apprehension about the future, fear of change and my lack of self-confidence. I am actually very happy at the moment, but my fear of the future overshadows my present happiness.

The affirmation I came up with is "I am exactly where I need to be". By saying this I give myself permission to enjoy the present believing that I'm on the right track for the future, wherever it might take me.

Here is the page I created with this sentiment in mind. I am still in a copying phase of my art journey, so I followed Tam's tutorial almost to the letter, although I did leave out a few bits and added some of my own. If you watch Tam's video in its entirety you'll learn how to layer colour and texture using Caran D'ache neocolour II wax crayons and apply white acrylics paint with a brayer to distress it. It is a great technique and produces wonderful results. Rubber stamping completes the background and I also added some butterflies cut from napkins. Tam explains so well about drawing and shading whimsical faces, which I'm slowly but surely getting to grips with. I took some close up photos of my page so you can see some of the layers better.

I really enjoyed working on this project, and feel like I got to know myself a bit better. I hope you like it and feel inspired to try Tam's class and start your own journey of healing through art!

WOYWW #287: Inktense pencils on textile

I'm linking up with the Stamping Ground again this week for What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday. As you can see from the photo below, I managed to keep my desk/dining table tidy ALL WEEK by making sure that I put away the stuff that I used for each project. It's a bit of extra work but I figured it's less painful this way than getting to the stage where it becomes unmanagable and having to spend half a day clearing everything away. I wonder how long I will be able to keep this up!

It occurred to me that I never shared the gift I made for Cindy in return for the (very useful!) desk organizer you can see on my desk. She received my gift a couple of weeks ago and made this touching video of opening the parcel. You can also see some stills on her website.

In the last couple of days I was busy trying a technique that I first saw on Peggy Gabrielson's website. She gessoed a piece of cotton fabric and painted a face on it with Derwent Inktense blocks, which she then used as a journal cover. It seemed a bit too ambitious for me to try this technique with a face so I drew some flowers instead using Inktense pencils. (These are currently £14.99 on Amazon UK for a set of 24, which is fantastic value, cheaper than the 12 pack!) Subconsciously, I think I was also inspired by this blog post by Beth Lee Browning.

Here's a photo of my simple drawing/painting on gessoed textile. You can see just how intense those colours are, though bear in mind that camera exaggerates a little bit.

Gessoed cotton material with Inktense pencils - later on, I added some white outlines as well.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with this piece of textile. In the end I decided to turn it into a tag and a mini book cover and used the leftovers for a journal page. Not one tiny piece of it got wasted! I added some white outlines to the flowers as well. You can see my creations below:

Tag/bookmark with faux stitching and sari ribbon

Close up of the tag - I love how the inktense colours mingled like watercolours!

Mini book cover

Gelli prints on inside pages!

I added a quote by Emily Dickinson inside the mini journal

I used all the cut-off pieces of the textile for a journal page

The Inktense pencils are really vibrant!

Thank you for visiting! If you're reading my blog post through WOYWW, please leave a comment and your number and I'll make sure to visit your blog in return!