Inspiration Wednesday: Seek

The current lesson from Donna Downey's Inspiration Wednesday included some serious play with adding and removing paint. This creates some lovely, distressed texture layers. Of course, it might happen that you cover up something that you like and end up with something less pleasing, but the risk is worth taking. I took some photos along the way, so I can show you the initial stages.

Following Donna's prompt, I started out with a teal background and used gel medium to stencil the butterfly motif and the word SEEK. Donna actually used Golden's tar gel, but when I tried Liquitex's string gel (which is supposed to be the same thing) it didn't really work. I got good results with the gel medium, though. The idea is to mask part of the background with the gel to allow the underlying colour to show through the subsequent layers. This is what my page looked like halfway through the process:

In the next step - again following Donna's prompts - I added raw umber and quinacridone nickel azo gold in a similar distressed fashion and ended up with the final look. Along the way I added some masking tape, stamping, a hidden message under my flap, drippage and of course the obligatory torn and stapled tag, which is one of Donna's signature elements.

Thanks for visiting! Wishing you all a lovely weekend!

WOYWW #353: Birthday treats and other things

I'm here again for another round of WOYWW! Never mind the weeks flying by like there's no tomorrow - what about the years?  I'm yet again a year older, even though my previous birthday seems like it was only yesterday. Somehow time goes faster as we get older. Why is that? Quite fitting that I came in at No. 47 on the linky list, which is my new age! I swear I didn't plan it that way!

Anyway, you're not visiting to hear my philosophy on the passage of time, but to see my work space. So here it is as it was yesterday afternoon in the middle of a project I was working on for Donna Downey's bi-weekly challenge Inspiration Wednesday. Oreo was keeping me company as usual and you can also see some of my birthday treats in the background.

Since it was my birthday and Mothers' Day at the same time on Sunday, I was treated to a rare trip to HobbyCraft. Wait, that's not all! My hubby was paying! I went easy on him, because I know how much he hates parting with his cash and also because I want to keep him under the impression that art products are cheap, so I just bought a few things that were on special offer! The more expensive stuff, I'll order secretly online! Clever, huh? This is what I bought:

Art apron (£5.00), DecoArt Media Misters black and white (£3.50 each), Liquid Glass (£3.00), LED tealights (£2.00), Sennelier acrylics X 2 (half price at £2.00 each) and an 8X8" spiral album (just £2.00!) = £23.00 altogether (plus a carrier bag at 5p)!

Some of these were a real bargain! The apron is really well-made with large pockets made from a thick canvas material. I might decorate it with block printing or just let the paint splash all over it. The spiral album at £2.00 is amazing value as well. I'm currently using the 12X12 version (it's the one on my desk, actually) and it works really well as an art journal once the pages are gessoed. The misters will come in handy used with stencils and the best part is that they're permanent, unlike Dylusion sprays. I'm planning to use the LED lights to light up little mixed media houses or shrines. I haven't got a specific project in mind yet, but those lights are always good to have for when you need them. And you can never have enough acrylics, though I don't care much for those pouches, do you? I think they're a bit awkward to use and store but I wanted to try them as they are Sennelier's. I chose a nice satin skin tone and a pearlescent white.

My son made me this Mothers' Day card at school and below that is my birthday card from hubby and son:

Finally, here's a sneak peek at part of the page on my desk in its completed form. I will blog it later this week. 

Thanks for visiting! If your comment doesn't appear, don't worry, it's not your fault. Google's been playing up again. I get notifications of every comment, even if it doesn't appear on my blog and I will get back to everyone as soon as I can. Happy WOYWW!

LifeBook Week10: Unexpected Mystery

Week 10 of LifeBook brought us a fun journalling lesson by Mary Beth Shaw, founder of Stencil Girl.  Not surprisingly, she used lots of stenciling in her lesson, in conjunction with collaging, painting and journalling. I loved her technique of looking for words in the book pages we used for collage. I chose two of the words that I'd found and titled my page after them: Unexpected Mystery. The numbers 8 and 179 also came from my book pages. I think they were the chapter and page numbers.

I stamped the word MYSTERY and the numbers with my old foam stamps instead of stencilling them. It was a lucky find to stumble upon these stamps while looking for collage papers in my stash - I almost forgot I had them! They were perfect for this project.

It was quick and easy to put this page together. I felt exhilarated and went splashing paint all over the place in my excitement. I managed to clean it up afterwards (just in case my hubby's reading this)! I think I have achieved the lesson's aim to be in the present - I could feel it and loved every minute of it!

3-in-1: The last three pages in my Play Journal

This is a picture-heavy post! I've finished my first ever "proper" art journal. I'd completed some mini journals before, and of course last year's LifeBook, but I consider this one to be my first art journal that isn't based on a class or a course. It's all my own, although I was obviously influenced by other artists along the way. All the previous pages have been published on my blog, and I'm planning to do a flip-through later to tie them all together. For now here are the last three pages, in reverse chronological order, with a short explanation for each.

Trust, Faith, Hope

This is quite a dark page and I wasn't entirely sure where it was going while I was working on it.The black and white butterfly was an oopsie for a previous project - my printer sometimes decides to print in black and white instead of colour. When I auditioned this colourless butterfly, I quite liked it against the gelli print background, so I went along with the b&w theme. However, I didn't want it to be too depressing, so I added some inspirational words to turn the page into a positive message.

A drop of  HAPPINESS

This page started out as a brayer clean off sheet. I'd had this pink background sitting in my journal for a few months before I revisited it. The figure is a magazine cut-out that I painted over and turned her into an angel. I only wish she was a bit more angelic looking! She looks more like a strict school teacher! But perhaps that's a good thing when an angel wants to teach you a lesson in life! The happiness dropper suggests that the state of being happy is a drop by drop process. If you can find joy in little things in life, it will accumulate into a pot of happiness over time!

Unity

This page was more like a technique practice than an expression of feelings, inspired by Donna Downey. Whenever I make three figures, characters or symbols, I inadvertently start thinking about my immediate family, especially when they are small, large and medium in size, reminding me of my son, my husband and me. Thus, the title 'unity'. We make a small, tight-knit family unit of three. 

Thanks for visiting!

I plan to publish a flip-through of my completed journal soon!

Let's Play: Make your own washi tapes from masking tape

Carolyn Dube's new Let's Play challenge this month is to use products from the hardware store as art supplies. One of my favourite products from the hardware store is masking tape. They come in different width and even colours. I normally just use them in my projects for texture and simply paint over them, but you can also decorate them to make your own washi tapes.

In order to make washi tapes, you'll have to tear different length of masking tape and adhere them to a piece of paper with a semi-porous surface. I find the waxed side of deli paper is perfect for this. The tapes stick well to the paper temporarily, but you can easily peel them off when needed.

Here are three techniques you can try.

1. Stamping with archival inks

This is a very simple process and perfect for using your background stamps, but it can also work with certain image stamps.  In my examples I used black archival ink for stamping. You can use pieces of these tapes for collage either on top of your artwork or layer over them. 

2. Gelli printing

You can also gelli print on pieces of masking tape. In order to do this, it's best if you temporarily adhere your tape to a sheet of deli paper (as above).  I used a mini gelli plate to stamp paint directly on my tapes (rather than putting them face down on the gelli plate). I applied some Golden Open medium to facilitate this process. I wrote about this technique in more detail in this post. You can even apply the paint over your stamped tapes for added texture. Once the paint is dry, you can just peel off the tapes and transfer them onto a clean sheet of deli paper for storage. Here are some of the tapes I made with this method. 

3. Staining with alcohol inks

You could use any ink for this method, but I like alcohol inks because they are waterproof when dry and have a special look about them. I just dripped a few drops of alcohol ink on my tapes and mingled them with some clear alcohol. Here are the results.

As a by-product, I got this really cool background pattern on my original deli paper. You can see how the inks seeped under the tapes but still preserved their outlines.

I hope you enjoyed my post and feel inspired to try some of these techniques. You can join Carolyn's link party too! Just click on the link below and it will take you there! You don't need to follow the challenge - you can link any of your inspiring projects! 

WOYWW #352: My 200th Blog Post!

Hello wonderful people of WOYWW! Today is a special day for me because I'm celebrating my 200th blog post! I thought I would do a little fun facts run-down about my blog and my WOYWW participation to mark the occasion! Here it goes:

• I published my first blog post on July 2nd, 2014 with the photo you can see above.
• I have since published over 1700 photos. That's an average of 8.5 photos per post.
• I'm not sure why I named my blog InkyDinkyDoodle. I guess I liked ink and doodling at the time. I still do, but I would probably choose a different name now. My son thinks it sounds silly!
• When I started my blog I didn't have any visitors for the first few weeks. I didn't realize I had to network in order to attract traffic. I received my first ever comment on this post. I was over the moon, even though it took me three weeks to find it!
• I've just reached 30,000 pageviews from 97 countries - nearly a quarter of them from the US and less than 10% from the UK, where I live!
• My most popular post was published on October 9th, 2014. It has been visited by 2353 people to date according to Google Analytics, thanks to being shared by Gelli Arts. It was a bit of a fluke in my blogging career so early on and I haven't experienced anything remotely comparable since then!
• I first joined WOYWW for week #276 on September 17th, 2014 with this post. 
• Apart from my hiatus from blogging between March and September last year, I took part in every single WOYWW since then!
• I first introduced Oreo to the world on November 25, 2015, who has since become a regular feature in my WOYWW posts.

I really enjoy taking part in WOYWW and would like to send out special thanks to Julia Dunnit for tirelessly hosting it every single week, rain or shine! I would also like to thank every one of you for your visits and kind comments!

I've made this new video of Oreo for all you cat lovers out there! Hope you like it!