Jon's Birthday.......

This year for my brother's birthday, I decided to make him a bookmark.  He had just ordered The Hunger Games trilogy, so I thought it would be cool.  He loved it, so sweating over with I did not mess-up.  Now I gave him a larger gift, but this was the handmade portion of his gift.

I used a shipping tag which I inked, sprayed and stamped.  I then used a piece of Tim Holtz paper on the back and stamped with the large owl clock LaBlanche stamp.  I love these stamps by the way! I then sealed the whole tag with a satin varnish.  Which I do not like the satin and I need to purchase the matte varnish for future use.  In person the bookmark is really dark and cool, but for pictures, the satin reflects the light.

 Enjoy.......

Street Art Anyone?????

Here is the second page in my art journal that I posted to the art journal ning site.  I know my posts have been short, but I am still recovering and my shoulder is screaming at me this morning. So, hopefully I will be back to normal soon.

This week's study was on Street Art or Graffiti.  This was a challenge for me because I do not do graffiti, have never done graffiti, so I winged it.  Still not sure how graffiti my page is...........but I tried.

I call this page Faith.  I did an original drawing showing faith growing from my heart.  The stems of the flowers have faith written in them and all is colored with colored pencils. The scripture is written with a black bic pen.  Yes, bic pen.  It worked with the background.

Oh, the background! I started with white gesso, then acrylic paints.  I wasn't happy, so I used a credit card and scrapped on more gesso.  I used a stencil, paper towel and water to remove the paint from the stencil area which created the "flower" areas. Then i decided black was needed and I wanted a stencil with little circles. So I pulled a scrap piece of card stock and started punching holes.  I used two different sizes of hole punches and made a "design".  Then I used the Tim Holtz Ink Applicator with Distress Ink Black Soot.  Over-all I like it.  I may at some point go back and add some stamping here and there, but for now it's done.  If I do add stamping, you will see a re-post with the updated page.

Enjoy.......

A smashing page...........

So I am behind on my art journaling.  I have been dealing with a pulled muscle in my shoulder and some others, so I have been resting.  Needless to say, i know........

So I was finally able to complete my two art journal pages and I posted them to the ning site. It was a smashing page that I want to talk about today.  I will post the second page tomorrow.

We were to put acrylic paint on one side of the journal and then close the book.  Smashing the opposite page into the paint and creating a background or design.  It was a disaster at first.  The paint did not transfer and then if it did, it pulled the paper apart. Yikes! You can see below where the white bits are in the middle of the painted areas, this is where the paper pulled off.

So, I tried again.  I used so much paint on the next try, it oozed from the journal.  Still do not think I got this technique down right, but I will keep trying.  So, here is my finished page that I posted on the art journaling ning site.

All of the color was smashed between the pages.  I then went in, using black acrylic paint, and added all of the black accents.  To me this looked like a close up of a butterfly.  Not sure it came out correctly, but I really like it and that is what matters in your art journal.  Do what you like and keep working even if it's not working, keep at it.  Enjoy........