Doodle stitching

I made a card for a friend's birthday this week and I used my free motion stitching again. I stuck down the book paper and then stitched the flowers freehand over the top, which I coloured in with pencil crayons. This was my second attempt as I forget to open up the first one before stitching it, creating the amazing non-opening card!

Deep Peace

I've been working on a piece of art for a friend's house and it's been a great excuse to play with some of the techniques I've been learning recently. The words are an ancient Celtic blessing.

I started with gesso on some 12 x 12 card. I wanted to add texture and I knew the colour of the background would be quite flat, so I made my gesso swirly...

I stamped some stars and fishes using StazOn ink and then added colour with my NeocolourII watersoluble crayons. I found that with a little extra water I could lift off the colour over the stamped images.

I built up the layers using stencils. Here's my bird stencil again. This time I used Distress Inks and I was worried that it was going to wipe off from the gesso background so I went around it with a pen.

My favourite part of the piece are my shining stars, some machine stitching swirls with some hand stitching sparkle on the top.

Playing with pages

I've finally finished the two pages I started at the last crop using the art journalling techniques I've been learning recently. This first page started out with gesso as a background and used some old diecut flowery card as a stencil with pink distress inks.

The chandelier is an image transfer from a picture from an old magazine using gel medium. I haven't tried this technique before and it worked so well. I'm looking forward to doing this again.

Here's my favourite new stamp again from Stampendous. This time I coloured it with watercolours.

I started my second page by collaging lots of paper ephemera onto the background. I painted over to mute the effect. I used foam and clear stamps with paint and a Prima paintable stamp with black ink.

Looking through a lens

I've been continuing with my attempts to improve my photography and I've been following the Picture Inspiration challenges each week. This week's theme was "Exploration" and so I added a picture I took in our garden a little while ago which I found exploring in the undergrowth.( Have you ever wondered why when plants get overgrown they become undergrowth - how does that work? ) This flower made such a perfect heart.

Last week's them was "Moody". This graffiti has been sprayed onto the shutters of our local fashion store. I've been meaning to photograph it for ages but it can only be seen when the shop is closed so it's been tricky to catch. The shop was being opened just as I arrived and the lady kindly left this shutter until last for me.

One of the areas I wanted more teaching on was portrait photography and so I've signed up for Cheryl Johnson's "Beautiful People" class. I used to go to Cheryl's scrapbooking classes many moons ago when I went to scrapbook weekends and I remembered how much I enjoyed her teaching style. I've heard lots of good thing about her photography classes and so I signed up for this - despite promising myself I wouldn't sign up for more classes for a while - oh well.

We had to start the class taking a self portrait. Here I am...

Plans

Today's sketchbook page was an idea floating around in my head for a while. I used pages from an ancient A-Z to make the background which I coloured using distress inks. The ink didn't take where the gel medium had transferred onto the top of the papers when I was gluing it down, but I really like the effect.

I continued with the distress inks to stencil and stamp the rest of the details with StazOn ink for the title as I wanted it to be bold.

The bird stencil comes from a book, "Stencil 101". It has some fantastic , bold, modern stencils in a great size.

New watercolours

I've had a couple of new art materials arrive over the past week - Neocolour II watersoluble crayons and Staedtler Aquarelle watercolour pencils. I've been watching various tutorials online which use gesso as a base and so I wanted to have a play with the materials to see what suited my style best.

I painted gesso onto half of a page in my A3 sketchbook and stamped my favourite new Stampendous stamp with StazOn around the page.

Neocolour crayons on gesso - the colours were vibrant and smooth but showed the texture of the gesso underneath. The colours stayed wet for quite a while which was great for moving them around but I also kept smudging them too.

Neocolour crayons straight onto paper - I love the bright colours here. The initial drawing can be seen through the colours but I like this as it adds shading. It dried quickly so not much smudging.

Aquarelle watercolour pencils on paper - colouring in firmly with the pencils gave a good vibrant colour. Pencil marks weren't very visible after painting. A subtler effect could be acheived than with the Neocolour crayons. You can see the smoothness of the colours in the corners scribbling I did.

Aquarelle watercolour pencils on gesso - The colours here were more muted and stayed wet for longer.

An experiment! I coloured in the flower with the Neocolour crayons and then used a mini mister to wet it. I added too much water and it all ran a bit. I was just wondering if this would work for when we are camping and I want to take some sketchy materials with me.

Dance in the rain

This is a quote I saw as a print in a catalogue recently and I really like it. I watched a couple more videos from the "3 hearts" workshop and had a play...

The background was made with acrylic paint, then a mist then alcohol inks. You can see how wet it was.

I used Claudine Hellmuth's layered stamps to add the images to the page.

I used a foam stamp set to add the words but they weren't standing out enough and were getting a bit lost in the background. I went around each letter with a black pen but that didn't do much, so I went around them again with my new white Sharpie pen. I attempted to colour gel medium with acrylic paint and use a raindrop stencil I'd made to make some dimensional raindrops. It looked awful! I wiped them off and doodled over the marks.