Psalm 139 canvases

I have been thinking about making this series of canvases for a little while and I am taking part in an online class over on Big Picture Classes called "Scrapbooking your Faith" with Courtney Walsh. It's a really inspiring class and it gave me a little push to get these finished. Last weekend I spent a very enjoyable day with my friends at my local crop sticking, inking and painting and managed to finish these in one day (including some more playtime in the evening).

If you'd like to know more about the details in the canvases and why I put them there, check out this post on my other blog.

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.

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.

Look at the birds

Yesterday I got a Facebook invite from my friend Robyn to join in with the "30 day sketchbook challenge" . The idea is that it takes 30 days to create a new habit. I bought a new sketchbook last week as I have lots of ideas for images in my head that I wanted to get down on paper. I had been putting off starting the new book so this seemed like the perfect platform to make myself go for it.

Our church have just moved out of our building for the next year as we are undergoing a major refurbishment of the building. We are all really excited about new things. I feel like my work is moving towards church banners, in a modern, exciting multi media, stitchy, painty sort of way. I bought my new sketchbook to get some ideas down on paper. The book is A3, which is the size I felt happiest working in when I was an art student. This is new first new A3 book for years and I'm loving it!

I have learnt so many new techniques in Christy Tomlinson's "Three Hearts" workshop and I'm kind of amazed at what I achieved in my book in quite a short space of time. I couldn't have produced this page a month ago.

I started the background with some acrylic paint brayered on.

I put much too much paint on and so I lifted some off with kitchen towel. Look at this fab texture it created...

I had words in my head from Christy and from Donna Downey about adding depth and texture as I put the page together, so I added some white bubble wrap print to the background too. The tree is some corrugated card, painted. The birds are a gel medium image transfer using pictures from an old kids picture book.

I added some white Prima flowers with some paint centres too.

As for me and my house

In March I signed up for Emily Falconbridge's class "Got Paint" over on Big Picture classes. I love using paint. I think it soothes my soul and I know I'm at my happiest when covered in a little bits of paint. This class was about using paint in various ways in scrapbooking. I didn't complete all the homeworks as some of the techniques were things I'd done before, but it was great to get Emily's perspective and she showed us some wonderful pages. Our final project was a wood-backed larger piece of artwork and here's my results.

Half term was the perfect time get my eldest daughter to help me make the background of the picture.

The base is an old shelf and the beautiful background was pieced together from my scrap paper box. It's such a fabulous technique as the effect is so similar to patchwork but it's so fast to do.

The title is from one of my favourite songs we sing at church and the painting will be put up in pride of place in my kitchen.