Raining Art Journal

I went out this weekend and picked up a few things so that I can continue my new love of art journaling. I bought a proper sketch book, some more acrylics and water soluble pastels - hurray! I was also inspired to try my hand at my own text. Christy from Tiddly Inks, sent me a link to an incredible art journaling artist Joanne Sharpe found here at Whimpsirations. I just had to try my hand at large scale hand drawn fonts.


I recently discovered that Bloggabella has Art Journal Monday every week. I was just hoping that my idea for a page would fit, and it did. Today's challenge was to use a magazine phrase or image or both to inspire your piece. This rain idea has been in my head a couple of days and funnily enough while poking through my local sale flyers there was a Fashion Store add with a lady under an umbrella, voila.

I glued on some DP and ripped book text then acrylic painted the entire page. I sketched over the painting in pencil, - which was a mistake, my colouring with the pastels was greatly hampered by having everything blue underneath show through.

I am not terribly creative in the font drawing department so I typed up the phrase in Word and played around with different font types. When I got what I wanted, I sketched it out in pencil while looking at the Word document.

The expression may seem odd. It is a take off on how happy I was last week to have gotten a brand new extra wide umbrella after having been soaked the day before discovering my fall coat was no longer water proof. When it down poured again a couple of days later, I was prepared and very happy.

I didn't use a single stamp on this page, everything was hand drawn. I will admit it took the entire school day today to complete this, and dinner was late getting to the table - yikes!

Tiddly Dog Walking

Post Script: A BIG THANK YOU to Judi M. aka. Crafts aka. Watercolour Wizard, this card was noted on the Splitcoaststampers: FAVORITES for the week ending June 19, 2011. Wow, other then regular "reply"s, I have never been mentioned on Splitcoaststampers. *Blush*

Today's Tiddly Tuesday Challenge is the perfect opportunity to get me out of my comfort zone and colour an actual scene. Tiddly Challenge #54- Simplify: create a single layer Tiddly card. Don't forget to check out the DT's amazing single layered cards and play along, you don't need a lot of supplies for today's challenge. Don't be intimidated, you just colour once and then you have a versatile card that can be quickly mass produced for any occasion.

I perused the awesome Tiddly Store for the perfect image to go with my doodled "Zoo" background. Yes it was a Zoo scene originally. I scanned my Zoo, then used PS to erase the animals and Zoo letters. Christy's Walk the Dogs was just the right image for my new little park setting and to fill out the right side, I also added Tree Hugger, I ADORED the shape of the tree. This card was made from Xpress It paper and coloured with Copics and watercolour pencils. Submitted for the In the Frame - One Layer card challenge at the Less is More Challenge Blog.

For anyone who's interested in learning how to combine digital images to a background, here is a great tutorial by Make It Crafty.

Okay so now that you've spent all this time on one CAS card, here is a kewl trick - SCAN IT. Now you have a ready made image that you can reproduce or drop into a digital card, or just print like it's an uncoloured digi and set it into your layered card and away you go. Colour once and enjoy many times.

This "completely digital" layout used a modified card sketch from Our Vintage Affair. All the digital items are from various Shabby Princess kits, except the brown cardstock paper from Peppermintcreative - Momitude kit, the stitches by Christine Smith Digital and the blank dog tag from The Elemental Pixie.


A special thank you to Mutnik on Splitcoaststampers for emailing me her tip to colour the background lightly with watercolour pencils then go over it with a lightly moisten Q-tip. I modified this and used a SU colour blender. X-press It! paper will lift and pill if too wet so quick and light blending is best.

Lego-ish Birhtday

Today is my little guys fourth birthday and he is obsessed with Lego's. I doodled this Lego"ish" image then tweaked it in Photoshop.

Originally I had planned for this plastic part dude to be skateboarding, but after resizing him and printing him out onto Xpress paper, he looked to me as if he was flying, hence the DP Nana's Kid Stack paired with Long Time No See by American Crafts.

My green copics don't match the SU Celery Green cardstock, but I only have 1 set of coordinating greens thus far.

I did however find a few great sites that maps out sets or bundles of copic marker colours and how to use them. Susana's site has a great "jeans" tutorial that I can't wait to try once I buy that colour set. Check out this site: Susanas Custom Art and Card Design, as well as this great site: Color Me Copic, their experts give their favorite colour combinations.

Home Made Geisha

The Geisha was hand drawn then scanned into Photoshop. My hubby helped make the eyes and eyebrows symmetrical, then the image was shrunk and printed onto cardstock. I thought my Copics might cause the printer ink to run, but it didn't.

I have an in-law that has an engraving business, he has mentioned before that he can turn my images into actual stamps. I am gonna give this one a try as well as some other images I have created.

As you can see I used the colours from this weeks SCS colour challenge CC220: Bashful Blue, So Saffron and Pumpkin Pie.



Details:
Stamps: hand drawn geisha
Paper: SU - Washington Apple
Ink: Copics, Pumpkin Pie, More Mustard
Accessories: SU ribbon, Dollar store accessories and flower

Wild Thing

This is my entry for the challenge on i {heart} 2 stamp and Verve Visual. I thought that the Verve stamp Wild Thing sentiment would be perfect for this image. This was a really fun challenge, I'm glad I attempted it.


The paper is Rhonna Farrer "Flourish and Fun, from my Christmas grab that I actually never ended up using. I love the swirls, it was almost a shame to cover them up with anything.

I painted the elephant with watercolour paints and the hearts with Tombow markers. The main heart has red Stickles. Both centre squares are raised with sticky foam dots.

The centre ribbon and the 2 tear drop style ribbons on the upper left are the same ribbon, the centre is just revealing the reverse side.