Art Journal: Let’s Take Back Our Eggs!!!

Featuring Bird Crazy Stamps and Distress products by Tim Holtz, this is a fun page where I get to be silly again for a moment.  One of the birds is wearing the rabbit ears from the Crazy Things stamps and asking his buddies if they’ll come with him to get back “their” eggs.  These birds are so silly that they don’t realise that the Easter/Eostre Eggs are made from chocolate and they think that they’ll steal them back whilst pretending to be rabbits.

Apologies that you don’t get to see the very first step (I think the birds deleted it), but literally all I did was stick down some of the Tim Holtz tissue wrap, stick texture paste through the Blossom stencil with a spatula and cover the lot with gesso.  The rest of the background is made with Distress paints and inks.

Ingredients

• Stamps: Bird Crazy, Crazy Things and Feather Things by Tim Holtz
• Stencil: Blossom by Tim Holtz
• Distress Inks:  Lots of colours!
• Distress paints: greens, blues and pink
• Texture paste and white gesso by Pebeo
• Tissue Wrap by Tim Holtz
• Stamping card by Sheena Douglass
• Archival Black ink
• True Black Spectrum Noir pen
• White gel pen and black fine liner
• Liquid pearls in Daffodile
• Googly eyes
• Dark grey pitt brush pen by faber castell

Mixed Media Canvas: Lucky

Here’s a lovely way of making art from whatever you may have lying around your crafting area.  Don’t let any colours distract you as the whole thing will be gesso’d out and recoloured.  I’ve taken a variety of stencils – including some by Tim Holtz, Sheena Douglass and Memory Box – and applied either texture paste or crackle paste using a spatula.  Once dried I’ve added all sorts of bits of pieces including some Idea-ology pieces (wooden letters, faux wishbone and a clay moulding of a clock face piece), paper flowers by Prima, lace ribbon, beaded string, card die cut pieces and a random tinker bell cabochon from a fancy dress outfit.  The whole piece got two coats of white gesso by Pebeo and was then left to dry.  Then came the Distress Crayons- yay!  These were scribbled on in vertical areas and painted out with a wet brush.  Once completely covered the piece wasn’t pulling itself together properly so out came the Dylusion ink spray.  This still allowed the colours from the distress crayons to show through but were now all related together from the top layer of turquois.  The final step was highlighting all of the raised areas (which are plentiful from all of the texture) with Empire Gold gilding wax by Pebeo.

Art Journal: Imagination (will take you everywhere)

It’s been a while since I did an art journal page using papers so here’s my urban/industrial creation using the Man Made paper pad by Craftwork Cards!  The quote is awesome and was apparently spoken by Albert Einstein.  I was very pleased to see that Craftwork Cards included a page printed with various bits of old newspaper – which I cut out to make a cool vintage cluster.  It reminds me of when the windows were being replaced in my house as a child, we found old newspaper stuffed in the brick wall cavity as though it was used as some sort of cheap insulation.  This background technique of sticking down papers, covering in watered down white gesso, then colouring back in works for all sorts of papers and is a great way of using up off cuts, etc.

Scroll down for the video, list of materials and close up photos.

Ingredients

• Man Made Paper Pad by Craftwork Cards
• White Gesso by Pebeo
• Gelatos by Faber-Castell in silver, grey, orange and brown
• Pitt brush pen by Faber-Castell in Walnut
• Micro glaze by Ranger
• Gloss Gel medium by Golden
• Cityscapes stamp by Stampers Anonymous
• Alphabet stamps by Craftwork Cards and Tiger
• Tissue Paper
• Black Archival ink by Ranger
• Distress inks in Vintage Photo and Black Soot

Card Making: Craftwork Cards Man Made Collection

It seems like ages since I sat down to do some card making!  This time I’ve decided to top up my more “manly” cards and went for the Man Made collection by Craftwork Cards.  It came complete with die cut toppers, sentiments, bag of candi and some 6x6” textured cards.  As usual I’ve added in foam pads, liquid pearls and glossy accents.

Round 1 – Inked Textured Cards

These first ones I played with inking the textured cards with distress inks.  The camera doesn’t sow it too well but each card has added raised layers.

Round 2 – Textured Cards Left White

The two on the left use a very simple technique to give interest to a card: chop off a bit and stick pretty paper behind it.  The card in the middle has an extra special detail as I have made the star springing using a piece of acetate.

Here’s a close up of the springing acetate behind the star.  You can also see where I added liquid pearls and stickles glitter.

Round 3 – Slightly less ‘industrial’ styles can also be achieved with this kit too.

Bird Crazy Picture Book 1: Part 3–Making and Assembling the Book

Hurray I have finally sat down to complete our first picture book!  The video walks you through the entire process of how we can collate our pictures which we made previously and bind them into a cool little book.

You can revisit the previous tutorials here:

• Book 1: Part 1 – Creating the Backgrounds
• Book 1: Part 2 – Creating and Assembling the Birds

List of Materials

• Chipboard
• A4 Black Card
• Stamping Card
• Distress Inks: Walnut stain, bundled sage, mowed lawn, rusty hinge and wild honey
• White Pen
• Tim Holtz “Bird Crazy” Stamp set
• Feather stamp from Stampers Anonymous
• Tissue Paper
• White and Black Gesso
• Die Labels 28 by Spellbinders
• Alpha stamps by Dovecraft
• Archival Black Ink
• Book Tape by Scotch
• Crop-adile and Eyelets
• Stringing Material
• Acrylic PVA and a cheaper PVA
• Matt Gel Medium