Crazy Crafty Weekend

What a great weekend I have just had! I was teaching a Mixed Media Canvas class at a wonderful event in Athlone with the fabulous Create with Kate. The event was held over 2 days with 4 classes each day and lots of Make and Takes and demos going on throughout. I even had time on the second day to take a class myself! It's been a long time since I did that and it was great fun. We made a lovely 'Grunge Quilt' inspired piece with the lovely Louise Furlong. I will post a photo of it here, when I have finished adding the final pieces. To see the canvas which I made have a look at my previous post here.

Card-making class

Some of you will probably know that I teach card-making classes weekly. However I always forget to add photos of what we do. So I thought I would add what we did last week and what we are doing tonight.

This is an easel card made using the lovely Grapic45 Steampunk Spells collection

This is a tunnel card made using Melissa Francis Vintage Treasures papers and Graphic45 Little Darlings Stamps

I hope you like them. I will hunt out some more soon and post them.

Art Journalling for Beginners

So Saturday saw the first Art Journalling for Beginners class in Ballinameela School, Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. What a fantastic day it was too! The inimitable Midi Walshe invited me to teach the class and we had 10 lovely peeps on the day. As you can see from the photo above the table was groaning with wonderful home baking and as many art supplies as could fit into the car. No-one had ever done any journalling before and so there was a bit of nervousness around the concept. But I am happy to report that by the end of the day everyone had at least 3 pages done and many more backgrounds laid down.

Drying some collage sheets

One of the pages

Another background

A side view of another page

As you can see we got lots done and had a great fun day. Our next session will be in early November, details to follow.

Catch Up!

I have been really busy lately and haven't had a chance to update the blog. So get ready for a photo heavy post.

Firstly though a little bit of class news. On September 21st I will be teaching a beginners Art Journalling class in Dungarvan Co. Waterford. This will be an opportunity for all of you who have been tempted to start this creative journey, but have just been unsure where to start. On the day we will hopefully complete 2 pages and have lots of fun making different backgrounds for some more pages. If you are interested in coming to the class contact me here in the comments or on my Facebook page.

A second class that I will be teaching is a mixed media canvas. I will be teaching this as part of the 2 day Create with Kate event in Athlone on 5th and 6th of October.

And so to what I have been doing recently. Well my journal journey continues. I am really enjoying playing with all of my products and seeing what works together. The new distress paints from Ranger and Tim Holtz are fantastic! In the latest issue of Crafting Ireland online magazine I did a product review, so check it out here.

 

Another thing that I have been doing lately is art swaps. 
The first swap was hosted by Create with Kate and was an alphabet swap. We were each given a letter of the alphabet and had to send our artwork to the person above us on the list. I decided on a canvas. The letter I had was "R", and I had an idea based on a quote about rainbows.

Another project I have done is a commission for a 16 year old girls birthday. This is again a canvas with a lots of collage work on it.

So there you go, a little sample of some of my recent work!

New Journal Pages

I just wanted to share a couple of recent journal pages with you.They are similar colour tones but created in two very different ways.

 I usually start with the background and build the page up but this page started out with the sketch of the three mushrooms. I then went in with some distress stains in broken china and peeled paint. The mushrooms were coloured with distress inks and more ink was layered through stencils on the background. A very quick page.

The second page started out totally differently. I used various different washi tapes to cover the page vertically. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with this background at first, but then I started to see the shapes of the New York skyline in the page.I outlined various shapes in black permanent marker and the 'city' started to come to life. I let the patterns of the tape dictate the shapes and locations of the windows in the buildings and coloured the buildings using black Inktense block. For the sky I used the Inktense blocks also. I scribbled graded colours up the page to create a sunset and then applied water to blend. I love the effect I got. Hope you like the pages. 

Mother's Day Gift

A Mother's Day Gift

I recently made a Mother's Day gift bag as a tutorial on Crafting Ireland, (see here) and decided that I needed to make something to go inside! What good is a gift bag without a gift? So I made a box of cards for all occasions that my mum can send to people over the year ahead. The cards are a standard C6 size and I used the same October Afternoon papers as for the bag. My Mum is in the USA at the moment so she won't get her gift for a couple of weeks, but I would like to wish all of you Mums a Happy Mother's Day!

This is a close-up of the box that the cards are in.

The box with cards inside.

Crafting Ireland Design Team

I can let the cat out of the bag now! I am on the new Crafting Ireland magazine design team. I am so excited to be on this team of very talented women, and I am looking forward to the next few months. Look out for our first projects in the March edition of the magazine. For those of you who don't know about it, Crafting Ireland is an on-line magazine, published monthly. If you would like to subscribe head over to the Crafting Ireland where there is a link to the magazine and a place to subscribe so that you never miss a thing.

Icarus Falling- Journal page

This page/ pages started out as a sketch idea for another project. I was just laying down some colour and texture as a background when my Derwent inktense block made a kind of circular shape on the page.

So as the name suggests the page is based on the Greek Myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. The pages were gessoed in white quite thickly. While the gesso was still wet I dragged my spreader through it to create grooves and patterns. I let this dry and then started adding paint. I started with a deep yellow which I painted on one page. I closed the journal over then and pushed down to transfer some paint to the other page. This gave a great mottled effect. I dried this off with a heat gun and then applied a lighter yellow to the opposite page and repeated the process. This results in one page being brighter than the other. This is where the happy accident happened. I got out my Inktense blocks to add a little more depth to the background and ended up with a large sun which just didn't want to be contained on one page! Then I thought, 'what does the sun bring to mind'? and I thought "Icarus". Off I went to the trusty internet to find some images of Icarus. I found this great one by Frank Wright, which has a lovely sketchy quality to it. I printed it down and used an image transfer paste to transfer it to the page. I used some more texture paste and stencils to add a little bit more interest and sprayed the lot with Cosmic shimmer mist in Mango Blaze. To finish I added the story of Icarus around the son.

A close-up of the texture

A close-up of Icarus

"Love" Journalling

Did you see what I did with the title? For this page I played with my new Dylusions sprays. Oh my word are they fab! I used the Bubblegum Pink, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape. I got the sprays from the lovely Kate at Create with Kate. She has a great range and I believe the new colours will be coming in over the next couple of weeks. I can't wait to get my hands on them, there is a new red and a new pink.

 Anyhow to the page. I spritzed the page liberally with water and then sprayed my three colours onto the page. I then closed my journal and got two pages for the price of one! I rolled off the excess ink with kitchen roll to give a lighter background. I then went back with my turquoise and grape sprays, but this time I didn't spritz the page first and concentrated the sprays at the top of the page. I stood the journal up then to allow the ink to flow down the page.

After drying the page I drew a large heart in the middle of the page and used a thin layer of gesso to fill the centre of the heart. I stamped out the love crafting girl from Stampotique Originals and used an image transfer paste to place her to the left of the heart. I outlined her in white to make her stand out from the background. The heart was outlined firstly with Derwent inktense pencil and blocks and finally with white pen. To finish I used the Dylusions Stars stencil, through which I spritzed water. I ran over this with my kitchen roll to lift some of the ink off the page, dried the page again and outlined the stars in white.

The quote is from Shakespeare.

The Secret Garden - Journal Page

This is my latest journal page. I started with the idea of trying an image transfer. The base page and border were already done when I did a previous page opposite. If you want to check the post out it's here. Well the image transfer went totally wrong, so I ended up printing the image again and colour tinting it with Distress inks. The roses were cut from some old wrapping paper. The leaves were drawn on and coloured with Derwent Inktense blocks. The quotes were taken from the book "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This has to be one of my all time favourite

This is a close-up of the image and text. I have to apologise about the bounce back from the flash. The days are so dull here at the moment there is no decent light to take photos!

The Journal Journey continues......

Not Quite Alice

My latest page is extremely messy! Those of you who know me will say that it is a very me page. I started out by painting the background using Citrus Paint Dabber by Ranger. Then I got busy with stencils and texture paste. The stencils are from Dylusions and I got them from the lovely Kate at Create with Kate. I added washi tape and some splodges of distress stain. I also swiped the stains over the textured areas.

(sorry about the shine on the bottom of the page- the washi tape was bouncing the light everywhere)

Curious Corrin was coloured using Tim Holtz Distress inks, as was the white rabbit. I drew the daisy and painted it with a mixture of white paint and yellow distress ink. A little bit of text and I was done. I learned a lot from this page. Some washi tape is very shiny and doesn't like having anything added to it!

Latest Journal page

The idea for this page came from a quote that my cousin posted on her Facebook page. I agreed so readily with it that I had to make a page to showcase it. The page border is just magazine off-cuts. The house and hills were drawn on a background sheet which I made out of torn book pages. I used Derwent Inktense Blocks and pencils to colour the images. I just love these!

I think I need to fill in the blank bits still. I am not sure with what yet.

A close-up of the text.

Cover of Journal

Journal Progress

I couldn't think how to decorate the front cover of my journal, so I decided to use some of my favourite quotes. I like the result that I got. I feel that I have got past the whole mental block that I think we are presented with when creating the cover for any album or journal. I always make a mistake and hate the result and don't want to use the album then!

This is the overall cover. I was going to paint out the manila colour, but decided to leave it in the end.

A close-up of the lettering. I hi-lighted the lettering with a signo white pen.

Starting a Journal

I have decided to start an Art journal. I am really nervous about this new venture, as I haven't kept even a sketch book since I was in Architecture School nearly 23 years ago! So I have dived straight in and started with a little sketch of some quirky houses.  It's not very 'Arty', but I just thought that I would easy.

This is how I started out. I used pencil and Distress Markers to draw and colour the houses.

And this is where I ended up. I stamped on tissue paper and added it to the roofs and paths. I painted the houses with a heavier acrylic paint. The sky was a little bit of a disaster. I had used Tattered Angels Glimmer Glaze to drip down the page ( hoping for a meteor shower effect) but it just wasn't working, so I over-painted it with ranger Paint Dabbers. Who knew that the glaze (should have worked it out from the name) would resist! I then painted some violet ink over the top and used my Inktense pencils to deepen the colour. The stars are from a Dylusions stencil, which I picked up from Create with Kate. 

Stay tuned for my (hopeful) improvement over the next few months.