New stencils and stuff!

At long last, my order from Joanne's came in. It felt like I was getting so much more than I actually got, or maybe that is the memory of how much I spent. Since, my studio section of my studio apartment is still in disarray. I am not the most active organizer. I tend to do it in small bursts. That means there is still no work surface, so I cleaned off my tv tray and had a go with some of my new supplies.

First, I have to say the Crafters Workshop templates were AWESOME! I started out with the 6"x6" size, since it seemed to make more sense to me right now. The bigger ones will follow eventually, they are that awesome. I am trying to figure out the angel policy thing. When it says you are allowed to create "x" number of images for sale, do they mean the number of times one can use a given template/stamp in any original piece of art you use that product in, or does it only refer to when you make the same thing several times. For example, an original design can be recreated a number of times when someone makes greeting cards. Is that what they mean? It makes as much sense to me as the last couple of questions probably did to you. I figure I ought to get the copyright/fair use thing straight before I make something and try to sell it. I am not looking to be hassled.

I also got a few daubers of distress inks, a few stamps, and a few containers of acrylic ink. The distress inks were very nice. I stamped with the walnut stain color. I frankly used as much as I thought I could get away with on one page. Somehow it seems to work. It is a beautiful mess. The most interesting thing on the page, however, wasn't one of the many new supplies. It was the set of homemade stamps I made. I have had a couple of keyboards bite the dust. With my computer/tv set up, it gets knocked down a lot, so tings happen. I tend to get the cheapest Apple keyboards I can find, which are reasonable. When I inevitably kill them, I take them apart for parts. Not to build a new franken-keyboard, but to eventually use in an art project. This is the first time I followed through. The frame for the keys is a big grid of Xes. I thought it would be cool to use configurations of them to stamp with, so I cut that bit apart and pulled out a couple of shapes that appealed to me, and glued them to some cheap Dollar Tree crafts sheets and cardboard. They worked beautifully. I also have a single one waiting to be mounted, and the rest of the part can be taken apart and mounted as well, melting down the Xes a little so they have wider edges. But I am not feeling ambitious enough to do that quite yet. I already have the mess of organizing supplies, making the art journal from paper bags, and backing up all my hard copy dvds to deal with. I figure I have enough to chew on for right now. 

My experimental art journal page. This is what happens when I test my new stuff out. My new letter stamps, the crackle stamp (I am going to love that!), a black gelato, a damask stamp, a damask TCW template, a couple of blops of acrylic ink, all colors of my new distress ink,  my homemade glimmer mist, and a couple of homemade stamps. Whew!

A close up of my page, with the homemade stamps that created the "X" images. Plus, you can really see the glimmer in this shot. Oooh...ahhh.

I also made a couple of black and white backgrounds. They are the image of perfect-ish symmetry. I seem to have customized my damask template by bending a couple of parts, making the page like a wallpaper/Rorschach test combo. Still, I like it...and the imperfect houndstooth. That one just makes me happy...and a little dizzy.

I love the chicken wire template. The small size makes the part that makes this design look like wire very subtle, so it looks like honeycomb. Very cool!

The houndstooth of hell! I guess i went a little heavy in spots.

My Rorschach sheet, I mean damask. Even though it is very girly, damask really appeals to me.

This weekend, I will be winding down my dvd project and moving my dvd tower to its rightful place, as an organizer for my art supplies. I will put the dvds in storage and finish my organization so I have room to work. Then, I will iron those paper bags and trim them, and lovingly craft them into a couple of fabulous art journals. Who am I kidding? I am pretty sure I will finish the dvd project. I will probably get absorbed in YouTube videos and/or some of the movies I have downloaded, since I haven't watched them in years, but the rest is probably not going to happen. It doesn't hurt to aim high...

Imaginary ladies galore

I made the decision to finally start working on basic painting skills. I would like to learn how to shade. Right now, I am not necessarily looking for realism. I just want some dimension in my work. I think the perfect subject matter is lady's faces, so I drew a boatload. I drew them on old poetry I weeded out of a journal I am altering as an art journal. Did you know that if you draw with a Sharpie, or similar permanent pen, and cover it with gesso, the ink bleeds through. There is a technique floating around the internets called ghosting, where you do just that. I traced my drawings in Sharpie so I would have a guide when I covered my bad poetry with gesso. Did you also know that ghosting is not only a phenomena that occurs when covering permanent marker with gesso? It also happens with ballpoint pen and cheap felt tip pens. Yep, the bad poetry I am trying to free myself from came right back at me like a bad dream. I tried a second coating of gesso on some pages, to no avail. Then, I hoped a coat of matte gel medium would seal of of that. I retraced my drawings in permanent marker, then gesso again. Better. But not good enough. Sigh...deep sigh. This paper is going to be so thick with gesso and mediums it will be able to stand upright without support. But I will persist.  I think I am at a point where I only have to touch up critical areas before painting. In the meantime, here are strategically cropped photos of most of the drawings. I really quite like them. I like them so much I am going to scan them so I can reuse them, especially if I end up destroying them when I try to paint. I hope you like them, too.

My favorite is the one on my left. Please forgive me if you can read any of the hideous poetry. I was emo before emo became a thing.

The center drawing is the only one I even somewhat modeled after someone else. I was watching the season finale of American Horror Story: Asylum, and I really like Lana's reporter look.

I didn't do absolutely nothing while I was sick

I went through an old popcorn tin I keep some memorabilia in and found a treasure. Not only did I find my Dad's old Army shirt, turned vest, I used to wear during my punk days all safety pinned up. I also found a book of my old poetry. As I read through, it occurred to me how bad it was. It was really awful, to be quite honest. I wrote poetry from my mid teens to my mid twenties, as a cathartic exercise. I had a lot of problems back then, so writing poetry was a necessary release, since I did not have access to a therapist or many friends who were understanding enough to stick around after they knew what I was really going through emotionally. I don't necessarily want to hold on to all of that. After inspecting the journal itself, I saw it would be perfect to alter. I tore out half the pages and went straight to work making backgrounds. My main goal was to cover up that old poetry, so I dragged out the garbage I have been saving and started gluing away.

Inside the front cover, I tore part of a drop cloth I had covered with paint into pieces and glued them in.

Then, I proceeded to glue in pages of the wrappers of things I have frequent contact with: Halls, tea, granola bars, the insert from an old Jane's Addiction CD, hot cereal, art supplies, you name it, I covered the pages with it. Yesterday evening, I did another round of gelatin prints and pasted a bunch of those in, as well. Nothing was safe. The combination of using items that may have been in a landfill somewhere and covering up those years of pain was very cathartic. I am not forgetting the lessons I learned but I can choose to not keep these monuments to my emotional pain around as a shrine. It is good to let go.

An exercise from the Altered Background e-course on http://gulfspritesartjournal.ning.com. This is Christy Sobolewski's site. This particular class is free, and I would highly recommend it. There are even more interesting ones that you have to pay for that I have my eye on when I am employed again.

Christy Sobolewski had a video somewhere about using stamps to cover a page. This may have been from her Altered backgrounds class, too. This is my favorite stamp, an eye. I just made a big, ill-advised impulse purchase from JoAnn's that includes a few more stamps, so I can't wait to do this technique with them!

Tea bag and Halls packaging. Gee, can you tell I have been sick?

Packaging from granola bars and more. I like the mirrored look, though I'll be darned if I know how to deal with it later.

Cleaned food packaging.

Fancy patterned tape from Daiso, the Japanese dollar store I love so much.

Another Altered backgrounds exercise. I wasn't crazy about the other one, but I LOVE this one. Who would have thought security envelopes were so pretty?

These two pages are gelatin prints on wax paper that was used until I couldn't use them anymore. I love these!

Gelatin prints on a slick, green paper insert that was between two sheets of alphabet stencils. 

I am now a handful of pages away from getting all the pages covered, and I have some ideas brewing about how to move along in the process with this journal. I feel like I am getting to the point where I am willing to move beyond the comfort of doing general backgrounds. I am at a good place and I  will be happy to see where the rest of this journal takes me.

Now, as for the gelatin prints, this round was not nearly as successful as the last, but I have some pages I am particularly fond of. It is a lucky thing for my pocketbook that JoAnn's does not have Gelli Arts Printing Plates for purchase online, because I would have snapped one up. I did, however take full advantage of their outrageous sale on scrapbooking/stamping/fine arts/jewelry making supplies. Lots of 40% off items and many more 25% off. And to top it off, if you spent over $40, shipping was free. I saved over $50, which tells you how much I spent. <blush> This online excursion is starting to get me up to speed on my crafting supplies: Cling and clear stamps, as well as acrylic plates for printing, Staz On ink pad, Acrylic inks in a few colors, Several 6"x6" Crafter's Workshop templates that I can use in more printmaking and more, a new self healing mat (!!),  circle and edge rounding stamps, Distress Stains in a few colors, Walnut ink crystals, some Gelatos, die cut flourishes, a matstack that was on clearance, and a couple of packages of gem drops to embellish handmade journals. It is going to be very exciting to get this package. I looked at glimmer mists and wow! $7.99?! No wonder people are making their own. I have a little shopping list for when I go back to Daiso. I think I will be able to pick up some spray bottles and possibly some eyeshadow powder that can stand in for micah powder (since that is what the pearly colors are). I may even have something that I can use (metallic Lumiere paints), so all I have to do is get the spray bottles. I have paint and glue. I also want to make some regular color misters for fast stenciling.

I guess I will leave you with more gelatin prints. You will notice I did a lot of prints ripped out pages from a Japanese Buddhist text and index cards. The index cards curled really bad, so I will need to straighten them out, but they look pretty neat.  I did some on junk mail, too, and it wasn't all successful. I think it would be advisable to cover up anything too bold or big with a thin layer of an opaque paint. I thought I might get an interesting look with the text showing. Not so much, sadly.

Homemade Stamps and Paulo Coehlo

New Year's Eve was spent cutting fun foam into various shapes and gluing them on corrugated cardboard to make stamps. Can you tell how much of a homebody I am? I didn't even watch the ball drop or anything. When the clock struck midnight, everything erupted outside my apartment. People screaming and fireworks going off. I was hoping I could see the fireworks that come off the top of the Space Needle every year, but nope. There is a giant condo that blocks it all. If it were shorter, we would have a wonderful view from the hallway in my apartment building.  I could only see the occasional puff of smoke and glow of light coming from the fireworks. Oh well. If we could see the Space Needle, my rent would probably be $400 more each month.

The View of the Space Needle from two block away, parallel to the needle.

This afternoon, I decided to play with the stamps I made last night. They were completely dry, so I wouldn't ruin them. After gessoing a bunch of pages in a couple of old books, I had a go. I even cut a lime in half that was past its prime and stamped with that on some scrap paper.

When I stamped on the pages in my book, I got to thinking about a movie I watched this weekend, Veronika Decides to Die. It was a wonderful movie about a woman who tried to kill herself only to be revived. She wakes up in a mental institution, learning the the overdose she took caused such severe heart damage, she would die in the near future. I know, it doesn't sound like an uplifting movie, but it is.  Not to give away anything, but point of the book was that knowing you could die at any moment makes you want to go out and actually live the way you were always scared to before. I now have a strong urge to read the book, by Paulo Coelho. I have had difficulty reading over the past decade or so. I think my migraines did something to my vision that interrupts my being able to focus on a page. I used to be a voracious reader, now not so much. It makes me sad. I am loading the book on my Kindle and I am going to give it a go. My migraines are not as frequent as they were, cross my fingers, and being able to enlarge the print is helpful. Now, I just need to get back into the habit. Two books per month to start: one fiction, 1 nonfiction. I will get back into it this year!

But back to Mr. Coehlo. There was a great quote from the movie, that I really hope is also in the book: "These days most people have replaced almost all their emotions with fear, and everyone has dreams, but only a few realize them - makes cowards of us all." It felt like the right one for the page.

I used everything in this page: my beloved Inktense pencils, acrylic craft paint, Pan Pastels, a white paint pen, a technical pen, and cheap watercolor from Daiso The green was craft paint and the red orange was watercolors. I did a little filling in of holes with yellow pastel.

Speaking of cheap supplies from Daiso, I finally gave the clear stamps a try. I stamped them all on the back of a large index card. They look awesome! I am going to enjoy these. It makes me want to get more, but I really do have to control myself. I noticed one thing. The first time I took them off the plastic, they were incredibly difficult try pry off. After that, they are a breeze. Is this normal? Or is this just part of the cheap quality?

A Fun Way to Use Eggshells

I have accomplished a lot of creative things for the past couple of days, but I have prepared two books to be altered into art journals and I made eggshell mosaics. Gluing pages together is not an exciting thing to see, but the eggshell mosaic experiment is pretty neat. Being my first time, I would have done a few things differently. Even so, a nice look is almost foolproof.

A few people have asked me, what is an eggshell mosaic. It is pretty simple. You find a surface you want to cover, paint a basecoat on it, brush on an adhesive, and crush pieces of cleaned eggshells, outer side up,  onto the glue. When it is on the adhesive, you ca add more cracks by pressing down with a toothpick, skewer, or pencil eraser,  until it looks the way you want it to. You keep doing this until the surface is covered. When that is dry and you straighten the edges, use a dye, ink, or stain of some sort to create color. I used a felt pad to dab a magenta alcohol ink all over mine, then strayed with very strong coffee. That didn't quite do it for me, so I dabbed on some black acrylic ink, sprayed with alcohol, wiping off the excess. I kept playing with it until it looked the way I wanted it to.  What will happen is most of the color will sink into the cracks. The eggshells may be stained, depending on what types of inks or dyes you apply. When it is completely dry, coat with your favorite varnish. I would venture to say embossing would be a nice clear coat. I used 2 coats of Diamond Glaze.

Here are the results.

Overall, I am pleased with the outcome, but I would do some things differently:

• The surface I used was one that was painted in a way I didn't like. It would have been better had I did a nice coating of black paint. I ended up having to take a Black Sharpie to a lot of gaps because the color showed through and didn't look so nice. Sharpie will smear when varnishing, so be warned. It actually worked toward the effect here, but it is better to do it the easier way.
• The reason I had to use a Sharpie in the first place was because I did not completely cover my surface with eggshells. In the future, I will make sure that I do.
• I used a gel medium as my adhesive, which was extremely thick. I would not recommend using a pasty adhesive. It was a little icky. Instead, I will probably use a bit more than a thin coating of Elmer's glue in small patches. That way, there will be a minimum of fuss and the glue will not dry before you are finished with the eggshell. Completely covering each glued section with eggshell before moving on is a good way to avoid large gaps. 
• Whatever color you use on your piece, make sure it is very thin and watery. The acrylic ink was a bit thick, not the viscosity, but the pigment. It completely coated my surface. That is why I ended up spraying with some alcohol. When you do that, some of the ink may come off, so there is a lot of experimentation involved, not necessarily a bad thing. At one point, I thought it looked like a pink lizard! 
• If your surface is cardboard or paper, you will be able to cut it into shapes with scissors, but I would make sure they are in the shapes you want before moving on. I would be too nervous punching them or trying to cut with a slide paper cutter. run them through a slide cutter.

I think it would be super cute to make a flower out of thick paper covered with eggshell mosaic. I am not sure how I am going to use the ones I completed, but I am excited to do more. Everything I used was found around my house. and the base and eggshells were things that would have ended up in the trash. If I was feeling ambitious, I could have even made natural dyes from stuff in my kitchen. There are lots of instructions on the web for doing that. I like crafts that make me feel good about myself!

A Hot Mess?

So, yesterday I mentioned my little cabochon making experiment. This is day three and they still aren't dry!

In fact, if you notice in the pictures, when as the glue is drying, it seems to be evaporating. There are big dips in each mold. So, yesterday, I added white glue to fill, and that is what you see. The white glue is also shrinking and evaporating away as it dries. In the process, I found out that many of the colors of the glitter are from a tint that was added to the glue, not from the glitter itself. The white glue in some of my molds is turning the color of the glitter. Hmm...

So, at this stage in the experiment, my genius has turned into a hot mess. If in several days, or however long it takes for the glue to completely dry, I will add some hot glue and see if my little cabochons can be salvaged.  Until then, I am crossing my fingers. Next time around, I would like to try brushing glitter into the molds first, then filling with either hot glue or Diamond Glaze. Plus, I will grease the molds to make them easier to unmold. If I find some glitter glue sticks, I might pick them up and give them a go.