Something Found

This is the small tag I made this week for Tag Tuesday, the challenge was to use something found and I used a piece of solder that I found when my partner had finished soldering some copper pipe and I thought it looked like a silver leaf shape.  I made some tin foil flowers (4 layers thick before die cutting) to put round it and put tiny pearl and silver beads around to decorate and I emphasized the center box with a string of silver beads.  A crystal bead chain added at the bottom and pink shredded  ribbon at the top finish off the tag.  I have seen some wonderful creations this week and I am amazed at how a crafter's eye is caught by different objects.  

Thank you for your kind comments.

Art Calendar 2012 366 Challenge - June

Well here it is ready and waiting for my first entry.  I have wanted to keep a diary for quite sometime now but never been motivated enough to do it.  I came across this monthly challenge through flickr.  I treated myself to a  Canson mixed media 9" x 12" 98lb journal which seems to work really well with watercolour and acrylic paints.    I did a wash of ultramarine, crimson, pthalo green and yellow to create a sea and sky background.  I stamped it with swirls at the bottom and tiny fish and seahorses in green and blue.  Each blue cardstock square is distressed with green distress ink and  dedicated to a single day of the month.  As the month progresses I will write a note for each day and add any ephemera or finds to the page.   As you can see I made a mess on the right hand side stamping a red crab and tried to cover it with paint but it didn't work so something that I collect in this month will be added to cover it.  I do hope to go to the beach a few times this month so I will look among the flotsam and jetsam for something special.  

Altered Book Lesson 8 - Colour

This fortnight's lesson covered the subject of colour and the colour wheel.  I found this part of the lesson particularly interesting as I had never looked at it this way "When the light rays hits an object our eyes responds to the light that is bounced back and we see that color. For example a red ball reflects all the red light rays."  For my page I firstly created a background with all the colours of the spectrum in watercolour pencils on a wavy edged blank card, hence the crease in the middle.  Then using pieces cut from magazines I made a colour wheel showing the primary, secondary and tertiary colours, 12 in all. (Thanks to the Nestlé Family for the template)


Primary Colors: Red, yellow and blue, primary colors are the 3 pigment colors that can not be mixed or formed by any combination of other colors. All other colors are derived from these 3 hues.


Secondary Colors: Green, orange and purple, these are the colors formed by mixing the primary colors.


Tertiary Colors: Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green, these are the colors formed by mixing a primary and a secondary color. That's why the hue is a two word name, such as blue-green, red-violet, and yellow-orange. 


In visual experiences, harmony is something that is pleasing to the eye. It engages the viewer and it creates an inner sense of order, a balance in the visual experience.  The balance in the spectrum above is the darker colours are at each end with the lighter colours in the middle.  The same with the colour wheel the cool colours are to the left and the warm colours to the right.  My wheel does not show monochromatic colours but in looking for scraps of magazines to use it made me very aware of the many hues and slight variations each colour has.  Paint chips in DIY stores really demonstrate this aspect perfectly.  Finally I put a magazine photograph of a Christmas candle in the middle to not only tie it into my altered book theme but to represent white light, the source of all colour.


Some Formulas for Color Harmony can be found at Jill Morton's page http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory where she gives great examples of the basic formulas for harmony - complimentary, analogous. She also has a Pinterest page which is interesting.

As part of our homework we have to create two backgrounds that show a colour classification.  On this page I chose to use hues of blue to illustrate monochromatic variation, ranging from dark blue at the top to light at the bottom of the page.  I decorated the page with items of primary colour, red, blue and yellow twisted wire stems with blue crystal flowers, a magazine page large butterfly with yellow blue and red gems, and two lace butterflies coloured with yellow and red mica powders (the red looks a bit pink in the photo).

For my second page I wanted to show the effect of adding white to three colours on the wheel.  My background is two coloured papers in pink(red and white) that have been stenciled and stamped with other hues of pink.  The roses are made from pink, lilac (purple and white) and peach (orange and white) ribbon, the tags and strings are other shades of pink and peach and the bows are another complimentary pale pink.  The only deep shade on the page is the dark purple bow in the top right hand corner, which makes it stand out from the rest. 

Off to play with scraffito, thanks Elizabeth for the lesson.

Altered Book Lesson 7, The Elements of Design

In this lesson we learned about the five elements of design, line, form and shape, space, texture and colour.  Our homework is to create a page showing each of these elements.

Line

On this page I have shown "line" in three different ways.  Firstly the zig-zag line that the skier has left in the snow.  Secondly the line shape of the trees , along the bottom of the branches wavy and along the top straight, this is somewhat hidden by the gesso snow.  Thirdly the line of trees rising up from the bottom left of the page to the top right.

Form and Shape 

On this page I have illustrated shape in the background, I have reflected the three colours of the baubles to give the page unity,  it is a flat surface with no depth or thickness.  The element of design Form I have illustrated with the round and grape shaped baubles.  Though they are just photographs cut from a magazine the 3-D geometric effect has been achieved by the reflections of light shinning from the glass.

Space

This is a difficult one to see from the photograph, I have used two overlapping sheets of paper the distant one is of a bundt tin full of chocolate truffles, the overlapping sheet is on the left and is a picture of fruits and ribbon.  I die cut some flowers out of the top layer before sticking down.  The die cut holes in the paper are shown by the negative space that surrounds them and are themselves two-dimensional spaces, having no depth.  I tried to highlight the area along the edges of the shape.  I made the flowers from the cut out shapes of progressively smaller size and wound them through the page to show distance.

If you squint your eyes you can see a three dimensional shape in the bundt tin, this is achieved by colour hues gradually getting darker as it receeds into the picture against a background that becomes lighter.

Texture

For this page I used a piece of corrugated cardboard as the background which I wiped with a damp piece of paper towel to make removing just the top layer in places to leave the ridged center piece exposed in some areas.  I painted this to varying degrees with gesso and stamped a Christmas stamp with brown Stazon down the right hand side.  The word "December" and the number 25 were also stamped with Stazon brown ink and I used some foam stamps that give a worn look to add to the texture.  A chipboard swirl covered with gesso and a single ply napkin that wrinkled on contact, three handmade material/ribbon flowers with pearls, two pearl flowers, a strip of lace and nylon wires threaded with pearls all contribute to different textures on the page. 

I have to tell you that gesso on distressed corrugated cardboard is my favourite background to work on,

Tag Tuesday - Baking

This weeks challenge is Baking, anything to do with it at all.  I chose three blueberry muffins, as I had just bought some stamps.  I painted the cardstock tag with gesso and attached a single layer of a pretty paper napkin while the gesso was still wet.  I covered the back of the tag again with gesso and used this to attach the two white sheets that I had separated from the napkin.  I tore the edges of the front napkin to fit the tag exactly and the back white sheets a little bigger so that they showed from the front like a torn edge.  I stamped the three muffins twice each and cut them out.  I cut the the top section of each one and attached it to the complete duplicate cutout.  This gave a raised area where the muffin shows from the case.  Some raised dots attach each muffin to the tag, though you can't see this from my picture.  I used glossy accents to highlight the blueberry muffins and the flowers on the background.  I made the blueberries with blobs of  dark blue stickles.  Some white and lilac ribbon threaded through an eyelet finish the tag at the top.

Thanks for popping by my blog.

Altered Book Lesson 6 - Design Principles part 2

Lesson 6 is all about the design principles of rhythm or pattern, movement, repetition, contrast and dominance.

For this page I hand beaded a star with metallic green and gold beads (though you can't see the brilliance of the beads in the photo) and mounted it onto green star paper and added scroll corners.  The pattern is shown in the design of the star and repetition in the corners and diamond shaped glass beads.  I can see some movement in the irregularity of the pattern of the small stars behind the beaded stars, they seem to draw you into the page and receed behind the main element.  Dominance is also shown by the size and impact of the large star.

Sorry about the reflection of the flash camera in this photo.  I used a lovely, well used stamp of an angel with a trail of stars heat embossed in silver on a blue star patterned paper.  The trail of stars behind the angel gives it the appearance of movement through the sky.  Repetition is again shown in the corner decoration, and of course dominance in the stamped image.

For this page I chose a metallic, dark blue cardstock background and stamped and heat embossed in white powder some houses, trees and stars. The interest in the page is immediately caught by the contrast of the white on the metallic dark blue. Repetition is shown in the houses, stars and trees. Depth is indicated by the smaller houses that recede into the background with the aid of the white snow road getting smaller as it climbs the page. The only dominance I see in the page is the broad band of white at the bottom.

There has been a lot of information absorb in this lesson and lesson 5, a lot of which seems to me to overlap and have the same purpose.  Looking forward to lesson 7, thanks Elizabeth.

Heart Journal May - Aluminium Foil

This month's technique is to use scrunched up tin foil on our heart. I kept some places smooth and some wrinkled and painted the whole thing with black acrylic paint and rubbed the excess off before it dried leaving paint in the indentations. I wanted the whole heart to have a feel of metal. I embossed the top right hand side with an embossing folder pattern that looks like water running and highlighted the raised areas with green rub-ons. Triple heat embossed black UTTEE with mica powders in green, gold and pewter was stamped with a swirl pattern and I partially embedded in it my yard sale find of a Willie Nelson ticket from an Old Whisky River Bourbon bottle that is made of metal. Short strings of beads and small coins were coloured silver with alcohol inks and added to the bottom edges of the heart. I wanted to have a feel of metal to this heart and the tin foil background certainly helped me achieve it. Thanks for dropping by my blog.

Google translation: Technique de ce mois-ci est  " une utilisation du papier aluminium ménager", sur notre cœur. J'ai gardé certains endroits en douceur et certains ridée et peint le tout avec de la peinture acrylique noire et frotté l'excès avant de le sécher la peinture en laissant dans les indentations. Je voulais que le cœur tout entier à avoir une sensation de métal. Je relief le côté en haut à droite avec un motif de gaufrage dossier qui ressemble à l'eau courante et a souligné les zones en relief avec le vert rub-ons. Triple chaleur UTTEE noir gaufré avec le mica poudres en vert, l'or et l'étain a été estampillé avec un modèle de turbulence et je partiellement noyée dans ce ma vente de garage à trouver d'un billet de Willie Nelson à partir d'une bouteille de Whisky Bourbon Old River qui est faite de métal. Les chaînes courtes de perles et de petites pièces étaient de couleur argent avec des encres alcool et ajoutés aux bords inférieurs du cœur. Je voulais avoir une idée de métal à ce cœur et le fond une feuille d'étain m'a certainement aidé le réaliser. Merci d'être passé par mon blog.

Tag Tuesday - Sewing

Not a love of mine sewing but I did try. I started with a piece of light cream coloured damask fabric and hand needle felted some pink and some white satin strips, together with some dark pink netting onto the background. I took small strips of the net and satin and felted some small flowers and a strip of dark cream scallop edge lace into the material. I then machined the whole thing onto a cardstock tag catching in some lace flowers at the top and trimmed the edges.

A border of cream coloured pearls, pearl and gem centers added to the flowers and a lace butterfly decorate the tag. Strips of the white satin and dark pink netting are threaded through an eyelet that has been added at the top.