Keep Calm & Create

We all need a good quote in our studio I believe, and I loved this one!!!
So out came an old canvas which was then painted, papered, sprayed stamped and embellished and this is what was produced...

I committed sacrilege with an Oxford Dictionary giving up many pages to create the background! What a sacrifice....
I then cut up a piece of Websters Pages paper for the roses....
I then wanted to gesso it, but due to the fact it was Easter, and the shops were closed so I couldn't get any gesso, I had to make do with what I had which was a cheap white acrylic paint. At least I didn't have to water it down... :)
Add some texture paste, gold netting and muslin for some texture...
From there I then played around with some of my Ranger Colorwashes, watering them down to get the pale yellow, pink and green that I wanted and then sprayed the whole background!!! Very subtle, but very pretty I think!
When it all dried, I then ran a black ink pad over the top to pick up the texture and add some shadow.

All of the chipboard around the edges of the canvas have been painted with a pearl paint and then sprayed with the Colorwashes. I used the same colours I sprayed the background with, but these ones weren't watered down. Because I used the pearl paint, the chipboard all shimmer...

The words were all painted with pearl paint, but they weren't going to stand out on the background, so I then painted them black and sanded them back, finishing with a coating of dimensional magic.
I tried several different techniques on the 'create' but nothing worked, so I painted them black with the higlight of the pearl, followed by dimensional magic.
That worked!!!

From there it was a case of deciding on placement of flowers (after I sprayed them with gold mist!) and glueing everything down...

Overall I'm very happy with it... the only problem is the frame of the canvas is a bit skew-iff... so the words look crooked, and they might not be quite centre ... damn!
I'm sure something will come to me to fix that as I doubt very much I can pull the letters off and restick them.
I'm also not sure if it needs something on the left hand side... any ideas?

Never enough hours

to get everything done that I need done, or even what I want to get done...
I have so much I want to do but not enough time now matter how much I try to organise myself... oh well that's life.

Over at Chooks I've set the monthly challenges for March...
I was nice... sort of! lol...
I'm going to share the samples, but if you want to know what the challenges are you'll have to head over to Chooks and have a look... maybe join up and have some fun!
Especially as this weekend we've got a cybercrop going.....

I will tell you that there is 5 challenges - quote, technique, colour, product and word challenge.
And if you're really keen, there's also card and sketch challenges!

Life is like a Piano

Another mixed media page.
After I saw this quote it inspired me to create this page. This is a good way of recording quotes I like I think...

I drew the piano keys down the edge of the paper (yes I need work on my drawing!) and the words life and create music using a permanent marker.
I then used a template to draw some white flowers in the background with a white chromograph pencil (it's meant to be impervious...) and then using acrylic paints watered down, painted the blue and green int he background.
I then stamped the greenery downt he bottom of the page using staz-on ink, and added in the rest of the quote, music notes and finally some white rubons.
I do like the effect of the background!

Mixed Media

I've started to play a little with mixed media, and of course I needed a journal cover so I made one from scratch!

I cut a piece of bookboard to the size I wanted, then added a title in chipboard letters.
Once I had that in place, I added random chipboard letters over the rest of the bookboard. Once I was happy with them I glued them into place, and then painted a white base over it.
Naughty me then tore some pages out of a dictionary, tore them and glued them into the 2 corners moulding them over the letters.

Now this is where the fun came in. I glued down flowers and embellishments, then sprayed it all with Ranger Colourwashes. It ended up that I wasn't happy with it, so pulled off all the embellishments and then ran the cover under the tap. I figured it was only chipboard so if I ruined it I could start again.
But wonder of wonders, it did what I wanted and lightened the intensity of the colours, without ruining the look.
Then I played again with some more spray, added the embellishments, painted, swiped and generally had some fun and this is the end result...

I love the blend of colours...

Then I covered the inside and the back cover with pieces of dictionary pages, then coloured them with the colourwash, stamped an image with stazon ink on the back.

and on the inside front cover I painted a stencil of a tree and added some text.

Overall I love the way it came out... very different to anything I've done before!