Mixed Media Tag - Elegance

Here's a very quick tag made in a flurry of stencils, paint and texture paste. I was playing around with colours and came up with a stunning paste mix. I'm not sure this tag does it justice and I'm sure I'll revisit it at some stage. See the shiny swirls in the bottom of the picture? That was achieved using a stencil and texture paste with a smidgeon of acrylic paint. I used a plastic palette knife to spread the mix through a stencil and let it dry.

Once this has dried you can use embossing powders to give a different colour but I liked this.

The centres of the flowers were created with glossy accents used as a glue for some small beads.

The final result....

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Collage Tag - Camouflage

There aren't many days when I get uninterrupted quality crafting time but yesterday was one of those days.  Ignoring the housework, I headed for the attic and spent an inky morning making a little tag.

I wanted very soft colours and opted for muted leaf greens and pale blues.  Then the layering began.

I used a combination of die cuts and punches to add texture and interest.  The stamp used was from Darkroom Door which is one of the very few images of women I have in my stamp stash and this needed a feminine touch!

Love those colours!

From this angle it looks like a crazy muddle...and because less isn't more I added buttons.

There are actually two tags, the top one was die cut was stuck on top of the other one which was left whole,  covered with a sheet of words and painted.  

The final tag.  The tricky thing with these sorts of deceptively simple projects is getting the right balance between layers, texture, depth and interest...and keeping the look uncluttered.

Mixed media page - Jar of Hearts

It's been an eventful couple of weeks - a bit of a rollercoaster with an ill puppy who was in animal hospital for 4 days while I was on a business trip to Germany and the burden falling on Himself who had to give up a planned trip to Snowdonia.   The good news is B. Dogg has recovered his energy and interest in the world although we still don't know the cause of his illness. So, crafting has been confined to doodling and sketching characters for use in future projects.  

One of those characters is this one collecting hearts in jars.  There's no deep meaning to this page.   I had roughly sketched the person and was wondering how to use it when a song came on the radio with lyrics including "jar of hearts".  The jars were easy to draw and cut out, hearts were cut from card and stuck in the middle of each jar which was then given a cover of glossy accents to make it look like glass.

The work trip to Germany was interesting because of the unusual hotel which hosted our conference. It's in northern German beside a busy autobahn but when you step inside, it's decked out like an Alpine ski lodge.  Much fun but the view from my room was of the exterior structure of the piste which was a bit gloomy.

 The magazines in the rooms were clearly targeted at sporty types so I ignored them.

And the view from inside the wooden clad restaurant was of the inside of the piste.  The staff wore traditional Bavarian costume and their friendly service was accompanied by booming ooom pah music.  If you like skiing, this is is the place for you!

Highland retreat artwork

On our recent break in the Highlands, we both managed to do some painting and drawing.  We have very different styles.  I can't draw so represent things rather than draw what I see while Himself can draw recognisable landscapes.  Sometimes I doodle which is what the mandala is - a round doodle using the colours of the hillsides we were surrounded by.  Muted oranges, heathers, olive greens and soft browns.  

Then I wanted to draw the hill across the loch but when I looked at it I couldn't work out the colours. They seemed to be blocks of colour so I drew that and painted them using my favourite distress pens.  I can only show you a section of that drawing for complicated reasons involving a new laptop a wonky cloud and my not being teckie enough to work out how to get my devices to talk to each other.

But maybe these photos will be enough to give you a flavour of how I went about (not) drawing my subject.  I can't draw foliage either so that was represented with leaves which I can draw.  Trees were turned into triangles on sticks and so on...
 

Perhaps drawing isn't about replicating exactly what the landscape looks like.  Perhaps it's the fun of representing how we see rather than what we see.  Not an original thought I know but one which was brought home to me by my attempt at a landscape!

And on the subject of not being very teckie,  our break gave me time to think about this blog and what I want to do with it.  I started with the idea that I'd try blogging for 6 months to see how I got on with it.  Four years later, I'm still here but in all that time  I haven't changed my blog layout since the first post and I never did properly work out how to use blogger and I never really shared my background as a craft teacher or that I had several projects published in magazines.  Someone recently said not only do I not blow my own trumpet, I don't tell anyone I have a trumpet.  

That's all going to change, oh yes indeedy.  Soon there will be an updated blog layout with links to my You Tube channel which is currently under construction.  The purpose of the channel is for high speed mixed media layouts which is where I've been focussing my creativity recently and I feel it's time I put something back, having benefitted from many fabulous You Tube tutorials and inspirations.  The blog will keep it's usual variety of craft subjects but I hope to be able to sort them all out a little better so new visitors don't have to scroll through too many dog pictures if they're here for baking or paper crafting!  I don't have a deadline in mind, it will just come as a nasty shock nice surprise sometime  :)

What's that?  You're here looking for a dog picture?  Oh ok...