Booo...?

Just a quick share today of an art journal page I did inspired by the whimsical characters of Tim Burton and my Dreamweavers forest stencil.

I had bought this stencil two years ago and never used it....don't ask me why. Now I can't stop. There will be another project and tutorial on October 7th using this stencil and some more (selfmade ones using some of Tim Holtz' fabulous Halloween dies) , where I have taken the theme and background technique a bit further...but for now it is just a little share of a bit of spooky fun.

Obviously one of the little ghosts is scared....aw! Poor little guy!

You may already have spotted some of the dies I have used on this journal page....yes, they are the Sizzix Decorative Strip die "Halloween Shadows" (the two little dudes and the owl) and On the Edge die "Graveyard". In this case I made die cuts from white cardstock and drew on them with a fine tip black Faber Castell PITT artist pen before I glued them in place with matte medium.

The forest background was done by first covering the journal page with black and dark grey acrylic paint (which I applied with wide rough brush strokes) and later stencilling on some medium white, beige and orange paint with a stipple brush - creating the "space in between the trees" and the sun.  I also painted on some additional trees and the arch shape on top with a soft brush and black acrylic paint.

Once they were glued in place the tombstones' and ghosts' edges that face the sun's spot were given some shades of the same orange to help blend them in with the scenery (using a fine tip soft brush and diluted paint).

For a finishing touch I  stamped a quote onto a piece of grey-ish card with black archival ink, cut it out and glued it on with matte medium. Then I shaded around the outlines with a black soot Distress marker while the medium was still a bit tacky to the touch so I could smudge the drawn lines with my fingertip.

Hope you like it and are having a great Halloween-ish crafty time too!
Hugs,
Claudia xxx

"Create Art!" - a mixed media tag tutorial

Hi there and welcome back to another tutorial! This time I want to take you through a lot of steps by which I created this tag:

To make this tag I used:

- an old paper palette from your latest acrylic painting session full of yummy colour remains (you can of course use any "messy leftovers" from your creative work)
- DecoArt Traditions Acrylic Colours "Raw Umber" and "Quinacridone Gold"
- DecoArt Metallic Lustre
- DecoArt Americana Decou Page (matte or glossy)
- DecoArt One Step Crackle
- DecoArt Texture Crackle (colour of your choice)
- DecoArt stencil with words
- a bristle brush, a palette or similar, baby whipes, scissors, a carpet knife, four brads, some rough fabric ribbon, a rivet and a rivet setting tool and mat, a hammer, a punching needle, some rough cord


The main idea of this tag is to recycle some of your left overs from colouring or painting sessions. For example I love to use coated paper plates as palettes, when it comes to painting with acrylic colours. And I never throw them away as they look awesome, having a lot of colours and texture on them that I could not produce that way if I wanted to ;) .

I used a Sizzix die to cut the tag, but you can also use a ruler, pencil and scissors to cut your tag from the heavily colour coated "card palette". The image above shows one of my unused paper plates and the cut to size tag to the right.

Once you have prepared the tag you want to work on, you can start turning it into a piece of art on its own :)

1. Cover the tag with a coat of DecoArt Americana Decou-Page sealer and let dry.

2. Then give it a coat of DecoArt One Step Crackle. See to it that you do not apply the medium too evenly - the crackles get larger with increasing thickness of your layer. So I tried to vary the thickness of the coat to get various sizes of crackles on my tag.

Let dry and crackle.

3. In the meantime prepare the "imagine" plate (or whatever you choose as your word/s) that will be mounted to the tag's center. Use DecoArt Texture Crackle (no matter which colour, as we are going to cover the letters with acrylic colour anyway) and apply it generously through the stencil to a piece of cardstock with a palette knife. I used "Light Mocha" btw.

Be careful when removing the stencil to avoid smearing the edges! Your stencilled word should look like this now:

Let dry (or even speed up the process with the heat tool). Your crackled word will look like this afterwards:

4. In the meantime the crackling of your tag should be finished (do not try to speed this up with the heat tool as it will make the crackle medium create bubbles instead of crackles).

Use something (an old brush or a piece of cloth) to rub in some "Carbon black" DecoArt Traditions acrylic paint. Cover the whole tag with the colour and quickly whipe off the excess using baby whipes, before the colour dries. This will leave some dark colour in the creases and make them more visible.

If you happen to take off the colour from the crackles too, try to whipe using less pressure or change from baby whipes to telephone book pages (which take off the colour as they are slightly absorbant, but do not get into the creases).

See the black and orange "tool" to the upper left? I created a so called "tampon" as is used with printing techniques when it comes to rubbing the colour paste into the fine detailed etchings of copper plates for printing. I used an old T-Shirt and cut out a circle which I filled with some cotton and closed with a rubber band. It allows you to "massage" the colour into the creases and works much better than a brush.

When wiping off the colour excess be generous and change baby whipes quite often, as you will only be whiping the dark colour from one space to another as soon as your whipe has taken too much colour. I needed at least three baby whipes to get the colours of the tag being bright again.


5. Cut the stencilled word plate to size and distress the edges. Therefore use a carpet or crafters knife and scratch it along the edges of the card as shown in the picture:

This will roughen the card's edges, which is perfect for a distressed look.

6. Punch four holes into the plate as it will be fixed to the tag with four brads.

7. Cover the plate with a coat of DecoArt Traditions "Raw Umber". Try to stipple instead of stroking the paint on with the brush. Don't be afraid - the crackles will still be visible afterwards.

8. After this has dried, add some traces of "Quinacridone Gold" DecoArt Traditions with some spots of the plate, half painting half dry brushing it to the surface.

9. Afterwards give it a rub with DecoArt Metallic Lustre of your choice.

I made images of the single steps so you can see the development:

10. The tag needs a darker edge to get the focus centered. Use DecoArt Traditions "Raw Umber" and a bristle brush and stipple some of the colour around the edges, leaving traces of the brush visible.

The next image shows how the brush's bristles partially apply paint to the upper side of the tag, leaving traces of the single bristles, which creates some nice texture instead of an even outlined border.

11. Cut some rough ribbon to size. It should be at least five to six millimeters larger than the plate. We want the ribbon's fibres to make a kind of "frame" for the plate, to make it stand out from the background of the tag.

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Remove some of the outer fibres by pulling them one by one off the ribbon.

This will create a rough edge of the ribbon and also let some of the background show through. The rougher your ribbon, the easier:

12. Position your plate on the tag and poke four holes through it to insert the brads afterwards that will fix the plate and the ribbon to the tag.

13. I then wanted to insert a rivet and discovered that my tag's hole was too large.

I fixed that by cutting a small piece of card to size and punching a hole of the right size into it. I then glued that piece of card behind the tag's hole.

Now I could set the rivet without having it fall through the hole :)

14. Use some strings of rough cord to add it to the tag.

15. I then stamped some artistic words (using self-made stamps from funky foam (tutorial can be found here)) onto some card, cut them to size and added them to my tag.

Done! 

I hope you like it and will try some artist's tags from leftovers of your palettes too! Thank you for staying with me this far and happy crafting!

die amelie xx

Of course some close-ups as usual ;)

More mixed media tutorials from talented fellow crafters and artists can be found here.

More word stamps and a tag

As I showed in my previous post today, it is rather easy to create one's own word stamps by die cutting letters from funky foam and adhering them to wood blocks (Kappla blocks for example) with double sided duct tape.

This is the result with some additional word stamps I made today:

You can see the word stamp blocks in the corner. I used the Tim Holtz "Typeset" die this time for creating the stamps and the wonderful statement stamp from RedLead for the background (to the left).

I also stamped the white ribbon with IndigoBlu stamps using archival black ink from Ranger.

This time I only added red GlimmerMist to the black and white look of the tag to keep it clean and simple and not to draw attention from the main focus: the writing.

I am entering Creative Inspirations Paint Challenge with this tag.

Make Your Own Word Stamps!

I have to confess: I stole some Kappla bricks from my son's building bricks pile today (shame on me, I know ;)...but they were the perfect blocks to mount my letters on!

Yes, you heard me right: I built my own word stamps today. And it is absolutely easy peasy (and of course I am not the first to do this, but I wanted to share this with you anyway ;)...

All you will need are:

-double sided duct tape
-alphabet die/s and die cutting machine
-funky foam
-Kappla bricks (or any other solid block to mount your letters on)
-scissors


1. Choose your word

2. Cut the letters from funky foam using an alphabet die (I used the "Alphabetical" die from the Tim Holtz series for Sizzix).

3. Arrange the letters on your table until you are content with their appearance. Keep in mind that they have to fit in the size of one Kappla brick (which is quite narrow...but you can of course mount your words onto any other surface as long as your mounting block is solid, which is mandatory for stamping). I also thought about cutting old plastic rulers to pieces and use them as mounting blocks - which would provide full visibility of the space you stamp your word onto.

4. Apply some double-sided sticky tape onto the Kappla brick (press firmly)  and cut to size afterwards.

5. Pull off the foil of the sticky tape and press the brick with the sticky side onto your laid out word. Cool thing is: you don't have to lay your words mirror inverted!

This is what I came up with after playing around for a while:

"Bad Moon Rising"

According to the challenge from Haunted Design House, "Bad Moon Rising", I made this card, which I would like to enter.
I also enter this project to the challenge at Inspiration Avenue
"Doorways and Windows".

The "bad moon rising" topic immediately evoked a picture in my imagination, even the story of an unsuccessful poor writer, staying in a quite dangerous neighbourhood due to his latest mission for the newspaper he is working for... strange things have occured during the last days and his mind is filled with fear and worry. He yet cannot grab exactly what has been going on here lately, but he is sure and can feel it down to his bones: it is something profoundly evil....

I wanted to show his writing desk with his typewriter on, being lit by the light of a "bad moon rising". Some red stains (could this be blood?!!) on the pale white of the table tell a story of horror and crime. As I am a huge fan of Crime Noir Comic Art, I wanted to make it look a little like that genre. So I needed pure white on a black surface. White stamping, painting or embossing would not deliver the results I had in mind, so I decided to cut out the shapes of white and black cardstock.

But first I created the "sight" through the window, which was going to be the inside of the card and be seen through a cut out window on the front. I lightly sprayed some white card with Glimmer Mist "Moonlight" (how suitable *gg), then stamped the image of a skull with embossing ink from Ranger and embossed with clear embossing powder. Only now I started to ink a pale blue-greenish moon, using a circle mask I cut from card, using both, the circle and the "surrounding" as masks - one for the moon and the other for the dark sky, which I inked with a rougher kitchen sponge to get some texture with distress inks "pumice stone" , "broken china" and darker blue stamping colour. I finished the background with a layer of black stamping ink "clouds". Then I stamped the house from my beloved Martha Stewart Halloween stamp set, in "Graphite Black" archival ink from Tsunekiko. It should be a spooky house on a dangerous spooky cliff, but I had no stamp for this, so I cut out a cliff-shape from a foam rubber mat and used that for a stamp, which worked out better than I had expected. Some additional bat silhouettes in front of the bad moon - done!


On the front cover I did some embossing with clear embossing powder, which I love as a textureal effect especially on black or dark grey card! The white areas had to be planned very thoroughly to match the window opening and the position of the bad moon. I stamped the tipewriter onto white card and after having decided about it's exact position, I marked the lines of the shadows with pencil and ruler, to match the moon's position and the lit areas on the window cross. The tipewriter and "desk" was glued onto the black card in one piece. At last I added a black velvet self-adhesive ribbon on the inside of the card, because the back of the front looked quite boring and missed some texture, but not too much not to detract from the main scene on the right page.Voila!

Hope, you have enjoyed your visit!!!

Hugs, die amelie!