It's Tag Friday at AVJ

It's Tag Friday at A Vintage Journey with an opportunity to create just for fun, that means no theme, no challenge requirements, just pure unadulterated play time. As I have been very focussed on workshop projects as well as DT samples this gave me time to go back to my roots with a vintage collage feel but also to add in some mixed media.

I started by gluing some of Tim's papers to a tag with matte medium and when it was dry I attacked it with the sewing machine.

To add to the layers I scraped over some gesso, dried it and then sprayed with antique linen, iced spruce and pumice stone distress sprays, but as we know gesso and distress inks don't like each other and although I sat drying the inks for a long while they remained wet in places so I decided to leave it overnight to see what happened. It still didn't fully dry so I dabbed it with kitchen roll to take any excess ink off and then sprayed it with DecoArt Americana matte spray and hey presto it worked and I just loved the effects.

 I next set about gathering papers and a photo booth pic to put together to get a vintage collage focus .....

.... and some other small elements to add to the collection.....

.... and with one of the small talk stickers it all went together beautifully.

Do pop over to the AVJ post today to see the variety of tags on show, it's a fabulous collection of styles and talent.

Have a wonderful weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx

Page 2 for Journaling Recipe 1

We had an amazing day at Pickwell farm on Saturday with 12 lovely ladies who came to see what my recipes for journalling are all about - in fact they enjoyed it so much we have put a date in for June to do recipes 3 and 4. How cool is that?

So today I thought I would show you some of the photos of finished pages done by the participants and also my page 2 using exactly the same recipe as the first pages I created which you can see HERE. Would you believe exactly the same steps but different choices for each one = deeper colours and a more vintage feel to it.

And these are some of the participants finished pages from the morning session - sadly not all of the photos were sharp enough to use but this certainly gives a flavour of their work and I was astounded at the fabulous outcomes. Well done everyone.

Thanks for stopping by today and taking a peek at what I have been up to.

I'll be back Friday with an AVJ Tag Friday sample.

hugs Brenda xxx

Be inspird by bottles #2

HI Everyone. I hope you've had a lovely weekend. Today I am sharing a mixed media board as my second make for my 'be inspired by bottles' challenge at Country View Challenges. 

I really got into the background layers starting with my 'Layered Shapes' technique that I taught at the CVC workshop a week or so ago.

This is how the board looked after I had glued on the die-cuts and then covered it all with gesso.......

 ..... and this is how it looked when I thought I had finished it (if you take a look at the finished photo you will see some changes). Using mainly DecoArt media fluid acrylic paints I added layers of colours and a spritz of the white media shimmer mister.......

......  finishing with some distress inks and then another shimmer mister spritz. 

The bottles were die-cut from chipboard (greyboard) and given a coat of white gesso. From there I used mask and peel, black modelling paste with a stencil, paints and metallic lustre to get these final effects

I also found photos I could use on the blocks and punched them out.

I had fun putting it all together adding some rusted elements and ribbon and also practising my asemic writing. I have collected examples and written a description of what it is on my Pinterest page.

 

I continued to add little splashes of colour with a brush a tiny amount of titanium white on a brayer and shading with both paint and distress markers until I was happy with it. I really didn't know when to finish on this one, I could have gone on forever I think.

 

If you haven't yet visited the challenge do pop over and see all the inspirational ways the team have come up to show you how to have a go at this theme.

Do pop back Friday when I will be sharing some photos from my Journalling day at Pickwell farm on Saturday - what a great day we had with some fabulous results.

Enjoy your week.

hugs Brenda xxx

Journaling Recipe 1

Happy Friday everyone, the weekend starts here - yay. I really looking forward to tomorrow when I am teaching two of my 'Recipes for Success', so of course I can't share them with you but I thought I would share some photos of what the group will see and from the process steps I created, I can't wait to see how they achieve their own versions. These two pages use mostly products from the DecoArt media range which are sold at Pickwell Farm.

If you look into the depths of the layers you can see some music paper, text paper and washi tapes.....

.... and more into the middle layers some stamping and stencilling ......

..... and then on the surface you can see I used paints, pens and gesso.

I know for me I often get 'caught' in the twilight zone, not sure what to do or how to start something and recipes can often help kick start me and invite Mr Mojo to return. Often I will only do the first two or three steps and once I have sparked the creative light inside me I don't need them any more I just take myself off into lots of different directions and follow my muse.

I have a second of my own recipe 1 versions to share with you soon and it is completely different, so ........

..... until the next time happy creating.

hugs Brenda xxx

Texture Boards at CVC workshop

Hi All, what a busy time I had last week, two full day workshops and all the prep that goes with it, but both were amazing days.

I love making, creating and teaching and this workshop for Country View Crafts was great fun with 12 lovely ladies, 11 of whom I already knew and one I felt I knew as she is a friend of a friend.

This is the texture board I created using the fabulous DecoArt fluid acrylic paints and their mediums along with some embossing powders. The wonderful Di at Tando Creative made up the small and large boards especially for us as a kit and they woked beautifully. Thank you Di.

There are nine individual boards each with a different and unique texture technique that can be used in mixed media project work.

1. Stamped Texture Paste.  2. Stencilled Crackle.  3. Textured Collage.

 4. Rusted Enamel.  5. Weathered White.  6. Crinkled Highlights.

7. Layered Shapes.  8. Subtle layered shapes.  9. Textured wallpaper

There are lots more photos over on the CVC project blog today including those of the lovely workshop attendees and some of their samples.

I hope you have a good week, we had a touch of snow yesterday; sadly it didn't last long, but we're in our first bite of winter and it's still very cold out. Stay safe and warm wherever you are.

hugs Brenda xxx

Watercolour playtime

Well my poor blog has been so neglected and at last I've had time to have a little play. I have other workshop things to be shown but I can't put them up until a little later.

These little postcards are the experiments of playing with brushos, bisters that my sister bought me for Christmas, watercolours and stamps.

 

The background was started first using distress inks before stamping this gorgeous bee by Wendy Vecchi which was stamped twice, once with sandstone brusho and again over the top with black archival which helped to get me a watercolour shadow. Water was used to be;each out some of the colour in the wings and watercolours painted in. Bisters were add and spritzed over the background and the hexagons stamped (also Wendy's) to finish it off.

 

The leaf gave me quite a bit of a headache. It's one of Tim's blueprint stamps which I masked and stamped over with another of Tim's old stamps to create a background, but it was far too busy and the leaf was completely lost. But I added brushos and bisters and spritzed to get the watercolour background, then using water bleached some of it out around the leaf trying to make it come to the front and show up more. It didn't!! After a while I took my watercolours and painted white around the edges and let it dry, this was beginning to look better and I repeated the process about 3 times. Now the leaf pops out more and the background looks quite misty and ethereal. Yep I am quite happy with that.

This last one is one of Tim's landscape stamps and you can guess where (even if the main buildings are all in the wrong place lol). Again I used the brushos and bisters to get the watery looking background and used bleach spray to create the clouds and to take out some colour from the buildings, painting them back in using the powders. I used just a little grey on the clouds.

Although I studied three years of oil painting at college I am not a watercolour artist, but the powders help create those lovely indistinct backgrounds and can be manipulated and changed. I just enjoy the processes which is the main thing.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx

Bottle shrine for CVC

Little houses seem to be all the rage at the moment so I thought I would make my own little bottle shrine for the Country View Crafts Project blog and to fit with the new Country View Challenge for January. 

 

 Once I started I was reminded of the fabulous make that Tracy sent me for my Secret Santa gift. 

Details can be found at the Country View Crafts Project blog.

Thanks for stopping by today.

hugs Brenda xxx

A new year challenge at CVC

This is my second post for today so if you missed my new year's greeting and project for the new challenge at A Vintage Journey please take a look Here.

Our new theme at Country View Challenges was chosen by me and is -

Be inspired by Bottles.

I created a table decoration for my New Year's Eve party.

 

Life began as an old glass Starbucks caramel syrup bottle and I gave it a coat of matte medium glue and when dry a coat of rustic DecoArt chalky finish paint.

I added die-cuts and Tim Holtz industrious sticker borders ......

.... and then a coat of DecoArt black gesso.

Over this I dabbed DecoArt media gold acrylic paint and because it was too bright I dripped over prussian blue, but I couldn't achieve the effects I wanted so I ended up dabbing over a coat of black.

To give me the metallic effects back over the top of the black paint I brushed over treasure gold and treasure pewter and the patterns and raised areas came back to life.

To add just a little more zest I used a fine paintbrush with the gold acrylic and dry brushed the stars and the 2016 die-cuts.

Knowing that I wanted to use this as my New Years Eve party table decoration I used Tim's snowflake rosette die with silver, gold and glitter card making double snowflakes to go back to back over BBQ sticks.

After I had added some gold Christmas twigs with baubles on and set it on the table ......

 ..... it reminded me of fireworks and looked lovely once the party arrived and we had the Christmas lights on and candles lit.

Thanks for joining me for a second time today and over 2015, I have really appreciated you visits, comments and continuing support. If you are wondering if I have a new years resolution? I have just one  --------  and that is to try and get over to your blogs more often than I have this year. I'm looking forward to seeing you soon. And to those of you who follow me by email - thank you for taking the time to pop in and see what I have been creating and making. I regularly look on Blogger stats to see my page views and am staggered that I get between 300 and 700 page-views a day. That just blows my mind.

Wishing you peace, joy and happiness for 2016.

hugs Brenda xxxx