Wonder and Promise

It's my turn to post a project over at Country View Crafts Project Blog today.

Inspired by Tim's March tag I used his technique of adding gold textured embossing to the background and layered other elements over it.

When finished I added this to my collage and mixed media album.

The colours and dreams of dragonflies in the garden gives me the promise of some warm lazy days near a pond or our local canal and perhaps a picnic with the grandchildren. We are very lucky to have a very large park which we call The Lodge near us which backs onto the Basingstoke Canal and is perfect for walks on a lovely summer day.

There are more details at the CVC project blog if you would like to see them.

Have a wonderful weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx

Aaah, summer - that long anticipated stretch of lazy, lingering days, free of responsibility and rife with possibility. It's a time to hunt for insects, master handstands, practice swimming strokes, conquer trees, explore nooks and crannies, and make new friends.

Darell Hammond

Visual Journey #15

Welcome to the 15th edition of my Visual Journey and another collage spread using some of my favourite products and techniques. As always I wasn't too sure of where I was going but I thoroughly enjoyed the process.

The pages were painted with gesso and left to dry. Strips of papers were adhered across both pages. A marker was placed for the photo so as not to get texture underneath it.

Next gesso was applied through Tim's lattice stencil - NOTE TO SELF gesso can be too thin so although the first pass was ok, subsequent passes meant the gesso seeped underneath the stencil.. Let it dry and smear some matte medium in various places,

Using gathered twigs paint dabber with antique linen spray stain and a couple of pinkish glimmer mists, spray and let drip. Leave to dry then add some drops of Victorian velvet mister (home made). Place waxed paper between the pages and leave it to flatten and dry out under a box.

Gather some elements together for your collage, I used one of Tim's photo booth images, love these.

Ephemera, tissue tape and chit-chat stickers .........

... and a few more drips at the top of the page then out came the matte medium and a brush to go round all the areas that I wanted to create shadow. When dried I was able to use my distress markers  to outline shapes and create more depth.

Thanks to everyone who is joining me in this journey and to those of you who pop in regularly to see what I am creating and making.

I hope you will join me in this visual journey with any journal pages you make. Anything goes with whatever journal/sketchbook/ type activity is right for you. My Pinterest page explains it like this -
'Keeping a visual journal is a journey of experimentation; giving time to be free in expressing yourself and not constrained by others expectations. Practicing design, layouts, composition, colour mixing, techniques, materials, mixed media. Creating your own exercises, titles, mood boards, taking yourself out of the box, finding yourself. Bring new ideas to life, to spark you off in new directions, to allow your own imagination and creativity to develop in complete freedom'.

Thanks for joining me today

hugs Brenda xxx

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Photobooth and Butterfly

I hope you have had a wonderful Easter weekend so far, just one more day left of the long weekend, enjoy.

I have been experimenting with the Wendy Vecchi archival reinkers and blending solution to be able to roller them onto plain card-stock. It works really well, but a little flat. So I rollered some white gesso lightly over the top. When that was dry I dipped the card into some watery distress stains. At this point I was happy with the background.

The butterfly is from Tim's Butterfly Duo which is a die with an embossing folder to create the texture. I swiped it with some white acrylic paint before misting it and adding distress stains.

I used a small brown tag and dragged some gesso over it and dried it before using crackle paste through Tim's doily stencil. When that was dry I splodge on a little vintage photo distress stain and spritzed it with water so that it ran in all the nooks and crannies.

Gathering some other elements, I set about creating a collage with one of the new gorgeous photobooth photos.

The archival inks used are hydrangea, forget-me-not, cornflower archival blue reinkers and also played with adding some orange blossom, dandelion and carnation red straight from the pad onto the craft mat.

hugs Brenda xxx

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, 

because it is his natural characteristic, 

so the artist works.

Alma Gluck

Through the Looking Glasss

There's a new challenge at AVJ today from our fabulous Julia and oh boy I think you are gonna love this one. I certainly did, it sparked lots of ideas of things I wanted to use or incorporate in my project like cracked glass using embossing powders and altering a hand mirror but whilst collecting bits and pieces I found a frame that didn't have the back on it, only the glass was in place and I could see right through it. I love the work of an artist called Kristin Mcfarlane who uses glass to layer images but I couldn't find anywhere an explanation of how she does it but it still set me to thinking how I could use this frame for my project.

Having been playing with Tim's 3 x 4 snippets at the back of his newest paper stashes an idea began to emerge.

Having found the frame that had glass in it but no back to it (one of those keep for a rainy day items lol) I gave it a light coat of gesso leaving some of the wood exposed.

I added a piece from one of Wendy Vecchi's art parts set, gave that a coat of gesso and added walnut stain distress ink to it and the frame.

I then set about making an A34 again using Tim's smaller snippets of papers from various paper stacks, collecting some other ephemera to add to it or to the frame.

Once the A34 had been completed I went out and bought some transparent film to adhere it to the glass. I didn't want to use glue as I thought it would show too much even though it dries clear.

The arrow with the parcel post label was glued with glossy accents onto the outside of the glass.

Using a small text stamp from Tim's shabby french set I  stamped it randomly over the glass using black stazon.

I decided the ephemera I had collected for the frame wasn't working for me so I sorted out some other bits and being rusty they felt right at home. I played with some distress paints and alcohol ink on the wordband and taking Paula Cheney's idea from her Guest post last week, I suspended it across the bottom of the glass.

Lastly I was going to add some remnant rubs but decided they weren't actually needed, instead I added a rusty wire hanger so I can put it on the wall.

I'm really pleased with my interpretation of Julie's brilliant challenge theme title

Do you know the thinking and creating in my head time was probably two weeks but if I were to put another of these together I could do it in less than a day. It just shows that ideas and designing is a long slow process for me, but I hope you like the outcome.

I also hope you will pop over to A Vintage Journey to see all the amazing inspiration from our very talented team and hopefully it will give you the inspiration you need to join in. Don't forget you now have a whole month to get a project made and to take part and there is a £20 voucher for the winner.

Have a wonderful weekend.

hugs Brenda xxx

Visual Journey #14

As these pages began to emerge the one word that kept popping into my head was 'Contrasts', so thats what these pages have been called.

 

Using more of my scraps I glued strips of papers to the pages, stamped using black archival ink and then scraped white acrylic paint over making it quite thick in places. I left this to dry overnight.

The next morning I painted with babywipes adding phthalo blue and transparent yellow iron oxide DecoArt media fluid acrylics to give me my colour base.

I decided what images I wanted to use and this was where the contrasts seemed to come in with the lovely warm colours contrasted to the quite austere lady in the photograph and the very shabby butterfly.

I really do seem to have a theme of butterflies developing in this journal.

I still don't seem to be building any particular mixed media/collage style. I think my pages are all so very different.

Thanks for popping by today and if you are following my weekly Visual Journal posts I hope you are enjoying seeing my pages as much as I am enjoying making them.

If you are creating journal pages then please link them underneath this post and if you want to share everyone who links here with others around the world please collect this code and add to your post.

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hugs Brenda 

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Layered butterfly birthday card - use kraft card at CVC

I don't seem to make too many cards these day but there is always that special one needed at some point and this is one of those. My dear sister Chris had her birthday a couple of days ago and this is the card I made for her.

I started with a piece of Tim's correspondence papers cut to fit an 8 x 8 kraft card. I had just bought a tub of clear gesso for the first time and decided to experiment with it. (I am waiting to get my DecoArt products and want to try theirs too). This one is rather runny so I couldn't paste it through a mask with a palette knife so I daubed it through using a small piece of cut and dry to prevent seepage - it worked yay. I heat dried it and then lightly blended chipped sapphire distress ink over it and wipoed it over with a babywipe to clean the ink off of the gesso and heat dried it again. In fact I did this three times to get the depth of dark blue in the middle of the area and lighter tones at the edges.

I used the fabulous layered butterfly and embossing folder with kraft card .....

.... and die-cut a border and a mixed media piece from cream card.

The sentiment is a sizzix embossing folder run through the bigshot using coredinations paper and sanded ......

....and a collection of elements that I could see might fit the bill to complete the card. The metal embellishments I chose to use were daubed with picket fence distress paint. I chose the number three as it's the third month in the year March, which is Chrissie's birth month.

I took the butterfly and dipped it into picket fence, salty ocean and spun sugar distress paint, dried it and gave it a coat of rock candy crackle paint. When that was dry and the crackles were all showing I blended over with chipped sapphire distress ink and then edged it and daubed a couple of areas with gathered trigs distress stain and baked it in with the heat gun. Later, just before I added it to the card, I splattered it with white acrylic paint.

Now all I needed to do was assembly the card.

The pink shabby bow and charm ........

.... the hinge clip and pen nib .....

.... and the lovely painted butterfly.

I used the opportunity to make this my DT sample for the new challenge at Country View Crafts so I hope you will be able to pop over to see some wonderful inspiration in a variety of styles and also to note down the theme so you can enter this month.

Have a fabulous April.

hugs Brenda xxx

Tim tag for March 2015

I love the mixed media feel to Tim's tag this month and especially the gold contrasted with the gorgeous paints, but I found the effects really difficult to achieve. My embossing powder stuck to the background as well as the texture paste no matter how long I heat dried it - I think I shall try it again but leave the tag to dry overnight.. 

So, as is me, I played around and decided to dry the embossing paste and then use an embossing pen to add the ink and the gold powder. This gave me a completely different look but one that I really quite like.

You can also see I added some gold EP to the dragonfly wings and some remnant tubs to finish it off.

Thanks Tim for another fabulous opportunity to try something different but also a peek into your very inspiring creative mind.

Have a great weekend everyone.

hugs Brenda xxx

Visual Journey #13

Harmony and Symphony

Can you believe the thirteenth post for my Visual Journey means we are a quarter of the way through the year - it doesn't bear thinking about does it????

Today I have used black, white and kraft as my colour palette. It all came about when I decided to use some Tim stamps to create some extra large washi tape using a roll of sticky backed parcel tape. To provide some depth to it I painted in some of the shapes and parts of numbers with a white posca pen. I then stuck it across the pages adding a couple of words left from a project and workshop I did last year and some scraps of brown wrapping paper (there's a theme going on here isn't there?)

Over this I scraped some white acrylic paint using an old plastic card.

Next came some texture stamping using black archival ink so that it is permanent and wont react with any further layers I might add.

Using Wendy Vecchi's black texture paste and a stencil I added some writing and I used what was left on the stencil and palette knife with a babywipe to start adding black shadows. (I knew I could lighten this with white paint again later if I needed to).

I left these layers to thoroughly dry whilst I collected some collage scraps and embellishments for the next stage. Once I was away with gathering and gluing I forgot to take any more photos until it was finished. But I used scraps of designer papers, borders, snippets, washi tape etc and when it was all securely glued to the page I covered the gorgeous found relative photo and splattered some walnut crystal ink.

 I hope your week is going well and that you are getting some time to free journal.

If you are creating journal pages then please link them underneath this post and if you want to share everyone who links here with others around the world please collect this code and add to your post.

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hugs Brenda xxx

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