A Video Tute (hopefully)

This maybe helpful especially if you have been following Tim Holtz 12 tags of Christmas. Some great ideas.

Heart Art

Here's a journal page I did yesterday. The journal itself is an address book that I picked up at the op shop awhile ago. It's a fairly modern book but with an oldy worldy look about it with quite nice script in it. I'm not usually a 'heart' person, but listening to the radio the other day I heard a line from a poem that struck a cord. It was written by a guy named Barry Dickens after suffering with terrible depression. He'd had such positive feedback from many listeners that he wrote a poem expressing his gratitude. I don't normally drive around in my car listening to poetry either, but I just happened to catch this particular programme and thankfully I've never suffered with depression. The quote is "the oddness of an extra heart".

I used a couple of different shades of acrylic green, smooshed and blobbed on, then blobbed and smooshed and wiped off yellow for the backbground. Some heart stamps around the edge and cut two hearts from different papers. The heart with the words has drizzles of glue with gold Fab Foil over the top. Edged the hearts with watercolour crayons.

Arty Girlz Challenge

Well I decided to join a challenge. It's the first time for me and I came across the Arty Girlz blog and their theme for the challenge was something you can display in your home. Well last Sunday I decided I would make some Christmas flags to hang across the window in our family room. I decorate the "kippers" lounge room with the Christmas tree and lots of little bits and bobs all around but tend not to do much with our lounge room. Seeing as we were having Christmas lunch here with my mum and sister and my inlaws I thought I would do something creative and the flags popped into my head.

It was a bit of rush job and I would have liked to add a lot more embelishments to them and poor old "Merry" didn't even get made, but I was reasonably pleased with the way they turned out.

Just chipboard covered in Christmas theme scrapbook paper, some chipboard letters painted in gold and silver then embossed with a cuttlebug folder. I pulled apart some old decorations that haven't been used in a few years and attached or glued them to the bottom of the flags and also edged them all with various patterned German scrap that I smudged with rub & buff.
So head on over to http://artygirlzchallengeblog.blogspot.com/ and have a look at some of the other participants.

I'm Pretty Jazzed

Well here she is.....my new car!!! Isn't she gorgeous? My brand new......brand new........did I tell you it's brand new? Honda Jazz. I picked it up yesterday afternoon and it's so good to drive. My most favourite part of the car is the icy cold air con, in the succint words of Andy ,"no boob sweat" for this girl this summer, but I love the power windows and I also love the central locking and all the gadgetry on the dashboard. It was a bit scary driving home especially along Leach Highway amongst all the huge semi trailers and then onto the freeway with all the peak hour afternoon traffic. I had my sister in law with me and if you knew her you would know what an excrutiating ride home it was for her. (she drives a zippy little mazda sports car and just between us......well think demerit points and loss of.....and a slight lead foot). I drove very slowly and very carefully and didn't get out of the left hand lane all the way home.

Ahhhh!!!!! The smell of a new car.

In the Pink

Not a colour I use all that much, but I had some paper I had torn out of an old, what looked like a computer programming book and it had all of these weird patterns in it, various colours from pinks and mauves through to oranges and greens and quite a few black and white. It was a book that I found at the local tip. Great treasures to be found there!!!

These are only small, about 10.5 cm x 15cm so they don't take very long to do. Unless you're like me and procrastinate and keep re-arranging and trying out various things on scrap paper. But that's the fun part I guess. I've been making a few Christmas tags as well just using cardstock, glimmer mist and fab foil, if they look ok I'll put them up tomorrow.

Russian Dolls and Clay figure ATC's

I've be making a few ATC's over the last couple of days, now I'm sort of retired I have a little bit more time to play.

The first two are some clay figures that I made with air dry clay and some moulds. I painted them with Folk Art Metallic Sequin Black, it's a great colour because it dries shiny, almost as if it's had a gloss varnish applied. I then smudged some gold rub and buff over the raised areas. The backgrounds are crumpled tissue paper with various colours of paint smudged over the raised areas and then edged with german scrap. It's a little hard to see the definition of the faces.

I came across some DCWV cardstock stacks that I forgot I had (lord knows what else I might find that I've forgotten about, tucked away in a cupboad somewhere) one of them called Far East, so I've used these papers to make these little "Russian Dolls"

This one I put several layers of UTEE clear embossing power over the body and then while still warm stamped the butterfly with black staz-on ink and left it until it had cooled then pulled the stamp off.

This one is mainly paper with a photo of me as the face and a metal embelishment that I painted black and glued to the body.

Here I've made another clay face, the wings are chipboard from the Collections range that I've painted and smudged with about ten different colours until I got the colour I liked. If I'd been able to scan these I think the colours would have looked a lot better, but because they have a bit of dimension (and don't scan well) I had to photograph them. Just can't seem get a good photo of them either. Using the macro always seems to leave them looking a bit convex, if that's the right word and I can never get them straight.

Photo Collage

I just did this today so thought I would add it to this post. It's a sheet of canvas sprayed with white webbing spray then spritzed with "graphite" Glimmer mist. Some images, transparencies, german scrap, corrugated cardboard stamp, and some rubons and some strips of scrapbook paper for her dress.

Nothing terribly exciting but I just wanted to try my hand at the Picasa photo collage (needs some work) . These are a few pages from some of my art journals and the the cover of one, also a snippet of the inchie canvas I did a few weeks ago. Not sure if you can click on the individual pictures for a larger view. I'm supposed to be making a few Christmas cards, but it's been such a long time since I made one that I think I've lost my card "mojo". I've got so many things started and not finished. Whenever I start something it seems to lead me to something else that I want to try so I tell myself that I'll get back to the original project once I've for instance, made a few clay pieces (my latest craze) so while they are drying I'll continue on, but while I'm making the clay bits and bobs something else pops into my head that might compliment the clay and I'm off on another tangent. Oh well I guess that's the nature of creating, one thing leads another and so it goes.

Just some photos

Just thought I'd post a couple of pictures that I took at the Trots last Friday night. It was Italian night so of course all things Italian including the colour of the fireworks, red, green and white. Colours don't show up that well especially with my little digital point and shoot.

This one is from my garden just after a shower of rain. Please note the rain drops.

and this one is of the bushland outside the old Remida recycling centre and I've mucked around with the Picasa effects buttons, looks cool !

"She Journal"

Over that last two months I've been doing an art journal class with the very talented and sweet Audrey. The journal was based on sayings from one of the Compendium books which is titled She......lots of quotes in it. Last night was my last class (some of the others are doing an additional 2 lessons). Audrey forgot to bring her camera so I said I would take some photos and put them on my blog for her. This is the front cover, transparencies, chipboard shapes, and some small charms tied to the binding. We made those last night. That Audrey.......she comes up with the most amazing ideas.

This one I call "Penis Head" for obvious reasons. We had a good laugh about it last night and I promise she will eventually have a lovely flower or butterfly applied over the offending appendage. After I had done the page, I sat back and looked and couldn't quite pinpoint what was wrong with it, until I looked closer and realised that what was in fact part of her head band, looked liked a penis. Yikes!!!!!!!

This page is not quite finished but I wanted to include some of the pages we did in class with Audrey. This consisted of heat embossing, glued down gauze and down one side of the silver heart will eventually be another quote from the book.

This is a photo of some graffiti on a building at the old Ramida recycling centre. The whole place is overed in it with thousands of discarded spray cans strewn all over the ground. Such mindless vandalism!

Another of the pages we did in class, although I had a bit of an accident with this page on the way home so I had to alter a couple of things on it.

I just like this page!

One of the quotes we tore from the book and smudged with gesso.

Photo copies of photos. Parts of them put through the cuttlebug embossing folders and then sanded back and smudged with stuff.
Thanks Audrey for sharing your creative ideas with us all .

Some of the charms we made and a beauftiful beaded charm that Audrey made for us all, these were attached to the binding with jump rings.

A Large Inchie Canvas

Kind of got a bit addicted to the inchies after the last small one I did, so I decided to attempt a larger one. This canvas is 30cm x30cm and has 81 inchies on it (well they're actually 1-1/4 inches). I thought it would take me ages to do but I just sat at my desk most evenings and made a few and the whole thing probably took about a week to finish. I salvaged the canvas from one of my many experiments that went horribly wrong and just painted it with black gesso and added a little jade green Rub & Buff around the edges. All the tiles are varying shades of green, it being my favourite colour. The colours don't show up all that well but you get the general idea.

Some close ups of the tiles.

I had to include John, Paul, George and Ringo to the mix. Such a huge part of my teenage years.

An addition to yesterdays post

They didn't really make me a cake. It was Chas' birthday and that look of utter bliss on my face?.....well it was the tail end of "happly birthday to YOOOOUUUUU!!!"

and I couldn't resist adding a few more shots of the blokes I used to work with.

After 19 years............

I'll never have to fill in one of these......

......or enter the data from one of these

......or sit at this desk

......or work with this motley crew.....Good grief!!!!
.......because I have RETIRED !!! After 19 long years in the same job, casual, full time, and permanent partime. What a strange feeling. I couldn't have picked a worse time either, what with world wide depression or recession (take your pick) looming , unemployment set to rise, job scarcity etc. etc. etc. But I'm not phased, I'll just keep the faith and let the universe work it out and drop some fantastic, interesting, worthwhile job in my lap. Too much to ask? And what did I do on my first day of retirement you may ask, vacuumed the whole house and washed the floors then right on the dot of 3 p.m when I would be leaving work, I awoke from a lovelly "seniors snooze" on the couch.