Color Your Day

 Hello!  The Altenew Journey continues, with a card from the "Color Your Day" course taught by Theresa Calvird.  This course was a lot of fun and I gained a lot of new ideas for my cards.  So...let's see if I interpreted her course properly.

To begin, I selected a color on my color chart - in this case, gold.  I wanted to see what would happen if I stamped a background with gold pigment ink and heat embossed with clear embossing powder.  Colors that were across from gold included blue.  I figured that would be great for some watercolor flowers.  What is it about watercolor and me in the second level?  I keep saying I am NOT a watercolorist, but my cards continue to be watercolored!  Honestly!!!  LOL

Anyway, I jumped in with both feet and heat embossed some rice paper using the Chocolate Flowers Background Stamp Set.  And I got some really cool freckles of gold.  It looked great.  But was it enough?  I decided to speckle the freckles with color and flicked splatters of maroon (pink), blue, and green onto my rice paper.  Now it looked more like somebody threw up confetti on the rice paper.  But I still kinda liked it.  So I forged onward and upward.

The next step was to do some creative stamping by using the Stamp Wheel exactly as intended - turning the wheel a few notches each time.  I used the Sunshine Bloom Stamp to stamp embossing ink in four corners.  For the next step, I heat embossed my flowers using Holographic Embossing Powder.  I wanted an almost invisible stamped area that would still hem in the watercolor that I intended to drop onto the stamped area.  The paper that I used was some Mixed Media paper rather than Watercolor paper - I wanted to see how it would hold up and it did just fine.  Once stamped and embossed, I began to watercolor my four flowers, dropping in some dark blue, light blue, a tiny bit of purple, and then some maroon for the centers of the flowers.  I dried the flowers between each color treatment.  And then I used the Sunshine Bloom Die to cut out my flowers.

And here is where I hit the first snag.  There is ALWAYS a snag in my card making.  Is anybody else like that?  The background that I had envisioned being so unusual (my puked confetti rice paper background) - just plain didn't work out at all!  So I raided my stash of papers, a flower in hand to see what went well, and settled on a beautiful dark pink paper for my panel.  I cut that to 5.25 x 4 inches.  After I cut the panel, I decided that I needed a sentiment.  So I thought - what if I emboss on the confetti paper!!!  That sounded like a fantastic idea.  So that is what I did.  Well, it stamped just great.  But the black glitter embossing powder swelled and grew upon heating, totally covering up the sentiment.  Total bust.  Ok...so I thought, what if I stamp on the confetti paper with black ink, no embossing.  and then, after I stamp, what if I glue that onto a white strip.  So that's what I did.  Not perfect, but on a super cold winter day (15 whoppin warm degrees), that's good enough to look at from a galloping horse. 

After I spent quite a while trying to get the edges of my sentiment equal distance from the stamping, I finally gave up on that and just glued it down with foam tape without a whole lot of thought.  In looking back, more jurisprudence in strategically placing the sentiment might have been better.  But it was stuck down, and I'd just have to arrange around it.  Design opportunities, huh~~~

Now that the sentiment was placed, I needed to add the flowers.  I had four flowers, but things look better in odd quantities.  How could I NOT have remembered that and just gone ahead and stamped 5 flowers?!?!?  Well, I quite obviously didn't remember, so I fiddled with three of the flowers and finally got a placement that pleased me.  Then I took the 4th flower and - OH NO!!!  OH YES, I did it!!!  I cut it in half.  My thought had been to place it on either side of the sentiment.  But that did not work out near as well as I had thought it might.  So I set those pieces aside and began blinging the panel up with gemstones.  Ad then I picked up those flower parts again and tried them on the sides of the panel and glued them down.  And blinged some more.  Now I have bling on the desk, bling on my clothes, and even bling in my hair!  Those gemstone dots fly everywhere!!!

Now came the time to take photos of my card.  I never can remember (as you guys well know!) to take pictures during the making of my cards.  Anyway, I retrieved my card from my desk and headed to the living room to take a picture.  And my eyes fell on the sentiment strip.  Can I just say that I HATED that sentiment strip?  

So I brought the card back to the design table, stamped the same sentiment onto cardstock, trimmed it out, and glued it down.  And then saw white edging all around.  Nothing to do but to pull that strip up and use my great ol' big black marker to edge blend all four sides of the sentiment strip.  And then I glued that sucka DOWN!  Better?  Maybe...it still looks like somebody puked up confetti.  But at least the words don't get lost.  Bawhawhawhawhaw!!!

Here is my finished card - I sure hope that you like it.  I thought that, overall, and design disasters not withstanding, it turned out pretty good!  And if you would like to see the video of how I made this card, minus the last minute changes, here is the link:  https://youtu.be/HwPCOFKF39o   Thanks for taking a look!!!

Do I need some splatters?  Maybe I need some spatters...whaddya think - do I need some splatters?  I dunno.  I might need some splatters.  I'll ruminate upon that for a while and come back to it.

Books…

 Books!  Oh, the siren call of books to my heart.  I have spent a lifetime being in love with books.  To this day, I still remember the day that the printed symbols on the pages of my first grade “See Spot Run” book began to make sense to me.  It was a Sunday afternoon and everybody at my house was taking a nap except for me.  When I realized that I was actually READING, I woke my mother and father up and read the entire book to them.  An entire world opened up to me when I learned to read,  And I have never stopped reading!

Not only do I love reading, but I love making books.  I love the process, the choosing of the papers, the stitching, gluing, folding, decorating.  I love collecting papers, creating backgrounds, painting pages, stamping pages.  Stickers, laces, Washi, strings, threads, yarns, all the tactile things that go into the making of a book.  I love planners, notebooks, big books, little books, tiny books, notepads.  Books that fold, books that turn from the top, from the side, that flip, books with pockets, tucks, waterfalls, books that house tiny scratchpads.  Books that I can write in, books that I can read, books I can draw in, books I can paint in, books that I can store items in.  In short, I LOVE BOOKS!  

Altenew's Beautiful Details Course

 Hello!!!  Thanks for following along on my Altenew Certification Journey!  This has been the most fun and I do so enjoy trying new things!  This week, I have been focusing on the Beautiful Details Course taught by Marika Rahtu.  And all that I can say is, "WOW!!!  What an artist she is!!!"  There is no hope of my ever being able to come anywhere close to creating the beauty that she is able to create.  BUT...my assignment is to try my hand at the techniques she demonstrates, not to duplicate her cards.  Challenge accepted!

So I set out with an idea for a card format that I saw Natasha Foote demonstrate on YouTube.  It is called a Column Card.  I thought that it was unusual and of course that made me gravitate right toward it.  LOL!  Not only is the format unusual, but it was a lot of fun to create.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First I needed to create the focal points of my card.  I selected the Happy Flowers stamp and die set and the Stunning Cosmos stamp and die set.  Using Lisa Horton's Cloud 9 Silver Shine Metallic Pigment Ink, I stamped the background and detail portions of the Happy Flower stamps and the detail of the Stunning Cosmos stamps.  Then I took my Poetique watercolor brush pens and my colored pencils and attempted to give some depth and dimension to these images.

Considering the design of this card, I needed to create a sentiment, so I stamped and embossed a neat message using Ranger's Black Sparkle embossing powder.  Then I used Tumbled Glass Distress Oxide, Mermaid Lagoon Distress Ink, and Teal Tempest Fresh Dye Ink to make the sentiment emblem stand out from the white background of the card.  This area gave me a little workout because I didn't think I would ever get it to where I felt like it fit with the blue panels of the rest of the card!  But I kept on blending until I finally reached a point where I felt that the sentiment emblem complimented the focal points of the card.  Then I decided that the emblem still needed some bling factor, so I glued tiny holographic stars all around the sentiment.

Still working on the inside card panel, I took two of the Stunning Cosmos blooms that I had colored and strategically placed them along the right-hand bottom portion of the card panel.  Then I added glue to the centers of the blooms and sprinkled Diamond Dust on them for more bling.  And then I ran a bead of blue along the third Cosmos bloom, dipped it into the jar of Diamond Dust, and then glued it to the panel as well.

At last it was time to consider the "Column" portion of the card.  I played around with my Happy Flower images until I thought that the arrangement worked and glued down the top and bottom flowers.  Then I popped up the center bloom and tucked leaves in as well.  For the final step, I added Diamond Dust to the center of all three flowers.

This card will fold flat for mailing, and then when the recipient opens the envelope, the card can be made to stand up for display!  I thought that was really neat, since I am a HUGE fan of overloading my desk area - no way you didn't know that!!!  So...That is how I made the card for the Beautiful Details class.  Thanks for taking a look!!

Art Journaling

 Art journaling is one of my “mostest” favorite things to do!  And I especially like small spreads.  A small spread means that I can spend as much or as little time as I want and still walk away pleased with my work.  And that is what is important in art journaling - for you to be pleased with your efforts.

Late in the fall, I made a small art journal using Kraft Tex and then I painted and stenciled it.  And I love this little journal.  It just feels good when you pick it up - almost as if it gives a little sigh of happiness in anticipation of being opened.  And of course, if you to pick it up, there’s no question but that you are going to open it.  Sometimes I open it and flip through the pages, looking at what I’ve created; other times. I imagine what will be created next; still other times, I actually open the book and begin the process of creating a page or spread.  I usually like to create pages that compliment each other as they are opened side by side.  Not quite a “spread” in the traditional sense, but just almost.

Today, my little journal was calling to me, so I opened it and began to do some ink blending while watching a YouTube video.  And I guess that I have totally ruined all of my inks, because in that video, I learned that you should never use the same blending tools for regular inks and oxide inks.  EEEK!!!  Well, guess I will just keep using my ruined, contaminated inks because I have no way of knowing which ones have been double dipped and which ones have not!

Anyway, I had just gotten some Anna Griffin journaling card dies, and decided to try them out - just playing, ya know - and I decided to bring out the embossed portions of the cards by rubbing some ink over the raised portions of the cards.  I wasn’t planning to use a journal card on my pages - nope, I had other plans for the pages.  I was just playing for the sake of playing.  But then…well, as they sometimes do, my plans changed.  So I glued my focal points down on the right-hand page (flowers that were left over from an Altenew class) and the left-hand page was screaming for one of the journal cards!  

But what to journal?  It is winter here and the scenery is stark, bleak, grey, and very cold.  I looked again at my flowers.  And I thought about the crocus bulbs my mom has on her kitchen table.  Years ago, I planted crocus bulbs all over my yard and they came up and bloomed just before a big snow.  There was my journaling script!

So very quickly my pages came to life.  I did a little doodling on the pages, and may end up doing more, but for now, I am through.  Looking at what I have created gives me such joy - a priceless sense of happiness.  And the look of the burgeoning pages of my little journal give me a wonderful sense of satisfaction that lets me know the day has not been wasted!

Polychromatic Cardmaking Class - Altenew

 Hello!  Today I have been working on a card for the Polychromatic Cardmaking Class portion of the Altenew Level 2 Courses.  I had a lot of fun experimenting with using my Altenew watercolor markers on embossed watercolor paper!  Here - let me tell you about it!  Come on in...

First, I selected a stamp and die set that had stamp layers.  I felt like this would work best for what was in my brain for this card.  So I chose the Garden Treasure stamp and die set and used the stamp portion that outlined the flower.  At first, my thought was to use clear embossing powder over Versafine Clear Embossing Ink.  But that didn't really stand out quite the way that I had expected it to, so I then tried Lisa Horton Crafts Cloud 9 Silver Shine Metallic Pigment Ink and the clear embossing powders.  This gave me a very delicate floral shape to enhance with my watercolor brushes.

I actually ended up embossing these flowers twice to get the result that I wanted, which was just a hint of embossed silver, but also just enough to give me a margin of resist for the water-coloring process.  Originally, I had 4 flowers, but ended up using only 2 for the card.

Now that I had the embossed flowers, it was time to use my Altenew watercolor brush markers.  Now, I am NOT a watercolorist, as I have said many times before.  That title belongs to my mother, who is a fantastic artist.  So I planned to put the colors onto my glass mat and then paint them onto my floral embossed canvas.  However, I decided to "Be Brave" and see what happened, so I actually wet the canvas with water, and then allowed color to drop from my brushes onto the wet cardstock.  And the results were quite surprising.  See, I had attempted to use these brushes when my mother was in the hospital (I can't sit there for hours without something to do!) but I ended up with huge blobs of color and no design.  So this was a real happy surprise to me!

Once I had my blooms colored, it was time to dry them so that I could go in with more color in order to make them "polychromatic."  So, I used my trusty heat gun and then went in with more colors.  After die-cutting, I had to decide which of the 4 blooms I wanted to use and finally settled on blue and teal.  I think that the blue blossom was more successful than the teal blossom, but I do love them both.  Not really sure if they qualify as Polychromatic, though.  But there is a graduation in color, of sorts, so I am hopeful.

Time to create a background on which to place my lovely little blooms.  I decided to use another piece of watercolor cardstock and wet it completely with water.  Then I sprayed with three Tim Holtz Distress Spritz sprays - Picked Raspberry, Tumbled Glass, and Peacock Feathers.  After drying with the heat gun, I went back in with Peacock Feathers and Picked Raspberry to add more oomph.  (Y'all understand "Oomph," right?)  Then I hit it with some Sheer Shimmer Sparkle spray and topped it off with hair spray to keep the mica from rubbing off.  

After deciding how to place my blooms, I used foam tape to pop them up on the card.  And then I embossed a sentiment with Black Sparkle Embossing Powder on a scrap of the background and popped that up with foam tape as well.  After adhering the panel to a silver panel, I glued everything to a white card base.  And with that, my Polychromatic Card was finished.

I continually forget to take photos during the making of my cards, but there will be a YouTube video uploaded later tonight just in case you want to see just how this card was made.  It can be found at www.youtube.com/@Jenniferatcreativeartapark - and here are some photos of the finished card:

Thank you for visiting - please consider leaving a comment and following my little blog.  I do greatly appreciate it!!

Creative Watercolor Media

New Year, new course submission, with me kicking and screaming all the way!  LOL!  Read on to find out why!

The Altenew Level 2 course that I have been watching for a couple of months now is entitled “Creative Watercolor Media.”  Oh My, the beautiful cards that have been made in this course!  Talk about eye candy!!  Totally stopped me in my tracks.  We’re talking frozen, here.  I am most definitely NOT a watercolorist.  Now my mother is, but sadly, I must have been hiding when they passed out true talent.  So I have really been stymied about jumping in and getting this module finished.  So on December 31, 2024, I finally said, “Enough is enough,” and stumped off into my studio to wrap this class up.  Now, 3 days later, here we are, slogging through a blog, so to speak.  I have created no less than 4 cards for this course.  Yes, 4!  I guess we better get started…

Card 1, which was actually the last card that I made, is probably the one I like the most.  For this card, I used the Library Blooms stamp and die set.  Stamping onto rice paper and embossing was an experiment that turned out surprisingly well.  By using VersaFine Clair Nocturne and then embossing with clear embossing powder, I managed to create an eye popping image on the rice paper.  And painting the rice paper was much easier than I expected.  I used the “smoosh” technique with ink pads on my glass mat.  Simon Hurley’s Grr, Remember Me, and Clear Skies, VersaFine Clair’s Nocturne and Sand Dune, and Tim Holtz’ Lucky Clover Distress Ink, lightly mixed with water, added color to my “canvas.”

Then I used Tim Holtz’ Speckled Egg Dixtress Oxide to ink blend the edges of a white card panel, but left the center white so that the stamped image would shine through.  After ripping the edges of the rice paper in order to fit it onto my panel, I used a glue stick to affix it to the panel.  Then I glued the panel to a card base and there you have it…

Now let’s take a look at the first two cards I created for this course.  Both were created using the Quaint Blooms stamp set.  The card with the pink panel was heat embossed with rose gold embossing powder.  It didn’t shine like I thought it should have, so I ran it through my MINC foiling machine with gold foil.  Doing this caused my watercolor paper to be less absorbent and the re-inkers that I used to paint the image did not flow like I thought they should.  And when I tested the fussy-cut image on the panel, it lacked pizazz, so I decided to splatter the card panel before adhering the flowers.

The second card of this duo was also heat embossed on watercolor paper, but this time I used black sparkle embossing powder.  I painted it using the same Simon Hurley reinkers as the one above, but opted not to fussy cut this image.

And the third card I actually made is featured last in my little litany.  Here, I used the Literary Blooms stamp to emboss my image with the black sparkle embossing powder onto watercolor paper.  Next, I used Tim Holtz Distress Spritz Sprays to paint the stamped image.  After the sprays dried, I “fixed” the glittery look by setting the sprays with hairspray.  Then I ran the image through my die cutting machine.  Next came a HUGE dilemma…I would either need to CUT my image or - GASP - use a different card size!  I decided to CUT!  So I chopped and hacked and trimmed away my image, slapped it onto a silver panel using foam tape, and called it done.  This card was actually “finished” last, but the focal point created third.  Could it be that it’s late, I’ve spend three days working on these cards, and am getting just a little cranky?  Well, I did warn you that I am not overly fond of water coloring!  So…which of the four cards do YOU like best?

 

The Artists We Admire and How They Influence Our Work

 Have you ever wondered about the influences other artists have on your own work?  Those artists that you admire and WISH you could be more like?  Is that something to strive for, something unattainable, or something to shy away from?  And how do we strike a happy medium between these three?

As for myself, I have a rather long list of artists that I admire for one reason or another.  Some, I admire for their ability to blend color; others, I admire for their ability to create a scene; still others, I admire for the sheer volume of their work and the beauty of it.  And there are others whose work is so free and happy that I really want to find that same joy peeking out of my own work, just because it brings such happiness.  

One lesson that I learned is that as artists, we MUST find our own artistic voice.  This can be difficult, especially if we are lucky enough to attend a retreat where classes are taught by someone we admire.  It is wonderful to learn new techniques, but I want to be my OWN voice, not a mini replica of so and so whose name and works are so easily recognizable in the mixed media and/or card world.  It took a while for that to filter through all the information that I gained during the retreat that I attended.  Most likely it took about 5 or 6 months for me to realize that, as much as I admired that artist, I was never going to be happy if all I attempted to do was to create art that SHE would like.  I need to create art that I like!

And that, my friends, is the bottom line.  As artists, we are driven to create - it isn't something that we just randomly "choose" to do.  We are drawn to the chaos of inks, paints, glues, papers, dies, stamps, brushes - the list is inexhaustible!  It is almost as if we are nothing if we do not create.  But the single most important thing to remember is that we MUST be true to ourselves and our own individual art.  As the great bard himself, William Shakespeare, said, "To thine own self be true" is the creed we all, as artists, should follow.