GPP Street Team Crusade no.55

Here was another fun challenge set by Michelle Ward and here I am snucking in at the last minute!  Well I have hardly had a minute to do art with all the comings and goings here but a little bit of time on my own tonight has made it all possible.  I started with some cardstock and a starfish stamp.

Then I chose my colours - my favourite teal and a lovely sunshiney yellow - can you believe we have been having temperatures of 29 degrees (87 F) here in London this week?!!  Hotter than it has been for 100 years and hotter than Mexico apparently!!

So a variety of printing takes place, teal on teal, yellow on teal

yellow and teal make green!

At this point I got a bit bored and decided to add a raspberry to the proceedings!

 And I liked it a lot!

And you can really see the texture of the stamp here

A fun and speedy challenge and a great way to get back into art-making.  Thank you again Michelle - you are amazing!

GPP Street Team - creative challenge - home

I have been so busy with work and other things that I have seriously neglected this little blog and seriously missed these challenges!  This was a fun opportunity to document creatively all the places I have lived so here is a glimpse at what I did:

Some gesso prepped pages followed by teal and gold acyrilic paint and some circles printed with an old cotton reel.  Then some spray paint over a stencil or two in a different colour, followed by some tea-dyed tags which not only have the number on the front of each house I've lived in but also a little writing on the back to remember why we moved!!!  They are stuck on with a little orange washi tape from Japan - really love this stuff!

Thanks again, Michelle, for a great challenge.

GPPS Street Challenge No. 48 Been there, done that.

As soon as I saw this month's challenge from Michelle Ward for the GPPS Street Challenge I knew what I would do.  However actually getting some time to do it was another matter as it's been a busy month with time away from home at board meetings and conferences.  But I REALLY wanted to do it.  So yesterday, amidst packing the case for yet another conference (this time one I am running  for 2 days plus an optional retreat), I just got the paint, gel medium, stencils and pictures together and went for it!

This marks a really fun day I spent with daughter no.4 when she came home for Christmas part way through her year on placement with designers.  She was working for Lanvin in Paris but has a real interest in Yoji Yammamoto and Issey Miyake as well as Maison Martin Marjeila who all do very interesting things with shapes and fabrics.  There were two exhibitions we went to. One at the Royal Academy on Art, Fashion and Identity where we saw Alexander McQueen's famous red lace dress (sorry no photos could be taken!) and then on to the Barbican to see the Japansese Fashion exhibition.  Both were fantastic with lots to see, be inspired by and thought provoking.  In between the two exhibitions, we headed off to Dover Street Market and into the Rose Bakery for a spot of lunch - one of the their special quiches with salad and some delicious jasmine tea.  Best of all it was time spent with a lovely young woman who is full of creative ideas and who I love very much!

Just some info on what I did to the pages of my journal: I painted the two pages in acylic paint (one red and one black) and then stencilled over some white paint in places.  I made a pocket with red carpet tape, to put some more little photos from the brochure in, and secured the cut outs and pictures with gel medium.  Note to self - don't put gel medium all over the page if you want to write on it afterwards, which I did!!!  I tried to write with both a white and a black pen but  it didn't really work too well.  I think I will add some more journalling probably on other paper and stick it in unless anyone has any other thoughts?  Ok, must finish the packing and start concentrating on the day job!!

GPPS Street Challenge No. 47 It's a Wrap!

Another great challenge from Michelle Ward over at the GPP Street Team, this time all about using some of the wrapping and ribbons we used at Christmas to make a journal page.  So here is mine.  I started out by gessoing the pages as the paper in this journal is quite thin.  Then I added some gold acrylic paint which I love.  I really wanted to do something with doors opening so cut my different sheets of paper up into door shapes and added ribbon for handles.  I tend to use tissue wrap for gifts at Christmas and then add showy ribbon in red or gold.  Inside the doors I wrote about each daughter who came home for Christmas - three from overseas so it is fun to record a little of what was going on for us this year.

The second page has a little wrapped parcel at the top (I did many parcels with white tissue paper and this red glittery ribbon) and a fun cellophane poinsettia bag (cut for the purposes of the journal) which I used to put homebaked oat and spice cookies for the postman, the milkman and the vegetable delivery guy plus anyone else who I thought might like them!!!!  

Inside the bag I put two tags similar to those I used for some parcels and then on the back I made some notes of the recipes I used this year for my turkey and vegetables etc., and I added some other shop bought parcels I used too.  It will be a fun memory - thank you Michelle as always for these prompts.  I especially need the deadline too!!!

GPPS Street Challenge No. 45!

Another street team challenge , this time to use a background which has been prepared earlier so here we have two layer-painted pages.

fairly uninteresting as they stand but layered using credit card and acrylic paint

time to brighten it up a little with some spray gold paint and some stencils and a little metallic rub on along the sides and a hint of script stamping

I wanted to use tags so thought I would use three and put some messages on the back

I used distressed ink in a variety of colours on the front of each with a theme of yellow/orange/red and a bit of green

I loved seeing Michelle's hand print - such a personal message, so I cut a stencil of my hand and sprayed black copper paint (crafty notions) over it (I nearly didn't as it looked so dark in the bottle and I thought I might spoil it all but it's all about taking a small risk here and there and going with the flow.  The inner critic would have me cautious and careful but this is so much more fun)

And I love the result!

So to the next page (base colours purple, black and white) I added a stencil made up from Tim Holtz's alphabet masks and outlined it with a sakura pen. Then I added some flower stencilling with distressed ink in purple.   I then wrote words on some voile fabric and used gel medium to stick them down.  Some of the words just melted into the page which was really cool.

Thank you again Michelle for this challenge.  It was fun and I was surprised by the results.  I really had no idea what I was going to do today with those pages but it just all came together. 

GPPS Street Challenge No. 44!

Challenge time again and more fun to be had.  This time it was all about scraping paint onto the page with a credit card/hotel key card or some other such card and watching how the layers take shape and then adding some stencilling.  So what to do? I chose my larger journal which is A4ish in size.  First decision, what colours to use?  I don't have that many although my collection is getting larger as I do more journaling.  First up it was teal blue and light beigey pink:

which turned out like this

Then I just had to do another page with different colours this time red, blue, purple and gold!

I had a hard time deciding on the stencil to use and in the end punched out three hearts and used the spaces as a stencil which I did in different colours on the background

I really loved the gold on the red so wanted to do more of that using the hearts again

But neither looked finished somehow so .....

I added some shiny stones I had in my stash and some tissue tape.  And for the red one I ummed and ahhed about what to use. I really wanted to use black but didn't want it to overtake the page!!!!  In the end it was a case of " c'mon girl loosen up here and just go for it" and this was the result!

And I like it.  I like it alot!

At the same time I did some experimenting as Michelle suggested using gesso then black paint, scraping back and adding several colours.  These will be good background pages for journaling sometime.  Any ideas for taking them further?

 Thanks again Michelle for a great challenge!

GPPS Street Challenge No. 42!

Another opportunity to take part in this fun challenge event this time using text from magazines or newspapers and a  chance to become a little more familiar with typography, size, shape, colour etc.

Having had an incredibly busy month with visitors from the US, daughter no.2 going back to Uganda and daughter no.4 getting ready to go to Paris for the next 12 months and then a very wet week in Cornwall I have had to be quick about this one.   But I just had to have a go and got busy yesterday cutting out words from the various magazines I had lying around.  Interestingly I found that I couldn't just cut out any old words but the words themselves needed to be meaningful to me!!  So the two layouts below are the finished result.

I used some pages in my journal which I had already prepped using a layer of gesso, a page from an old book and some copper acrylic paint.  The words were then randomly stuck on using my new Sparkle Collage Pauge by Traci Bautista which my friend from the US brought over for me as a gift.  I am not sure you can see the sparkle on the photo but it is definitely there and certainly adds a little something to the page.

This page is a message all about my daughter who is leaving for Paris in the next couple of days.  She has been living with us during this second Uni year and I shall miss her a lot.  She is our youngest and this means an empty nest for the first time.  This season seems to be all about goodbyes so I found myself doing a little message to express some of what I feel just now.  I coloured the page first with blue, green and yellow water colour crayons and then wiped them with a babywipe to get a blended but not too wet combination.  Then again I used the Sparkle Collage Pauge to stick the words on, adding a little text myself (I suspect there will be more!).  Thanks for another fun challenge Michelle!