A few more backgrounds...

It seems once I start playing with my Gelli plate I just cannot stop! I pulled it out again last night and made yet more backgrounds for some postcards! The orange and blue ones are just for me and the metallics is for the upcoming black-metallics post card swap over on MMSA.

These are just the starting layers. Each one is a piece of cardboard that I cut into 4 cards. No idea yet what I will do next but I like to have all phases of the cards around in case my muse hits me on the head and tells me she wants to play!

Sharing these oranges one with Mandarin Orange Monday.

Sharing these blues one with Blue Monday.

And these 2 metallics and black are the start for the upcoming swap over on MMSA.

As I make these into post cards I will show them here... might be a while because I like to have a lot of variety at hand to choose from.

Also linked to:
Creative Every Day

Made a few more postcards...

This time not for a swap but to keep on hand for sending out Mail Art. These are similar to ones I made before but different color sets.  I have pieces of cardboard big enough to make 4 post cards so I did 2 sheets of it with gelli prints and stamping then I cut them up and doodled and stamped more. Now that I have started swapping and putting my snail mail addy out there I am starting to get mail art I want to respond to and now I have a few post cards ready to go!

Linked to:
Creative Every Day

Hot Glue Gun Stencils...

Who knew? Well apparently a few people judging from the You Tube videos available HERE, HERE, and HERE... but it was a new technique to me so I tried it this weekend!

You need:

a hot glue gun and a LOT of glue sticks, some parchment paper or a craft mat (I used 2 pieces of parchment paper),and I used a brayer to press down as it gets hot and hard on my hands to press the glue flat.

then for the printing you need:

a gelli plate, acrylic paints, and a brayer to spread the paints as usual, paper to print on.

You can follow the technique in any of the videos above, but basically, you lay down a design on the parchment paper using the hot glue gun, immediately press the other parchment on top of it, flatten it (for the gelli plate I found this is needed), then when the glue has cooled, lift it away from the parchment and you have your stencil!

Here are a few I did today:

Primary set (a la Jane Davies above), yellow layer first, then red, then blue.

Yellow first, then orange, then teal, with a wash of part yellow-part gel medium to soften it.

Olive green and magenta, with a softening overcoat of gel medium mixed with transparent iron oxide (Golden)

and its reverse ghost print (my favorite of all these I did today):

These are mostly tests, although there are parts of them I like and might tear or cut up to use in my journals or other art. When Leslie and I get together again after Christmas we are going to play with this technique more. I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

Linked to:
Colorful Gelli Party
Mandarin Orange Monday
Creative Every Day

Pink Post Cards...

Pink Post cards... Odd thing for a swap (@Swap-bot), I know, but luckily I happened to have a gazillion pink gelli-plate printed deli papers that I could tear up and collage for a post card or two!

These were made by collaging a lot of pink gelli prints (torn up) onto an 8.5"x11" page then cut into post cards and ATC backings. I got 2 PC and 4 ATCs from one page of collage. I like them as is, but may spend a little time looking for other things to collage onto them while I watch TV later.

Linked to:
Paint Party Friday
Pink Saturday

Working on the 21 Secrets class today...

I decided to pick another of the 21 Secrets workshops that had doodling and working a bit outside my normal zone so I picked Roben-Marie Smith's Baby Got Back-to-Back class to do next. I have enjoyed Roben-Marie's work for many years and have taken a class or two from her here and there but have never attempted to do a journal page in her style, which is how this workshop starts out. HERE is a link to her wonderful journal page tutorials!

So the workshop starts out by making a journal page in her style, which actually took me 2 days. Once again I was working on pages I had taken out of the 9" x 12" Canson Montval Field All-Media Journal. I decided last night to start by making 2 pages so it took a little longer, and then part way through I wanted them to dry completely so I left them overnight. I made 2 pages because one of them has to get cut up for the book part of this workshop and then I would have an extra, although now I have to decide which one I want to keep and which to use for the Back-to-Back book part of the workshop!

It starts by adding color to your page (painting and gelli printing):

Then some collage and stamping:

Then lots more inking, painting, doodling...

And finally both finished pages.

What I enjoyed about this part of the workshop was using colors together that I normally do not use much of and making a page much busier than I normally do and having it look nice in the end. What I found difficult was having to constantly go back over things and doodle more or fix doodles that got covered or painted on that I wanted to show, and the general fussiness of working these pages. It sure looks easy when Roben-Marie does it but it takes a lot longer than I thought!

But I gotta admit, these are two of my favorite pages I have done lately! I think I will incorporate some of this working over and over in my art journal pages now and see where it takes me! Thanks for pushing my envelope Roben-Marie!

Playing with more gelli prints...

Started doing up a bunch of lighter colored gelli prints for additions to art journal pages and scanned one to test out how it scanned. I didn't like the plain scan all that much so I started playing with the colors in PaintShopPro (my cheapo version of Photoshop) and made a mosaic in BigLabs to see some of the various colors I adjusted it to. The darkest one I made a negative of the colors. I have not played around with PSP for a long time and I had forgotten a lot of the cool things it can do, so I think I will be playing with it a bit in the coming weeks.

This was the original scan:

Linked to:
Pink Saturday
Colorful Journey Gelli Party
Ruby Tuesday2
Mandarin Orange Monday
Mosaic Monday
Blue Monday

Looking for pink...

I wasn't sure I had any more pink journal pages for today's Linky party but I found this, a journal page I had done for the Journal Fodder 365 group I am doing over on Ning. Not sure that I ever posted it anywhere even, maybe I meant to do more on it but now I have forgotten...

It's on a gelli printed background, traced around my hand and colored in with pan pastels. Then I sprayed fixative so the pastels wouldn't brush off and wrote the caption with black and white markers.

Linked to: Pink Saturday

Creative Dare for April...

Over on Tracy Weinzapfel's blog she lists the April Creative Dare challenge as "Pick 5 words that describe yourself"... so these are my 5 words for the moment. I actually have more words so it was hard to choose, but I liked these 5 the best this evening:

This was done in my smaller (7" x 10") art journal that is nearly full! It is a background of gelli printing and stencils, with various inked circles and writing. I actually had the page background done for a while and it wasn't until tonight that I found a use for it.

Linked to:
Creative Dare
Art Journal Every Day
Show and Tell Saturday

WOYWW #203

When I looked this morning it was more like what was on my workdesk left over from last night's Gelli plate playing...

Here are a couple of the stencils I used for the red and black gelli printing session last night:

Linked to: WOYWW

Some red and black in progress...

Not sure what I want to do with these yet but I got home and felt like making something in reds and black so I got out the trusty Gelli plate and whipped up some layers of red and black stencil play.

Linked to:
Ruby Tuesday2

Paint Pens and Lots of Color!

I decided to practice my doodling and using paint pens in my art journal this week. I came up with these two pages, both a lot more colorful than my usual pages.

I really like the Bloom one... I am liking this doodling idea!

And this one I liked for all the variety of paint pens I used...

Both started out with gelli printed, sprayed and stenciled backgrounds. I gotta remember to take the before pictures!

Linked to: Paint Party Friday, Art Journaling Everyday, Orange You Glad It's Friday, Show and Tell Saturday, The Octopode Factory Friday Challenge, Inspire Me Monday and Mandarin Orange Monday.

Having fun making stencils...

It is a really simple process! I am so glad I got this machine because not only can I make a new stencil whenever I think of one, but also my hands do not have to go through the agony of cutting stencil material with an exacto blade. And of course now I can make much more intricate stencils than I could by cutting them myself!

First make a design on the Silhouette software:

Then cut the stencil with the machine. It is a bit noisy!

After it is cut, take it apart and you have the stencil and all the parts from inside to play with as well. What I like about this is that I can resize the same design and make a couple of stencils of various sizes to use.

Next prep the gelli plate. THis time I used some pink and purple cheap craft acrylic paints.

Making a print: The bottom part is weird because I wiggled my arm and it didn't print exactly smoothly but no big deal, I just use it as it turns out!

And later making a print from the inside parts of that same stencil:

It doesn't always have to be printed with the gelli plate. Here is another new stencil that I used spray inks with:

Linked to: Gelli Party (Carolyn Dube)

Another Mandarin Orange Monday...

Not at all sure what these will grow into but the last few days I have been adding blotches of orange, gray, white or black to these and just playing with the colors. For all I know they may get mostly all covered up eventually but for now, they are blotches of orange which pleases me.

And here are some cut up gelli printed labels my friend Leslie and I did on Sunday with my new Silhouette Cameo machine. I need to stop playing long enough to write more of a post about that thing, but it is so much fun I just can't stop using it to blog about it!

This is a gelli printed label page (using some of the new stencils I have been making):

And another art journal background page, this time for my new larger 9"x12" journal:

Here are 4 of the bunch of stamps we cut, actual size around 2" x 1.5", made from a stencil of postage stamp designs I made with my new Silhouette Cameo. Cut out of gelli printed label paper:

Linked to Mandarin Orange Monday and Carolyn Dube's Gelli Print Party

Mandarin Orange Monday...

I am so inspired by this Mandarin Orange Monday challenge! I actually really like orange and it is fun to find things to add to this challenge blog!

Here are a few newer Gelli print pages that are screaming mandarin orange:

and one more gelli print...

and finally an art journal page looking very orange (with a gelli print background)

Linked to Mandarin Orange Monday and Orange You Glad It's Friday.

Russian Nesting Dolls...

Testing out some transfers that didn't show up very well on the very patterned background. I need to work on how to make better transfer images. Meanwhile I was looking at my little matryoshka on my shelf and thinking how at times I am like one of those nesting dolls... you gotta peel off the layers to get to the real me.

A few new Gelli backgrounds...

Can't seen to stay away from that Gelli plate! Made these tonight... wanted to use some orange on one of the paintings and decided to also do a little gelli printing.

I really like how the orange one made shapes through the stencil (roundish holes) as it pulled up from the plate.

Linked on Mandarin Orange Monday.

I am liking these online prompt groups...

They keep me motivated and creating... this page was actually for 2 different groups, Carolyn Dube's "Use Your Words" group as well as the ongoing Journal Fodder 365 group on Ning that I have mentioned before. Both of them had a prompt about words so I was able to incorporate things from both prompts onto one page.

Mid week journal page...

Or what I did this evening instead of going to an exercise class. I had started this last night and came home wanting to do something in blues so finished this page.

I can't believe I am almost finished in this Canson Journal already. I stsarted it last year then lost where I had put it for nearly a year then found it and have been journaling almost daily for the last couple of months. And now I have around 10 blank pages and around 15 gelli printed pages in it and it is done! And now I am thinking I want to go larger for the next one... and maybe start a couple, for various purposes. I still want to make a journal with just art pages from song lyrics.

Sunday art...

Finished up a set of gelli prints that I started yesterday and ended up with 21 pages, which I am going to bind into a small book (7 signatures) and probably just keep as the gelli prints without any other journaling in them. It is very colorful and I haven't get fingured out how to show it in a photograph so I guess I will need to scan the pages and make a mosaic to show them before I bind it. But not today...

I did another journal page, not so much for the Art Journaling Journal Fodder class but more cause it just felt like it was coming out of me today...

Gelli printed background with collage and writing on top. Lyra aquarelle crayons and Micron pen. Ink drops on top of it all.

3 Day Weekend Art Play...

Heard my Gelli plate calling me early in the day so spent some time playing with that...

Then made a journal page for the Journal Fodder 365 class on Art Journaling (see links in a previous post). The topic was writing on non-straight lines so I made some swirly shapes on a gel printed page in my journal and went to town.

What you don't see is the incredible mess my work area is so tomorrow I will be cleaning that up before I do anything more!