new year, new decade, new goals

With a new year, comes new years resolutions.

Maybe one of mine could be giving some TLC to my blog, 

because quite frankly I have been neglecting it lately 

due to other social media, mainly Instagram 

(you can find me under my blogname butterfliecrafter)

there you will see that it is not because I am not creating anymore,

although that has also been on a low fire,

but since I followed Kasia Avery's daybydaycourse the fire has been reignited and I am trying to keep up with a daily routine.

Here are some of my favourite pages that I created during the course:

Right after this challenge I followed along with Kasia's advent calendar,

extending my daily routine,

here are some of my pages

and now I am starting of with creative jumpstart 2020

So I hope to create daily as of now 

because I feel that I need to,

that it helps me relax and destress,

and just because.

WOYWW518

Another week has flown by and my desk doesn't look the same,

that is always a good thing 😉

Last week someone wondered what I would do with my Mona Lisa stencil,

well

 tada

Trust is exactly what I needed to have creating this page,

because it first went from bad 

to worse 

to finally something I like.

Van Gogh

2 months ago I went to the Van Gogh immersive experience in Brussels

which was impressive to say the least.

When you entered it was as if you walked into his bedroom.

In the next room you sat down in a beach chair

and enjoyed his paintings brought to life 

and projected on the massive walls,

(below a little flavor video)

In the last room you truly entered his world through virtual reality,

this was truely mindblowing.

These impressions return in below artjournalpage 

using one of my newest stencils.

Christmas journal page

Just a quick post before we head out for the year end celebration.

This is a page in my journal which had smears of paint from cleaning of my brush. I added some scrap pieces of patterned tissue paper (leftover from decorating some wooden Christmas ornaments).

The tree is cut out of a collage from leftovers from my christmas cards.
I cut the tree in pieces and distressed the edges with DI walnut stain ink.
I hung the tree upside down after seeing Carolyne Dube's tree , maybe next year I will be brave enough to attempt this in real life.
I had a leftover ornament (I didn't have enough tissuepaper to do the back) which I turned into this little snowman.

And just added this quote that fitted with my upside down tree:
It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.

I hope everyone has a nice, festive evening.

arrows and chevron

I played a bit in my art journal with these 2 new handcarved stamps:

Oddly enough the 4 arows took me longer to make then the chevron one. That one was surprisingly quick and easy. Or maybe I'm geting the hang of it??

I wanted to use them immediately so I grabbed my art journal (that has been gathering dust on the shelves), but now and then I glue some scrap pieces in there or add left over paint or clean of my stencils in there. 
I opened this page with some pieces of gelli prints on

and started with creating blocks of color the same size as the chevron stamp with oil pastels, added the arrow stamp with black acrylic paint.

And the chevron stamp with stazon black ink randomly in a few blocks

This page has progressed but still is far from finished.

gelli plate to the rescue

Here are a few pages I made this week, they are for a special project on which I'm currently working on and can’t say much more about as it is a surprise, but more will follow shortly off course.

I experienced hesitation starting off, didn’t know exactly what to do or start with, so out came the gelli plate. This usually gets my creative juices flowing.

And it certainly didn’t fail me this time.

In no time I had some fabulous backgrounds to get me started.

Off with the first page, but not for long as I was stuck again L 

But then it dawned to me, “hey why do you always stick to one page start to finish, if you’re stuck just put it aside and start another one. “ Right?

That’s exactly what I did and wow did it work, I started a couple of pages at the same time and added something here, something there and now I have 3 pages finished.

And I must say I’m pretty pleased with the results:

this background wasn't made with the gelli plate

Still a few to go and then I can finish of the book (oops, slip of the tongue J) 

We're halfway through the sweepstake, don't forget to enter.

letter N

Hi,

I’ve just completed the letter N in my dictionary for the alpha/dictionary challenge over at The Craft Barn.

This time there were not a lot of words that grabbed my imagination, originally I was going to use number or numerical, but I noticed that already a few people had done that and decided to choose another word: nest.

I liked the process of this page, I didn’t have a plan to begin with ( I only knew I was going to use this stamp of a girl with a nest of birds on her head). But one thing led to another, very organic. I’m still very much procrastinating to add more layers to a page because I already like what I’ve done and am afraid of covering it and ruing it, but usually it turns out better and if not, so what, gesso over it and start over, right. 

The small leaves were punched out of a real leaf.

Don’t forget to check out my sweepstake

alpha/dictionary challenge - letter V

Who could have thought (besides the smart brains over at The Craft Barn) that just by browsing an ordinary dictionary, you could be so inspired. Me not, that’s for sure, or I would have done it much sooner.

I decided to do the challenges which I need to catch up with in the same order as they came out.

So I started out by reading the V-pages and found so many words that inspired me, in the end  I went with the word ‘verbal’ and this is how it turned out:

Because I’m feeling so inspired I don’t  want to leave it at just this page, so I grabbed my art journal and continued with the other V-words that screamed (not just spoke) out to me. One of those words was valentine:

The background was made using my gelli plate, this was the first time I printed directly into my journal, but will definitely be doing this more in the future as I like the result.

Still words on my to do list: volcano, vintage, Victorian, Venetian, view.

Will keep you posted on the progress I make.

alpha/dictionary challenge

While browsing the net I stumbled onto a blog challenge held by The Craft Barn, the alpha/dictionary challenge.

For the challenge you need to alter a dictionary or use pages out of a dictionary; every 2 weeks they post a letter (not in alphabetically order and sometimes with a twist) and away you go with altering. 

The challenge is already running from January and they are almost finished, currently they are on challenge 18 (out of the 26), so I need to catch up a lot. But altering a book was still on my to try list, so I went to the thrift store and got myself an oxford english dictionary and started challenge 18, which is the letter Z. 

To my surprise there were only 2 pages on the letter Z, I scanned trough the words and came across the word Zinnia, as English is not my native language I didn’t really know this word. I did some research and found out that these are beautiful flowers; this inspired me to do a spread about the flower fairy Zinnia:

sunset city skyline

I started this page last night and am overwhelmed with the result so far. 

So much that I need to go to the art supply store and get me a rectangular shaped canvas to put this on, that's how much I like it.

I'm guessing this is gonna be one of those pages of procrastination :-)

procrastinating...

This week was all about finishing art journal pages.
I don't seem to be afraid of a white page: I spray, stencil, paint something on but then stop.
I procrastinate, overthink everything and can't seem to progress with the page. So now I just said to myself stop thinking and just do.
And I must say I'm pretty satisfied with the results

Here I had sprayed some stencils from Crafters workshop. I picked up by glueing some parts of doilies and leaves to the page, gave it a wash with gesso and then all of a sudden the word "flourish" came to me. So I added the definition and made these flowers out of bookpages

On this page I only had stamped the brick wall using an embossing folder, the rest was still blank. I had this idea in my head of creating a butterfly out of a bunge of small butterflies. So I used this page for it and I sprayed a sunrise and pasted a dozen of butterflies on top of it.

This page started out with the black page where I already had a stencilled image with metallic paint, I cleaned of my stencil on the white page. So I took this further into a night&day theme.

Originally this page was something totally different, but I didn't like it, so I gessod over it and redone it. I had bought these napkins with embossed circles on it a while ago and glued that to the page, then I just HAD to go with the circles. These butterflies were lying there and screaming out to me to be used. I'm very glad that I did redo this page, because now I'm very pleased with the result.

This is the last page I have to take on. The problem that I have is that I already like it the way it is, but I know/feel it isn't finshed. I'm afraid of ruin what I already have when I add something.

I will show the result when I've figured out where to go from here.
Until next time, bye for now.

art journaling

I came across art journaling not so long ago by browsing through You Tube tutorials and found the concept fascinating. 

For those who don’ t know what an art journal is, it is a journal in which you combine art and words to express yourself. I always find the word ‘art’ so loaded and don’t consider myself being an artist ( I associate an artist with someone who can paint and draw),  but rather someone who loves being creative and get messy in the process and just have fun and relax. So instead of drawing I stencil, stamp, collage…

The nice thing about journaling is, there is no wrong or right way, it’s your way, there are NO rules.

I use journaling not so much as a daily diary but rather to experiment with new techniques and  enjoy the process of creating. 

Here are some examples from my art journal: