owl canvas

Wednesday I promised to reveal the owl canvas.
And if you promise something...
So without further ado, here it is

I was inspired by an owl I saw here.
I started by printing out an owl, tracing it on a piece of carboard and cutting him out.

Next I punched a bunch of circles out of gelli prints and glued them in layers on the owl.
Some trimming and then my husband pointed out the fact that the feathers were going from bottom to top instead of the other way around. 

So I started over, not only because of that but also because I wanted to use other colors, more brown tones. 

This is more realistic and fitted better with the background I was creating with my gelatos. 
I handcarved a leaf stamp for this project

And cut leafs with my cameo silhouette.
I also cut a flower with the cameo.

And the sentiment

I so love my cameo, the possibilities are really endless I believe.

This was a present for a colleague who went on pension, that's why I wasn't able to show it earlier.

Carloyne Dube hosts a weekly let's play party, find all details here
I will be linking this project as this is also a perfect illustration of what she says about inspiring each other.

fireworks

This page for the weekly CraftBarn challenge actually started as another project I’m currently working on, more will follow in a later post.

I first did some collaging with gelli prints, then came some stamping  

and then suddenly I saw fireworks in the page, just needed to add a crowd watching.

Mermaid

This week’s challenge over at the Craft Barn is ocean, this is what I made of it

I started on a page in my journal which already had some marks on from cleaning of stencils from a previous project.

Next I added some aqua colored acrylic paints to create the ocean, 

some gelli printed tissuepaper 

and various stamping.

progression of the background

The mermaid is a free image which I printed from the net.

I colored her body with posca paint pens and glued small circles punched out of various gelli prints on her tail.

I outlined her with a fine black posca pen and gave her some sea creature friends.

The posca paint pens are fun working with, they are also great for kids.

My son decorated his apple box with them (because lots of kids in school have the same box it’s hard to tell which is his, now it won’t be hard anymore with such an unique design)

I was also amazed with his drawing abilities, he drew an ostrich.

K3 & eclipse

I made 2 new pages in my ARTicles book.
The first one is about a Flemish band called K3 who announced last week that they were quitting after 17 years, it’s not that I’m a fan or so, their public are mainly kids, but still I wanted to include it in my book.

I started by collaging blocks of patterned paper on which I wrote some of their hits 

I took out my sewing machine to add some real stitches. (although the sewing machine is still not my best friend) I must say it went a lot smoother then last time, even changing the color of thread, I know the sewing is not up to scratch, but only practice will get me better, no?

Then I applied a light coat of gesso and divided the empty space in equal lines to add my rainbow colors (inspired on one of their outfits), the color was added using inktense pencils.

I added some music notes to the rainbow and finally stenciled a woman’s face 3 times, one in each color of their hair (they were known for that: there was one blond, black and ginger)

The second page is about the partial eclipse we could see here past friday, this is my interpretation:

I started with adding blue acrylic paint with a credit card as background.

I wanted to add some interest and texture with a paper napkin, but when I thorn it and laid it down it reminded me of a city, exactly what I wanted to create next with gelli prints. No need for that anymore.

I stamped birds onto gelli prints and cut them out.

I wasn’t able to catch the beauty of the sun however.

In fact I’m not that sure about this whole page, maybe I still change it. 
What do you think?
And do you want to join in the fun of journaling about everyday life?? Hop on over here

book of words

I was so lucky to have been drawn as one of  the winners during the spray inks play dates from Carolyne Dube. Earlier this week I received my happy mail, the wonderfull wall of words stencil which I off course needed to testdrive immediately.
I decided to make a little book of which each page contains 1 quote of the stencil. As the stencil has 28 quotes on it, I rummaged through my box of prints and choose 14 pages that caught my eye and made a simple pamflet booklet out of them. For the cover I turned ones more to my mop up pages which lay on my desk. 

These are a few examples of the pages:

The intention of this book was to try out the stencil, to have a reference of all the cool quotes on the stencil and each page is a starting point to be further explored. But I must say I already like it a lot with only the gelli print and a quote on it.

Thanks Carolyne for this awesome stencil, it will be well used.

monochrome canvas

I joined the Journal Workshopssite from Jennibellie already in March but was too overwhelmed by everything at that time and was too scared to dive into.

But last week I gave it another go and I am hooked now.

She hosts a monthly challenge and April’s challenge was messy monochrome.

After watching the video, the ideas seeped in my mind and yesterday I sat myself down and executed my thoughts on a canvas.

My Step by step:

• Collage of black and white gelli prints
• Stamping (footprints, hearts, text and dots) with jet black Stazon
• Cut out heart shapes out of the black and white gelli transfer film I made a couple of weeks back, I added some red acrylic paint to the edges to let them stand out more
• I stenciled a flourish heart on some tissuepaper and glued that to the canvas
• Printed out the quote In art as in love instinct is enough (I found this quote inside a chocolate wrapper), cut it out and glued down, the words art and love I wrote on a piece of fabric (ones used to be a pillow cover)
• Some paper flowers in just the wright colors and some washi tape to finish it all of

 Here are some detailed pictures

NEW TOYS!!!

Past weekend I bought these new stencils:

Which, off coarse, needed to be tested as soon as possible:

I LOVE this print: it's just perfect, pristine and crisp

The ghost print however doesn't blow me away.

Of coarse I couldn't resist the butterfly one.

The alphabet one is amazing, so versatile

works well as a first print

as a ghost print

as a stamp (this is the clean off from my print)

or with spray ink

I love my new stencils, I'm glad I splashed out to buy these, because normally I hold back and try to make all my stencils myself with a heatcutter, but I'm just not able to get such great detail.
They are just FAB!!!

gelliclopedia part1

It has been a while since I played around with my gelli plate, shame on me, urgently got to change that.

In Carolyne Dube’s community A colorful playground over on google+  there are so many talented gelli printers, I am not wowed by my own results so decided to start experimenting some more to improve myself. I want to put together kind of a manual for myself ( a gelliclopedia) with what works and what doesn’t.

I started with exploring colors, color combo’s, paint types…

My key learning's thus far are:

1.      I prefer the more translucent paints
2.     A print gets more interesting by adding different elements to one      print ( I tend to make prints with only one stencil, one texture, but when combining several together suddenly it becomes more intriguing)
3.  Layering (best to start with the darkest color, when you use shades of the same color you create a nice shadow effect)

Here are some examples of my first run

first play with this homemade stencil, LOVING it!

2 prints with the other 2 stencils

flower coasters as stencil, combo of warm colors

fern as mask

detail of a print where I used
 an embossed paper as texture,
love the different shades of green

there is also something like too much layering

.

wax resist 2

Ok, so my first go at this wax resist technique didn't quite turned out as expected, so on to trial no2. 

This time I really put a thick layer of crayon on my blank page, it was easier to remove the paint as with the previous prints but still not exactly what I had imagined (I also find the colors rather dull)

Maybe it's the type of crayon, so I used neocolor watersoluble crayons (like they did in the demo video from gelli arts) this seems to work a little bit better (or maybe I'm becoming more patient in removing the paint)

I also tried something different, I made a print on which I rubbed with a candle. Removing the paint was easier but it was harder to find the spots where I had rubbed. I also should have chosen more contrasting colors. I do like the feel of the spots where the wax was rubbed.

When I pulled the ghost print there was also a transfer of some of the crayons of a previous print

Gelli printing with wax crayon resist

After seeing the tutorial over on the gelli arts website I had to test this wax crayon resist technique.
But as you can see it didn't turn out as planned.

I don't seem to be able to peel of the paint afterwards, maybe I need to build up the wax crayons much more??
However I like these prints, they have something abstract about them.
I'm going to use them to make a gardenbook for my son's progress at a vegetable garden, more to come later.