The Here and Now

This mixed media card has a collage base with various scrap pieces from my large "junk box" filled with scrap papers. The dandelions are from Carabelle Studio's as well as the sentiment. The bird stamp is from Stamper's Anonymous.

Being in the here and now is what I always strive to do... but today well, this past week actually, I have been very much looking forward to this weekend! It's Art Specially 2017 convention and I am really looking forward to see some of CHA's products in real life, getting to know more techniques through workshops and just having a grand old time! If you're planning on going as well, I'll maybe see you there! 

I would like to enter this card in the following challenges:

Try it on Tuesday for the Botanical Challenge
Craft Cardmakers - Spring into spring challenge
Create and makes - Anything goes opt. springtime 
Stamps and Stencils - Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep Birds

Have a wonderful weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Published in Mixed up Magazine!

My creative goal of this year was to get myself "out there" and take a courageous leap to have my work published. It was a big step for me to show my work outside my own creative comfort bubble, which is this blog, but I'm glad I did :) And I'm happy to announce that in the coming issue of MixedUp Mag (an online magazine about all things mixed media) I'll have a work of mine published. This issue is all about Art Journaling and it's a whopping 100 pages with tips, techniques and inspiration on the subject. As you might know Art Journaling has been a fairly new journey for me, been doing it since last year and I'm absolutely enjoying it! Happy to be sharing a page from my pocket journal and a little story on how I got started. 

A little sneak peak at my published image :) 

The issue will be on sale April 1st this saturday via PocketMags and it's an ONLINE magazine! So it's with you wherever you go, on your phone, tablet, whatever mobile or digital device you please. Awesome for waiting times at the doc's or dentist or hairdresser... who wants to read those stale old mags on their counter anyway ;) If you want to know more about the magazine before you buy it, you can try issue 1 for free. 

Thanks for stopping by today! 

WIP: bright and sunny

Beautiful spring days are here and not only the weather is bright and sunny, I am feeling that way as well. Some exciting things are coming up and I can't tell you about it just yet :) But I wanted to share a little sneak peek of a recent work I did. I tried do convey the bright and sunny feeling on the vintage magazine page using colors that really speak to me a lot at the moment. The stencil is from the Crafter's Workshop and I used trims from my Courageous Mother Nature project. Come back next week on Wednesday to see the finished piece and with it the exciting news I have to share.

Also wanted to share a little reminder that you can still play along with the March Challenge over at Viva Las VegaStamps! blog and can link up your projects until the end of Friday! 

Have a wonderful sunny Wednesday and thank you for stopping by!

It's okay, breathe today.

Lately, I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed. Maybe also because another birthday has come and gone (with a great trip to sunny Valencia in Spain, on which a report will be blogged at some point ;)  and faced with this perception of growing older I'm thinking "There so little time and so much I'd like to do!" But I need to keep in perspective that doing, doesn't affect the quality of BEING. I made this ATC/inspiration card to remind me of that. I took the butterfly base of one of my Cascading Butterflies sessions and played with paper Artsy Fresco paints, Liquitex INKS and Golden Fluid Acrylics in fluorescent yellow, which I received in the Artsnacks January Box this year. I love how that the spatters just pops up the whole image. The sentiment is re-mixed from this VLVS! text stamp. "It's Okay, breathe today" is something I say to myself when I feel like I am "wasting time" by not being "productive enough" and need a reminder that every breath has the same value, in doing or being. 

I would like to enter this artwork in the Moo-Mania challenge In Triplicate (so poetic that I made this ATC with this theme without even realizing!) and I love the fact that there is a challenge site that inspires to make some smaller works like Moo and ATC size :)

I also would like to enter this in the following challenge
Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge - Things with Wings

Thank you for stopping by and have a wonderful day. 

Enjoy it, even though all you did was breathe today :)

  

MailART Monday: Do you Snail Whale?

Last month I started to join in some mail art swaps over at Swap-Bot again and found this wonderful swap called Sticker Shock! So I got out my tin of stickers and went to town! I can't tell you HOW MUCH FUN it was doing this :) I used to collect kawaii stickers and stationery and I still have a ton of them, so it was great to get all those little sticker flakes and put them to good use. There was some placement coordination, like the title which I hope you can spot ;)  And take a good look around, there is so much to see! From a kitty knitting a sock on a bunny's ear to an angrier kitty trying to chomp on chocolates and a lazy bear trying to get the happy pick nick sandwiches into his tummy. This is totally going on my "need to do that again!" list! And if you have been saving up stickers like I have, definitely give it a go!

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Art Journal: Fragile

This week has been filled with springtime inspired projects. When the weather changes to brighter days so does my mood and you can really notice that in my work. I would like to share this art journal page with you I made recently and it's inspired by the prompts over at Rubber Dance blog. The theme challenge now is everything spring which is their Mid month challenge. 

Earlier this month they also had a color challenge based on the below color scheme.

And isn't it just gorgeous? Absolutely wonderful spring time colors! Due to time constraints and a holiday in the first weeks of march I wasn't able to participate, but I'm happily combining the two of these challenges together which resulted in the art journal page I am showing you today.

Let me tell you how I made the base. I started off by spraying some magenta, yellow and turquoise dylusions spray on a piece of A5 paper. The yellow and turquoise blended to a bit of green here and there which I loved. I then took a script and postage stamp and stamped with corresponding Staz-On colors. I placed a script stencil over it and then dabbed some Paper Artsy Fresco paint hint of mint through it. I built up everything else from here.

The Birds stamp is from Studio light and the flowers from Artemio. The postage border around the birds is also from Artemio. I accentuated the birds with a mint colored gelpen to have then stand out more.The Fragile stamp is from paper Artsy and I also colored it in with the mint gel pen.

The flowers are stamped with midnight blue & dove gray Staz-On and then overplayed with versamark and violet interference embossing powder. These wonderful flower postage stamps, also in corresponding colors, have a great pop up effect on the over all lay out.

I splattered some Hint of Mint paint and a bit of Liquitex Gold INK on the page, colored the border with Chipped Sapphire distress crayon and matted it onto a light blue card stock before adhering it to my black spiral bound journal. A light, happy, colorful page to ring in the first weekend of spring :)

I'm also entering this art journal page in the following challenges:

Creative Artiste Mixed Media #24 anything mixed media goes 

HeARTful stamping Spring + Stamp 

STAMPlorations Mixed Media Challenge March 

the Stamps and Stencils March Birds challenge

AND as invited to the Art Journal Journey Out and About challenge

I digitally altered the page to add the words to it and to use as my FB banner for the coming weeks. 

Happy spring to you all!

Have a wonderful weekend and thanks so much for stopping by!

Fountain pen NL club meet at La Couronne du Comte

On March 4th we had the second meet up of our Fountain Pen NL club and this time it was in Tilburg, This day was in part hosted by La Couronne du Comte, a great store that sells amazing stationery products, art supplies and of course fountain pens :)

The store is a bit on the smallish side (good news, they will move to a bigger location soon! Check out their moving sale!) but packed with a ton of goodies and people on this day! About 30 of the facebook members attended and it was super fun! More pics of the store coming up:

Faber Castell products

Lamy, viscont, pelikan, sailor...

We arrived a bit earlier than the meet up was planned so we still had some room to browse in the store.

But that quickly changed as everyone had the same idea ;)

We had lunch at Happy Italy which was across the street from LCDC and it was great to chat with everyone, try each other's fountain pens (also be envious of them, haha!) and getting to know fun and interesting people. And I'm really missing the two crazy people on the left! Sigh...

Group members Chaïm and Martin together with Dennis from LCDC also organized a little quiz to test your fountain pen knowledge. There were 6 prizes to be won and I was one of the winners, yay! The prize was the yellow Lamy on the right. Everything else you see except for the sailor pro gear slim earth and the KWZink were gifts in the goodiebag LCDC gave us. By the way, The winner of the quiz was Azizah, with 9 out of 10 correct answers. She even beat Stephen whom was 3rd place with 7 correct answers ;) I had 6 correct and was 4th place :D

With a whopping 25% discount on the assortment offered to the group members I could not leave without buying something, and they had this gorgeous pen with a music nib on it, so naturally I was a goner as soon as I tried it! I got KWZ ink old gold to go with the pen, love the shading in this ink.

Did you know that LCDC also sells art supplies? I saw this gorgeous Karl Box with amazing Faber Castell goods. The price, even with 25% off was still a bit too steep for me, but well one can dream, right? 

They also have these amazing Caran d'Ache oil and water color pastel's for sale. Pictured are the NeoPastels 24 set and Neocolor II 30 set. I always wanted to try them in my art and now I can thanks to Dennis! I can't wait to use them and will post a review of them too, hopefully in not too long from now. 

This was such a fun day and if you're a fountain pen enthusiast living in the Benelux (or are from the Benelux but currently live somewhere else...), you can join the the FPCNL facebook group to chat with other Dutchies about this crazy hobby of ours :) And of course you will get notified by next group outings such as this one. Sadly I had not taken any pictures of the first meet up, as it was so hectic and we had to leave early, but Akkerman in the Hague were also awesome and gracious hosts then. Please see Azizah's blogpost about that meet up (and yes, that guy standing next to me in the 3rd last picture is my husband.... :D) Am looking forward to the next meet up in May!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Courageous Mother Nature

Today I wanted to show you a Mixed Media card I made inspired by this month's Challenge Inspiration Board over at Viva Las VegaStamps!

Beautiful isn't it? I got inspired by the nature elements and the green and purple colors.

Last week I showed you how the Mixed Media base  of the card was made.
I added a lot of paints on to the card to get the bold colors layered well.
Some detail shots below:





Please visit my blogpost over at VLVS! to see the details on how I made this card and which stamps I used. Hopefully this will inspire you to play along with this month's VLVS! challenge as well.

I would like to enter this card to
Craft Stamper March Take it Make it Challenge

Creative Artiste Anything Mixed Media goes challenge 

heARTful Stamping challenge for Spring+stamp

Stamping sensations - Close to Nature

Mixed Media World #23 Anything goes Challenge

And lastly the Rubber dance Theme Challenge Everything Spring

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

MailART Monday: Springtime BIRDS

Today is the start of spring as marked in the calendar and I wanted to show you some happy bright springtime mixed media envelope on today's MailART Monday. I've only used Dylusions stamps for this piece together with my gelli plate, distress paints, embossing powders, sharpies and alcohol markers. It was really fun to do!

I started off by masking the round address circle on an envelope which already had some blue paint on it. Then I brayered on some orange and green colors. I made some texture by stamping on some bubble wrap with green paint directly on the envelope and also with use of my gelli plate.

Then I layered on the stamps with memento, dylusions and staz-on inks. I made the birds blacker with sharpies and used the text stamps over them and embossed those to finish it off as you can see in the first picture on the blogpost.

The back was also decorated the same way with brighter green and blue colors. I used a white gelpen to accentuate the outer lines. I loved using my Dylusions stamps again as I has them in my statsh for a good long while, at least over a year. 

Dylusions stamp sets used: 

Birds on a Wire 

Further around the Edge 

Write between the lines 

Clearly borders 

Entering this to the 

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge A bit of Green. 

Shopping our Stash Luck o'the Irish -

 also a great challenge to encourage people to use what they have in their stash already!

The Unicorn Challenge - Go Green 

Creative Artiste Challenge for march - Anything mixed media goes

And lastly
RubberDance Everything Spring challenge

Hopefully spring weather will arrive soon again here!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Twinkling Chief Agatha

A little while ago I made these two little cuties for an ATC swap over at the Stampotique Originals group on facebook. The challenge was a color theme this time around so we had to use all the colors of this color scheme.

I knew right away I wanted to use Agatha for this because of her lovely feathers. Also a wonderful excuse to use my new Twinkling H2O's for this project as well.

They have such a nice sparkle to them :) To color her in I used Orange peel, Vavoom red, Poppy Red, Wild blueberry and Rich cobalt.

The background is made with distress inks mustard seed and ripe persimmon. Dylusions Mixed Media palette inks are used to stamp on the Texture Cube motives by Kate Crane to give the background more interest. Edges were rounded with a paper punch and then blackened with distress crayon. 

It's hard to show a good picture of how she twinkles, but she definitely does shine! Oh a tip for you: I have colored the whole image of Agatha and then just het face on separate pieced of sticker paper (the face is colored with alcohol markers). The I cut it out to place the face over the water colored image. That is how the face is unaffected by the Twinkles. Masking won't help much as water just seeps everywhere, really. I also drew in her hair and made the eyes blacker with my trusty faber castell pitt artist marker. 

Thanks for stopping by and wishing you a colorful and twinkling weekend :)