Let love grow in your Midnight garden - AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a card I have made with wonderful products from AALL & Create. The base is a one layer mixed media card and I've started off on a piece of cardboard where I already had some left over paints on & a light residue of modeling paste through Kassa's stencils. 

You can see the subtle texture which I have highlighted with some Finnabair Opal Magic paints. This was basically a piece of cardboard that I rolled on left over paints decided to see what I could do with it now that it developed that "patina" of paints :) 

I stamped some texture on it with Staz-ON Royal Purple and stamp set 109 from Tracy Evans. It is a giant A4 set but you can quite easily cut those 2 images apart and have a bit more flexible use that way. I created a border of texture and then went to work with flowers from another set. 

These are flowers from Katy's set 127 and the stamp positioner is a great tool to have to create crisp images in patterns all over your card. These are stamped with Staz-ON Midnight Blue. 

I wanted the images to be blurred around the edges so I took a baby wipe and dabbed a bit of staz-on cleaning solution on it and lightly rubbed the edges to move the color & blur the hard lines. 

The blurred edges gives it a nice dreamy effect. In the middle I left room for a large flower from Tracy's stamp 120.

I've stamped that in with staz on midnight blue and rubbed along the edges of the flower to make the petals look lighter. For highlights I have used a white gel pen. 

I've matted it and added the sentiment "love grows here" from stamp set 123 by Tracy. The sentiment is heat embossed with white embossing powder on black cardstock. 

It's a card to send to someone to remind them of the importance of self care. Let love grow in your midnight garden so it can bloom during day time too. 

AALL & CREATE products used 

 

Hope you liked seeing this project with gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

Art Journal: Rooted Strong - StencilGirl®

This month at StencilGirl® Talk we share what we feel grateful for. I've made an art journal spread about my home town, Amsterdam. I'm feeling grateful for the roots I have there, the city I've spent the better part of my life in and in connection to my remaining family whom still live there. It's quite a personal spread, but it has so much meaning that I decided I wanted to share this with you here as it helped me worked through processing loss.

Art Journal: Thoughts and Dreams with AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a project for AALL&CREATE as part of their guest design team for the coming months. I'm super excited & honored to be part of the amazing team and to be creating with their wonderful stamps designs. You'll see weekly projects from me on the weekend and to kick it off I'm sharing an art journal page in my moleskine pocket water color sketchook. 

After a long day I like to relax with my sketchbook and watercolors. Having stamps that inspire me to color is very valuable to me because I don't need to worry about a sketch that I need to make myself & get right to the coloring.

When I saw the designs of Tracy Evans and Katy Paltridge I knew they would go well together! In this project I have stamped a female figure of set #129 in combination with the flower of #123 in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. A few work in progress pictures: 

I am using Jane Davenport Glitz Sea  mixed with some of the Neutrals set. 

I like using stamps in different ways than designed, so I used the flower petals as Faerie wings & the stems as water waves.

I did color the  petal wings with a flower color because I love the contrast of the warm red pink with the blues and lime greens. 

It's very fun to see how the stem is quite effective as water waves! And I love the many blues in the glitz sea palette to give the body of water some color nuances. 

Looking at her serene face, I think she is enjoying the stillness in nature, lost in her thoughts and dreams. So I decided to stamp those words in the scene. 

I also used the grungy flower to create a bit more texture in the background by partially stamping it randomly over the page with lighter colored stamp pads. Some more close up shots of the finished piece. 

I have used a sakura While Gelly roll to add the highlights for finishing touches.

The stamps sets I used are the following:

123 by Tracy Evans and 129 by Katy Paltridge

Hope you liked seeing this project with watercolors & gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

Art Journal: find your Magic

Today I am sharing a journal spread made with stencils by StencilGirl Products & Paper Artsy fresco & Tim Holtz distress paints. I really love my new visual reference book because it gives me the opportunity to see in a glance which stencils go really well together, like the ones I have used for this particular spread.

This pretty peacock face stencil by Andrea Matus de Meng is such a gorgeous one and I had not used it before. you can do really great layering with this one as you can see in the hair.

Find your magic is made with the uplifting words on Carolyn Dube´s stencil but I made the `your` with an R from another word. This way the stencil is also versatile in creating the words you need!

The background is made with Art Deco Peacock Feathers and Mary Beth's Private collection 2016 Stencil Club set. 

"Find your magic - believe in yourself and trust that the universe has your back! Know that magic can be found anywhere and you'll have to trust that you will find it!"

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a great day! 

Micro Art Journal: Tiny Collages

A collage of my collages I made in september in my micro art journal inside my tiny KeyPer from Jot. The collages are made with bits and pieces left over from projects. 

It's been quiet on the blog, but definitely not quiet art wise. I've been sharing art daily on my instagram and facebook, if you want to see what I have been up to lately. 

Have a wonderful weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Art Journal: Diary of events

The days are getting shorter and the weather colder - what comforts me in these times besides hot drinks and snuggling on the couch with Meesha, are big bright bold colors! While cleaning up bits of my art room recently, I found a few boxes of oil pastels and decided to use them in my art journal pages. This one is another collage with vintage and modern magazine clippings and gelli prints backgrounds.

I've oil pastels marks in the same colors as the back ground and just made big bold marks with them around the collage images. I've then stamped a script stamp (Paper Artsy), row of numbers (VLVS!) and a fence stamp (Stampotique Originals) for texture.

The sentiment "diary of events" is from Tim Holtz sticker books. The juxtaposition between the black and white & grey against the bold colored background really pleases me. It reminds me that even though the day to day can be B/W & Grey - there are bold colors inside me and I can let them out any time I choose, bursting through the fences we often place ourselves behind. 

"I no longer want to fit in, I choose to be me, with bold and beautiful colors."

Hope this inspires you to play along with this month's Craft Stamper TIMI challenge. You can win a lovely prize and you'll have the chance to have your work featured in a magazine! See the full terms on the site & hope to see your entries there. 

I also would love to share this art journal page over at Art Journal Journey with the theme of Creature Comfort this month. What a great theme again and I love seeing everyone's creations!

Thank you for stopping by and hope you'll have a fantastic weekend!