Mailart Monday: Happy Holidays!

The season is nearly upon us! We've decorated our apartment in the holiday spirit and I've also made some cards to send out. Well, I've made one card, scanned it and sent off to the printer because that was the best and fastest way to do it. Sadly the prints have not arrived yet, grumble, but I can show you the card design. I've used stencils 101 by Ed Roth, a lot of distress inks with a blending tool and designs by Ryn texture stamp. I've used the stag stencil first and blotted ink through the stencil with my blending tool. When I was satisfied with the look, I took the texture stamp and stamped it through the stencil to give it some more interest. Then I went on with the wreath and blended the colors until I was satisfied with the look of it. Same as with the "Happy Holidays" sign under it. I made sure to mask off all parts of the stencil and the aria around it with low tack masking tape to get a clean and simple design. I'm quite happy with how it looks :) I am curious what the prints will look like and hopefully they will arrive any day now so they can get sent out this week, to hopefully arrive on time for the holidays. Here is the slightly altered digital version:

 I digitally altered the card to add a border and a watermark. Feel free to use the above image for your holiday cards as well (you can just download the image by right click saving). 

A little holiday gift from me to you as a thank you for your support with my blog and journey this year :)

Have you made your own holidays cards this year? 

If so, leave a link below I would love to see them :)

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

namasté

Mailart Monday: a ghostly halloween

It's october 31st and that means it's finally Halloween. I made the above postcard for a fun swap, the blue ghost postcard exchange hosted by my friend Amanda at Letter Letter. The objective is to send and receive a handful of postcards to your assigned group of penpals with the message written with blue ghost ink (see a great review of the ink here by S.J Mills). So it's readable with UV light only! It's super fun and I have participated in the last couple of years too.

I chose Edgar Allen Poe as focus and made the card with stamps from Lost Coast Designs, Carmen's Veranda and the Stempelwinkel. The background is made with the large grunge border stamps, stamped with opaque white and versamark. I only embossed the middle part and left the rest white. I then got some distress stains in orange and purple on my craft sheet and blotted the ink with the stamped paper.

It came out looking like this! I cut the page to size and added the rest of the elements to it and made accents with grey and black distress markers.

I blotted the rest of the ink off a separate paper and made the postcards above. I sprayed the a bit of red brusho mix and together with the drops from Designs by Ryn they look awesome ghostly (the double print also does the trick of a ghostly image!) I hope my partners will enjoy these postcards and I can't wait to receive mine!

I am entering these cards for the mixed media monthly challenge for october with the Halloween theme

 

Have a wonderful Halloween everyone!

Thanks for stopping by!

Mini Art Journal: An Ocean of Drops

Today I am sharing an spread in my art journal inspired by a quote from Cloud Atlas, which fits beautifully with the stamps from Viva Las Vegastamps and Designs by Ryn.

The background is made on Maruman Zuan watercolor paper on which I used different Dylusions spray inks, brusho crystals in blues and teals and spattered liquitex acrylic inks in black and white. The brusho ceated some fun effects with the spray inks. When it dried I then stamped on the drops from Designs by Ryn with Staz on Azure. 

A close up of the background, a multitude of drops effect. The greens are from the brusho crystals which gave a fun unexpected effect. And these drops stamps from Designs by Ryn are just amazing!

I colored the half face with tears from VLVs with letraset promarkers and ripped it out and adhered to the page. The lettering of the quote I have done with a black brush calligraphy pen from Muji store which I forgot I had ;) It was a good test to see how it works on watercolor paper. I had to trace it a couple of times to get the deep black I wanted. It would probably work better on smoother paper. 

The I adhered the page to my journal and added some washi on the top and bottom of the page to cover up some empty strips. I traced the quote with a sakura stardust pen to give it some sparkle. 

"What is the ocean but a multitude of drops?"

I'm entering this journal page in the october customer creation challenge at the Designs by Ryn blog. Wish me luck :)

Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by!

namasté

Mini Art Journal - A new way of seeing things

This is an ATC I made a while ago when I wanted to test the drop/tear stamp from Designs by Ryn (from water effects sheet) in combination with an eye stamp (by stampabilities). The other stamps are from Tim Holtz Grunge rays and the travel quote stamp from Technique Tuesday. I thought it made a striking card esp. with the bold colors and the rays coming from the eye. I was super pleased with the outcome, even if it was a first try. So I set it aside on my desk and moved on to other things and then the most annoying thing happened... When I wanted to write down the materials I used for this card and I couldn't find it anymore! I went through my desk and papers over a bunch of different times and could not find it anywhere! What a bummer!! But thankfully I still have the picture of it. Then I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a journal where I could test out my ATC format idea's on without risk of loosing them again? And so, the mini Art Journal was born!

I have this moleskine sized journal with sturdy watercolor pages in them which I thought would be great for this project. It's bigger than the ATC format of course, but still small enough for projects on that scale. I stamped the eye and drops first with memento Black and made a mask for them. Stamped the Tim holz Grunge rays with Staz on Black Cherry and the checked stamp with Staz-on Saddle Brown. The background color is Distress stains Wild Honey, diluted with water and adhered with a brush, creating a gradient from top to bottom.

Then I took off the mask to work on the eye & drops. As you can see I placed all the drops closer to the eye. It already has a striking result like this due to the bold background! As you can see the mask was not cut tightly around the image (I wanted to avoid bleed through in the image by color seeping in though the sides) but you can easily fix that. I used Tombow light ocher and a water brush to blend the colors in. And then I I got some more Tombow dual brush pens to color and accentuate the eye and drops.

And this is the end result. I added more lashes and gave it a bit of 'smudged eyeliner" look. I had found a left over piece of water colored paper and stamped the quote on it with Staz-on Pumpkin. I just love these drop stamps from Designs by Ryn! They are so realistic and very easy to place. Not sure how I feel about starting yet another ART journal though, but I like that I have a place to collect my small scale ideas in.

Hopefully at some point I'll find the original ATC again... Or I'll just make others, now that I have the visual ideas in the journal ;) 

Have you ever lost something you created? 

I think it means that I need to do a bit of spring cleaning on my desk, haha!

Also with this post I am entering the fortnight challenge at De Stempelwinkel's challenge blog for challenge 8 'Sunshine Yellow' - wish me luck :) 

Thanks for stopping by!

Have a creative weekend.

namasté