Mugshot

Slammin it lately!!!! Of course because I need to be designing classes so I am avoiding (procrastinators unite-tomorrow). This is my art journal page for this bi-monthly A Year in the Life...challenge. This time we had to take a "mug" shot of our favorite quote. Conveniently mine is actually on a coffee cup! I took the photo in front of the rainy window with my fxcamera. Than used a yellow filter so I started with a cool looking pic. Next we were supposed to print it out on book paper. I choose to make my words upside down so they would be less distracting. Than layers and layers of gelato, stamping, and acrylic stenciling. More stamping -love it!!! At one point I thought it was heading toward hot mess but I think it turned out cool. I didn't want to add any embellishments because this is a moleskin & I am a bit worried about adding bulk. I tell you it was hard not to add anything wood or metal on there but....what are you working on today???

Bloom Challenge

My quest to submit more continues with this contest on My Sweet Earth- Susan Weckesser's blog. Susan has a line of stamps with Unity and paper that you can get from Want to Scrap. You can find her "Create to Live" February challenge here. This is the inspiration:

 

Following the black stencil portion from the challenge, I spritzed the background in grey and than black using the chevron stencil. I die cut flowers with patterned paper and spritzed them with shimmer misty nummyness. The stems were heat embossed with funky border stamps. I added some of my fav-washi tape. The page was missing something and that was the lady stamp used from Susan's "mother is a verb" stamp. 

I colored her lady using the challenge chart. I love that she is looking at the flowers. For my title I used one of my favorite techniques. I stamped and cut out an alphabet. Next stamp/embossed with Susan's stamp "In Circle Me". It is one of my favorite background stamps for art journal pages.  The letters were colored with distress stain, the embossing

resists the stain creating these cool letters! The great part of this technique is the options are limitless! I added some rub-ons in white, splatters of ink & crackle paint through punchinella. The fun just goes on & on!!!! Sadly I ran out of space on the page so happily I added on a tip-in postcard style using patterned paper. 

 More spritzing and rub-ons. Finally my self created quote, with a color spritzed butterfly & a bit of bling. This challenge was a lot of fun to do. Enjoy!

CSI #59

This was my entry for CSI: Color, Stories, Inspiration. I still can't believe what a little misting can do for a page! This page started out looking like this: from a DCWV paper pack.

Adding random background misting and than once dry a stencil with more misting gave me the cool background to start the layout. Because the swirls are glossy embossed they resisted the mist. In the original paper you can barely see the swirls but with the mist they are fabulous! The thing I love about mist, is the ability to color other elements to fit the page. In this case the calla lily flowers and butterfly. I got to this point and really didn't want to add my title or journaling. I felt it would take away from the photo which stands out as the focus. I ended up hiding my words inside the little bird.

I talked about my daughter and how she is so tough that I sometimes forget she is still young & vulnerable. I also realized I need to spend some more time getting good photos of my kids showing different emotions-add that to my list!

CSI #58

This is my layout for CSI:Color, Stories, Inspiration this week. After following the color palette I chose metal, wood & jagged edges as my "evidence". My "testimony" was to write about a journey/travel site. We had taken Trin to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium to see Winter the little dolphin from the movie "A Dolphin's Tale". This week we had a sketch that we would follow which made it more interesting & challenging. The sketch is made by Em Stafrace creator of  "Page Drafts".

I followed the page fairly closely but didn't put in all the elements & added some different ones like my journal pocket. I took a glasine pocket & tore the top off it, embossed it and spritzed it with perfect pearls mist. Hitting the high points with ink made the embossed image pop. 

I used THoltz banners die to cut canvas & than spritzed with glimmer mist. Added a bit of stamping to give interest to the top layer. A wood tab stained with distress and stamped with the date was added to the banner as well as these cute 7Gypsy dome studs. My title is made with metal letters from my stash. YAY!

The best part of this layout is it is #23 for the year. The down side is I am falling behind my pace & need to get some scrapsprinting done! Thanks for stopping by!

A Year in the Life #2

Here is my page for the Year in a Life challenge. The prompt was rainy day-journal what that means to you & drip paint. Wow it was a challenge to get this in on time!!! I did this layout over a period of days, working on classes... being sick, doing that mom carpool thing & kept coming back to it. One of the days I was feeling very silly, mainly due to some meds for an ear infection. That is where the spiders, and happy red eye tree frog came into play. These stamps are mainly Dyan Reaveley-love them! There is lots of inky goodness on this page and it is very sparkly which of course is hard to see on camera.One of my favorites is the way the rain drops turned, out using oil pastels to highlight them. Things were going well until I went one step too far & did some drippage. While normally I love this look it just wasn't working. I was making a bit of a mess. 

Darn, don't you hate when you do that "1" too many thing? I decided to try & fix it by cutting out rain drops from book print, coloring them with glaze, spritz with glimmer mist, sewed around the edges & plunked them onto the messes. I had planned vaguely to do something like that anyway but I like how they helped clean up my mess a bit. 

Another part I like is incorporating Madonna's lyrics. Using lyrics helps to remember favorite songs which tends to spark a memory for me. I also did this big rain drop with dew drops & seed beads inside of it. It looks very cool live, adding that extra dimension that is fun. Of course after the drippage it looked neat coming from the drop except now it could be a tree rather than a rain drop. Ah I like that it is viewers choice!

I may add more of the squiggly music paper stamping (you can see it behind froggy). Using distress stain gave it a watercolor background look. I may distress the edges of the entire thing in light black also.The journaling says: "One of my favorite rain memories was in Germany, 1987 at the World Championships. Dawn and I went for a pre-competition jog. The scenery was beautiful & we were running on a grassy hillside in Germany! Suddenly it started to rain, a lovely warm summer rain. It was surreal & remains one of my favorite rainy day memories."

Besties

Layout #20 of the year!!!!! Simple but I love it! THoltz paper, his die cut butterfly's using scrap art journal paper and some bling which seems to be a contradiction but works. At the bottom is a strip of Artisan Elements by pinkpaislee which I love. I inked it up using the new distress paints which I also totally love. Ok lots of the L word but hey Valentines  Day is coming up. The Distress paints are fluid & smooth but with great color. Finished with a touch of stencil punchinella using the metallic distress stain antiqued bronze. Very excited that page 20 of the year- bam done.

CSI: 57-Escape

In my quest to scrapbook more I have joined the challenge site CSI:Color, Stories and Inspiration. Every week they have a new challenge that focuses on a color theme, some elements and for you to tell your story. Here is the guideline of this weeks "case". They also offer members (free to sign up) a printout that goes with the challenge. I didn't get to that this week but I will try to incorporate it next time.

Here is my first posting to their site-I felt like such a newbie trying to figure it all out but I will get the hang of it as I go. The most important thing is I did it!!! My layout has photos from summer 2011. Amazing to see how young my boys look just 1 1/2 years ago.

I was quite happy with how this layout turned out. I love this new paper by Kaisercraft mainly because I love the look of bricks and photograph paper is quite dynamic. I used many inks on this from dylusions, color shine (Heidi Swapp), Glimmer Glam, India ink and distress inks. One of my new goals is to dust off my cricut and try to make the die cuts grungier. Not sure I succeeded with the ice cream cone (my first one was a hot mess). It's still kind of cutesy but hey it's an ice cream cone... The little bird is want2scrap covered in a few different teal paints/sprays. All in all I think I covered all the bases for the contest-just glad I managed to get it uploaded to the site!!!! Even more exciting is this is scrap layout #19 for the year. I am slightly behind pace of 5 a week but I am on a roll.

Follow Up Friday #2

It is a cold & blustery day here today in VA we are having crazy weather- 71o one day & 2 days later 27o (with a feels like of 11o) - what???? Anyway... I absolutely can not believe it has been a month already since my 1st Follow Up Friday which you can see here. Basically the theme of this monthly post is to do a project or technique that I have been wanting to do but just haven't gotten around to.

I was working on an art journal page and trying to figure out what to do for today's post when much to my happy surprise I was already working on it. I have been lurking, stalking, following but not joining in to  A Year in the Life of an Art Journal. I would read the emails and nod - nice idea and move on to my life. My goal this year is to submit more and this is the first place I am starting. I have started a new journal just for this project, yay, excited face. I am using a Moleskin Folio A4 sketchbook that my husband thoughtfully bought me. The prompts are every 15th & 30th of the month. I am a few days late getting this done but all forward movement counts!

The first prompt is New Year's Resolutions or one word. A lot of artists, sites...choose 1 word to represent the year. The idea is to strive toward or focus on that word as we all improve ourselves for next year. I am still working on doing this for the first time so I chose Resolutions. I also did not read-all the words- but they have an art journal idea as well and this prompts was to use watercolor and salt. Opps I will pay more attention next prompt!  

 Here is my Resolutions page. I started with multiple stencil images and modeling paste. Once dry, I made an acrylic spray for the background and added in Claudine Hellmouths Studio paints blending and shading with my fingers. I made an interesting discovery- spray mists do not work well on top of this paint. Normally I do not have problems using craft acrylic paint & than spritzing with a stencil either dylusions or glimmer mist. I am guessing the studio paints create a different finish and the mists run much more with this paint making the stencil image blurry. Interesting. I added some stamped border images coloring in with souffle pens. The text is THoltz's word play & Prima paper highlighted with oil pastel-love using that technique. I wanted tags on this page so I put them together and stamped a journal box to write my resolutions. The tag was spritzed a bit with glimmer mist. My favorite part of this piece is the clock, one of Tim's new stamps.

  I colored it and used glossy accents to highlight bits of it. Finally I added my year. It too was colored and covered in glossy accents- you can't see by the photo but it is glossy and luscious.

Very excited to work on my next page is this book which conveniently the prompt we on the 30th so I can! I guess there are benefits to being slightly behind! What are you working on today?