Inspired By... Athanasia Papantoniou

Hello Blogland, today I am inspired by the wonderful art of Athanasia Papantoniou, who is a member of the Finnabair creative team as well as quite a few others. 

Here is the art journal page that inspired me.To expand on the thought of "Inspired By" if you are like me you get to see all the wonderful creative art out on Instagram, Facebook, blogs... Quite often I see art that completely inspires me to make the project or learn the technique. It is rare that I take the time to follow through on that brief flash of excitement! 

I made the point of following through on this one. In my busy schedule of designing it was a nice change to be the student. I did change the page up quite a bit, but do you thing it is a copy or different enough to be simply inspired by? 

I can't quite decide! Athanasia's blog post has a full tutorial & she also made a video so please go check it out here & hopefully you will play along!
You can find more of Athanasia's work on her blog Me and myself.

Art Journal Challenge Using Ann Butler Designs.

Today I am playing with Colorbox Crafter's stamp pads & Unity stamps both by designer Ann Butler. Her ink pads are unique as they are designed to work with fabric, wood & more. I of course must try & play to see what else they can do. I wanted to use them on paper but was in a mood for watercolor. What if I used them completely differently then what they were designed for? I was in for a pleasant surprise.  First here is my art journal page.

 The journaling is about our lack of planting this year. We have had a small veggie garden for the last 4ish years but realized that we tend to take vacation during the main harvest days. This spring we were super busy & decided to take the year off. In the end we couldn't take vacation- brilliant planning! This did make me realize just how tasty our homegrown tomatoes are and I really missed the ability to just go pick what we wanted for dinner. I am entering this page in the Word's & Paintery challenge (info at end of post). My photo journaling has the colors & quote from the challenge in it.

 Quickie tutorial. I took the back page of an art journal piece that had a newspaper base. Glued down pieces of paper that came home from school with Korean writing on it. Selected Colorbox colors that were similar to the challenge. What was awesome is even though these colors were not quite right when I mixed the brights with Desert Sand color they were exactly like the ones in the challenge!

I swiped the ink pad on a piece of deli paper & misted some water to use the inks as a watercolor. The technique worked surprisingly well and created a total watercolor look that was BONUS... waterproof when dry! The great advantage to this for future consideration is being able to have a permanent water color base on a project -hummmmm. To darken the colors just dry & add another layer of color or add less water to start with. 

For my embellies I simply stamped a few of Ann's 1" Diamonds & Plaid stamps by Unity onto book paper & punched a circle out of them. These were adhered & edged with distress crayon. Add some random stamping & finish off the piece with faux stitching. I wanted to stitch but that would have ruined the art work on the back of the piece so I heat embossed another of Ann's stamps with black and voila stitching!

My colors & theme were inspired by the Words & Paintery September Challenge. If you want to play along click on the above link, you have until the 15th of October to join in. Happy crafting!!!

I Want To Ride My Bicycle DIY

Today I am up to something a little different. I was given this super cool wood decor bicycle by Southern Ridge Trading Co.. to decorate. Inspiration is a funny thing sometimes. I could not figure out what to do with this project. A trick I have learned over the years is, when faced with this dilemma, rather than sit & stare at it is to move on to other things. That way my subconscious can do the work of figuring it out while I am getting stuff done. I set the bike up in my kitchen so I would see it a lot throughout the day. It took longer than usual, over a week for my subconscious to work out an idea. 

Here is my finished project. Sadly in my rush to get it in the mail I did not take a great picture. If you are at the Great Canadian Scrapbook Carnival in Calgary this weekend it will be on display! Lots of shimmery goodness right here. Head over to the Southern Ridge Trading co.. blog to see more. Also while you are there participate in our monthly contest to win chippie$$$!

Guest Blogger for The Crafter's Workshop!

So excited to be a guest blogger for The Crafter's Workshop! I have been a big fan of their stencils for ever and now I get a chance to share on their blog! I have a tutorial up with lots of pictures so go check it out!!! This project looks complicated but I have made the steps easy so you can make an up-cycled brush, pen, whatever holder too!

I have another post this month so keep an eye out we will be playing with canvas!

Cute SeaHorse Pen Holder

Hello Clay making fans, today we are putting together a cute seahorse pen holder. I have a full tutorial on the Resin Craft blog. 

This is a simple technique to achieve and a great way to make things like teacher gifts as you can customize them! Go check it out on the Resin Crafts blog!

Seth Apter Journal Play

How do we create a grungy, metallic art journal page?

Seth Apter has a line of stencils, stamps, and die cuts. I have taken a few classes with him & not only are his products unique and different he is a super nice guy and really good teacher! You can buy his products directly from his shop or in your local scrapbook &  paper arts stores.

The start of the adventure...

  Let's start with corrugated cardboard. Inexpensive & easy to find! Add a coat of gesso, lots of stenciling using flexible modeling paste. To get an idea of what this will look like go here. Once this was dry it was time to add some paint. I used DecoArt Media fluid acrylics and painted the background in varying colors of blue/teal, using a bit of Paynes grey with the blues. Once that was dry some random stamping in archival ink gave nice interest & texture. 

Have you always wanted to learn how to shade? 

 Using a fine brush I painted darker on the sides of the raised areas, blending the paint with my finger as I went. This gave some nice depth to the images. Using a hard piece of foam I hit the high points of the stenciled areas with Metallic Luster, this is one of my favorite techniques! Just adds that wonderful, shiny, metal look that is nice & grungy. I used a quote stamp of Seth's as a focal point. His products fit into each other which is too cool, leaving all kinds of options. 

Time for some die cuts! 

I had cut a bunch of shapes from gelliplate papers. Choices.... In the end I was feeling circle-ish. I simply took the 2 inside circles from the Robo Ring die, placing one inside the other and cut. This left me with 3 circle rings and a middle full circle, which I did not use. I stamped on these with archival ink. I also cut the same out of cardboard- about as thick as a cereal box. The trick is to run the die cuts through the machine 2x- as in forward and back (leaving the sandwich in place so the dies do not shift) to cut this heavier material. 

After distressing the edges so no cardboard shows through simply glue down the cardboard circles with a strong glue. I left off the pretty tops to keep the excess paint from getting on them. Fill in the circles with DecoArts crackle paste. When dry the paint on the bottom layer shows through the cracks. 

Let's add a pop of color!

I used fluid acrylic which is enough to color the paste but once dry doesn't cover the crack effect.  Once that was dry I glued my gelliplate cut-outs on top. 

Adding paint on the inside of the circles gave it that depth. Almost done! Adding a key after wrapping a copper metal coil around it and a tag that was painted and stenciled with the word enter. Voila! The tag covered the back pages tab which I had found distracting.

That's it! This was a super fun page to work on, although with all the modeling paste etc. I would work on it, set it aside, work on it. Tip: have a few projects on the go to prevent staring at wet paste willing it to dry faster. You do want to let these pastes dry naturally for maximum effect. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Leave me a comment if there is a project you would like to see on my blog!  

Supplies:

Seth Apter:

  die by Spellbinders- Robo Ring

 stencils by Stencil Girl:

-numbers, story time & urban outsiders 

stamps by Impression Obsession:

-context, journal coins & pattern play

DecoArt Media:

 Fluid Acrylics- cobalt turquoise,  cobalt teal, paynes grey, 

quinacridone burnt orange.

 Crackle Paste   

Metallic Lustre- copper kettle

Americana Acrylic- Lemon Yellow

Ranger: archival ink- jet black

Daler Rowney- black acrylic ink

Making an Art Journal Cover

I have a simple tutorial on the Southern Ridge Trading co.. blog, the making of an art journal. I started with an inexpensive composition book and...

voila!. Click on the link above to check it out. You can make one too in no time! This book is my #LSNED project, a yearly class with Shimelle Laine. It is a way to look at, reflect or as the title suggests Learn Something New Every Day in the month of September. I usually get the journal part done everyday and simply add in the photos in smash book style when I can. It is a fun project & now it has a nice cover!!

Creative Postcard Fun

Creative postcard fun with Canvas Corp Brands.  Our CCB Crew team did a postcard swap this summer which was quite fun! In fact it has inspired me to make a few extras to mail to family and friends. You can see the card I mailed to my swap partner here with a mini tutorial on how to make it. It is under the title Wanderlust Postcard by Karen Bearse.

Here is a similar one I did as I really loved the one I sent. The fun thing is this card is going to go into my 100 days project junque journal to remind me that this was one of the projects I did during that time.  The beauty about this kind of post card project is you can duplicate your original as a different person will receive your card so they can be quite similar. 

Here is the backside of the card. I added a stamp even though I am not mailing it because the postcard stamps are so pretty!! I even wrote a note to myself. Hop on over to the Canvas Corp blog dated Aug. 29th to see the cards other crew members did!