La Calavera Catrina: Mixed Media Day of the Dead Painting

Here's my latest redone canvas. I thought I'd show you the before and afters. La Calavera Catrina is a companion piece to the Shadow Man I posted on Monday. Basically I took an old canvas that we'd painted on years ago, covered it in gesso and then spray-painted through stencils to add a little something to start with.

My next step was to add collage pieces, acrylic paints and pen work to personalize it. Then I splashed alcohol ink here and there to bring all the disparate parts together.

Then I started blocking out the main image and deciding what parts to keep and what t conceal. 

I imagined her as a Painted Lady Calavera so I left her chest designs exposed but covered over a lot of the stenciling on her face.

Her mouth and necklace are two of my favorite parts.

I used caran d'ache neo colors for most of the drawing. They blend into the acrylic paint beautifully and provide their own shading when they smear. 

Her hat is decorated with My TCW Balzer Designs Feather stencil.

This canvas was originally painted by one of my boys in a spider web pattern with thick dimensional paint you squeeze out of a tube. You can still see the raised sections. To highlight the texture, I scraped off the acrylic paint and gesso down to the spray paint. I love the effect.

Thanks so much for visiting. Have a great weekend!

Making Treats Special with Washi Tape

I was bringing treats to a friend's celebration and wanted her to feel especially loved.

And you know, for us crafty types, nothing says love like tiny washi flags. LOL.

I wasn't going to post this because it's a well-known idea at this point but just in case, I thought I'd share anyway. All you do is trim the end off a skewer with scissors, sit it in the middle of a piece of washi tape,  line up the short edges and seal the tape into a two-sided tab, trim a notch in it for the flag shape. Done!

As far as cupcake toppers go, they are the most effective in my opinion. 

Don't they just scream, "PARTY"?

(does your fridge have a giant coil in it? It's so weird!)

These look great in mini sausages, holding finger sandwiches together or skewering veggies in a bloody mary. Put all that washi you're hoarding to good use and make someone's day :-)

Voodoo Man Mixed Media Canvas

During this year's season finale of Grimm we met a zombie raising vow-doo man. I love the iconic, inspiring imagery. 

From Grimm:

Here's the villain from Disney's Princess and the Frog:

And this picture was too amazing to pass up.

So I took a crack at my own Shadow Man.

I started with an old canvas and gessoed over the previous picture. While the gesso was wet I etched words and marks into it. You can see the water-reactive colors coming through and tinting the gesso. Yummy!

Once dry, I spray painted the whole thing. Lately I've really enjoyed painting a background entirely and then blocking out sections with a solid color until the picture emerges.

 A few close ups:

It's the first time I've tried flowers and I'm hooked. You'll be seeing more of these.

Here's how that texture worked out. I love etching into wet gesso. 

It creates so much visual interest.

The playing cards might be my favorite part :-)

My husband took this canvas and hung it in his office as soon as it was dry. What a sweet compliment !

Thanks so much for stopping by. 

Warmly,

~~~Nicole

Mailable Mixed-Media Cards

One of the most difficult things about making cards is mailability. You have to decide pretty early in the process if you're good with paying that extra dime, using a padded envelope or *gasp* reining in your creative ideas to fit the medium and it's mode of transportation. 

The tension between artistic expression and practicality is never greater for me than when card making. But, since I send most of the cards I make to Canada, I've decided that 

flat is phat and lumpy makes me grumpy. 

LOL. No. I haven't been drinking. I'm just a giant geek today :-)

Michelle Wooderson makes great cards and her designs are easy to flatten if you leave off the top layer - usually buttons, chip board etc. I've used her ideas as a jumping off point for all of these cards. 

Also, soft embellishments, like a modest amount of seam binding, are wonderfully crushable and can rarely be felt through the envelope. It's my go-to supply when I want to add a little softness to a flat(ish) card.

My go-to supplies for cards like this are washi tape, tags and gesso. They pack a lot of punch without adding thickness.

For these cards I employed one of my favorite little tricks, I stamped on pre-printed journal cards.

 The one on the right had the brown border and I added the stamped flower and sentiment. 

I love how the stamping integrates into the design.

This duo was made using the scraps on my craft table.

 I employed a similar design on both, but they ended up looking fairly different. 

Both cards needed a little more oomph so I colored around the tag with watercolor pencils and then softened it with water. This quick technique totally changed the look and feel of the whole card without adding any (literal) depth.

These are my favorite. Notice anything missing? 

I left the sentiments off so I could add them once I know what is appropriate. The style seems versatile enough to accommodate everything from a birthday to a feel better soon. 

~~~

How important is mailing ease for you? Do you make cards with mailing in mind or leave it up to the universe to sort out? Do you struggle with adding interest to relatively flat cards? What's your favorite technique for creating visual interest without bulk?

Handmade Canvas Watercolor Art Journal

Remember all that canvas I painted, cut up and made Prayer Flags with? Well, I found it when I was unpacking and since it's been a few months, I declared that project abandoned and decided to use the pieces willy-nilly to make some journals.

How many notepads, art journals, smash books, diaries etc. do you have going at once? I have about a zillion. Seriously. Because sometimes I want marker paper and sometimes I want watercolor. One book is for drawing, one painting, some are tall and skinny, others are HUGE (like 18x24 huge), one is square... it's endless. So I needed to make a bunch of journals each with specific paper needs. This one is watercolor.

I sewed a velcro clasp to help it stay closed once it's stuffed with mixed-media goodness.

Inside Cover:

I added in some paper scraps so each page had a little tag like Donna Downey's journals. I'll let you know if I like the extra little bit of space, texture and visual interest.

Inside Back Cover:

I made a pocket for holding my beloved Faber Castell Aquarelles

Back:

It was a fun project and I liked that I kept it simple. To be honest, I was considering stamping, doodling, being all crazy but there's something appealing to me about how basic and uncluttered it is. 

It's just a little hint to what you'll find inside.

Sorry I've been quiet lately. It's just been a really hard time. And now Father's Day is coming. My husband and I both lost our Dads this year (4 months for me, six months for him) and it feels so weird and sad not having them anymore. If you are missing someone this year please consider this a big hug from me. It's a terrible thing to say goodbye to family.

Frida Kahlo Mixed-Media Wall Art

It's Stampotique Designer's Challenge once again and I was so excited when Sarinda chose text paper to be the theme for their 101st challenge.

I LOVE text paper and I rarely do any projects without it. Hooray!

I thought it would be fun to make another Modern Girl, this time using Frida Grande.

After stamping her head and shoulders on book paper using Staz-On ink, I drew the rough shape of a blouse on deli paper, using it like you would tracing paper. 

Then I cut out the blouse from an embellished index card.

For her skirt I made a mono print using my Gelli Plate and layered long strips of the painted paper to form the skirt. I was going for a boho-formal vibe which I felt was consistent to what I've seen her wear in photos.

Then I added jewel and pearl embellishments.

The quote:

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.

~~~~- Frida Kahlo

Thanks so much for visiting my blog today. It's my last week as guest designer for Stampotique and again, I truly couldn't be more honored to have the privilege. 

Note: Some of you eagle-eyed blog readers may notice there are two different spellings of, "Frida" shown in the pictures. When I printed the quote I was working from an official Frida Kahlo website and her birth name had the 'e' in "Frieda" but the spelling she used professionally drops the 'e'. I went back and forth and finally decided to correct the art. Some of the pictures are from before, some after. For the final work I went with the commonly used, "Frida Kahlo"

Art Journal Page Featuring Stampotique

(click to see this full-sized)

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Hope your week is going well. We're busy unpacking and getting ready for our trip back to Canada next week. It's exciting to see the house coming together.
I'll share pictures as soon as I can find my camera ASAP

This week Kim picked the challenge over at the Stampotique  Designer Challenge Blog and would you believe it's their 100th challenge? Huge congrats to everyone involved. It's one of the few challenge blogs I can't wait for each week and I play along with regularly.

The  SDC Challenge 100  theme is, "Anything Goes" and I LOVE being able to just mess around and see where inspiration takes me.

It took me to my art journal. Surprise. Surprise.

On the left side I used Beauty Verse on a mixed media tag that features spray ink, stenciling, french dictionary text and messy stitching with black thread. 

The base of the page has layers of paint, stencils (fragmented flowers is one), stamping and Neocolor II and I brought it all together with a tiny bit of striped wash tape. 

For the right side, I built the base up with paint, stencils, spray and music paper. 

 I stamped Heart Throb on a Handmade layers tags from Elle's Sudio and colored him with copics. Stamping on pre-made (printed) tags is one of my favorite short cuts. What you lose in control over the paper you more than gain back in the illusion of complexity.

Doesn't it look like the red chevron at his feet is washi tape and the blue dotted 'stamping' to his left is also the printed tag. The "no. 12' too. In reality, all I added to the tag was Heart Throb and the red splatter. 

Isn't Heart Throb just the most loveable stamp? I'm smitten.

To match things up nicely I added the other half of the ripped piece of striped washi tape above the focal image. I think that sort of symmetry brings a lot of balance to an art journal page.

Speaking of balance, did you notice how the two sides are very different but the weight of the images is about the same, the colors are repeated (blue on the left in amongst the orange and red and the yellow on the right)

Also in addition to the striped washi tape,  I had manilla tags on both sides as well as red paint splatters.

Sometimes art journal pages can get a little crazy - and that's awesome - but if you are looking for something a bit more calm to look at, or you want to make sure your quote gets as much attention as your focal image, you can do that with weight and symmetry and you don't have to sacrifice fun painty layers. 

Thanks so much for popping by.

Warmly,
~~~Nicole