Hat's off to Paris!

I had to go to Paris on business on Sunday and have returned tonight (Tuesday).   While I was away I was thinking what I could do for the Hat's challenge at Three Muses and decided, in honour of Paris, to do a Zetti type person wearing the Tour Eiffel.  Content sorted, I just had to finish the work I had gone to do, come home and paint it.

Imagine my utter surprise when I opened the Air France magazine on the plane home and found - a photo of a woman wearing an Eiffel Tower hat!

Paris is as lovely as ever - tres magnifique!

I decided to change my plans and rather than draw her, I would put her in my art journal.  So today there is no painting or close ups, what you have here is a Zettie style art journal page, with a lady in a hat.  It's my art journal page of my trip to Paris this week.
The other collage elements are all from the Air France magazine and the background is sprayed with Dylusions inks in bubble gum pink, turquoise and lime green.
Doodling is with Sakura Gel pens and Sakura Souffle pens and also with a Sharpie, permanent marker.

Thanks for taking the time to look at what is basically my journal!

Rainbow Trout

Over the last week or so I have been playing with a negative space technique and have used it on this piece.  What it means is that I didn't paint the fish, I painted the space between the fish.  If that makes any sense.

The fish I didn't paint!

This is an A5 piece painted on high quality card stock.  I covered the entire substrate with various colours of translucent Golden Fluid paints.  I chose bright colours and, because the paints are translucent, they show the colour underneath when you paint over them.  (let them dry before you paint over)

As you can see below, it was really an exercise in covering the paper without creating muddy colours

Once it was dry I used a French handwriting stamp across the whole of the page in Archival French Ultramarine blue.  Using a pencil to draw the outline of the fish, I then outlined again in white paint before applying lots of Gesso to fill in the space between the fish.  I built up lots of texture but it's hard to see from the photo's.  In real life the white seems to have the texture of water swirling around the fish.

I then outlined the fish with a black permanent marker and applied some white dots using the end of my paintbrush.  

Most of my art is bound into books, but I really like this one so I framed it for a while. 

Credit to Andy Skinner for a video that got me playing with this technique.

Look into my eyes

For the last few weeks I have been working on a recycled mini book for a swap I entered.  It's been a lot of work but I've loved every minute of it.  The only thing missing was the cover image and so decided to use the Three Muses theme for this week - Eyes.

Recycled mini-book

 There are so many techniques and pages I won't go through them all here, but for those who would like to see all the pages you can view them on the Flickr slide show here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/83296776@N03/sets/72157632057873440/show/

The book is 1.5 inches wide, 2 inches tall and .75 inch thick.  It has 3 signatures of 2 pages each which has been hand sewn to the outside of the cover using waxed thread.  In addition to the book, is a book holder which is made in matching style also with an eye impression.

Inside Cover

The book is made from a frozen pizza box, off cuts of various papers, some scrap fibres and pieces of canvas.  Also included were some tiny pieces of art I had left over from making inchies and ATCs.  The book cover and book holder are made from printer paper, sprayed with inks and then collaged with tissue paper, stamped with an eye.

One of the inside pages showing the binding.

Book with open pages and the book cover

I also made a YouTube video of the book and describing each page that you can see here

My little Christmas angel

The challenge at Take a Word today is angels.  I always have such great things I want to do but time conspires against me.  I bought an artificial Christmas tree on Wednesday and we were looking for an angel to put on top.  This is my inspiration for my piece today, which I had lots of fun creating.

Oh Joy! I haven't had so much fun since last Christmas

The background is covered in 3 shades of water soluble wax crayon in green and then I sprayed over the top with some pearlex pearl powder in water to give it a shimmer.  Then I applied some Titan white golden paint through various stencils and stamped a checker board pattern in Ranger archival ink in coffee.

Next I did a direct to paper dragging across the whole piece with Distress Ink in Iced Spruce.

For the tree I stamped with Forest Moss and added Stickles in festive berries and starburst.  Next I stamped the wings on white card stock and coloured with Inktensils and also sprayed with the pearlex water.  Once the wings were dry I applied a little Golden Gel medium on the top and sprinkled on some DecoArt Glamour Dust to give a little sparkle.    I stamped the Stampotique boy onto the background in StayzOn and stamped him again onto white paper.  Using the Stampotique boy as a guide, I glued the angel wings to the background before colouring the white card stock version of the boy with Inktensils and gluing him over the top of the other layers.

The Christmas lights across the top are hand drawn with Stickles in Festive berries for lights.  The text is typed on my computer before being glued to the background.  I finished up by attaching a small red bell to the top of his hat!

A Swarm of.... what!

I was looking forward to lots of challenges this week and had lots of ideas, but as the days went by I became so busy at work there was no time for art.  For the  Three Muses Challenge where the subject is animals,  I had wanted to do a painting of a King Penguin, but knew I wouldn't have time this evening, so I went the quirky route and did what else...  a swarm of zebra!

I wonder if a swarm of zebra make the 'bzzzzzz' noise

My aim was for a pictured book style and painted the background in watery acrylic paint and tried to do some layers but hadn't used water colour paper, so the paint layers are not as many as I would have liked to do.

The baby zebra image was found on a wild life site and I printed out 13 of them in different sizes before colouring their white stripes yellow.  The wings are painted in Lumiere Halo Pink Gold,  cut out and glued to the background.  I thought the stamp 'Think and Wonder' from Artistic Outpost was the perfect match and completed the piece by stamping it in Ranger Coffee Archival ink.

It was dark last night when I had finished and I couldn't take photo's which didn't have big shadows on them.  Even at 8 am this morning there are still shadows from my lamp so apologies for the very bad photography.

Peek a boo!

I have always loved tribal masks and own a few that I hung on the wall.  A few years ago I decided to do a painting of a tribal mask from the Pacific Islands  (I lived there most of my adult life).  This is a piece that I've had hanging at home and I decided to post this, rather than do a quick painting of a mask for the challenge at Three Muses today.

I can see you!

The piece is painted in student grade acrylics on stretched box framed canvas and measures approx 60 cm x 50 cm.  I should print him out and use smaller versions in my journal pages!

I'm all heart today

I recently entered a jumbo ATC swap and I chose to do the theme 'hearts'  I produced three different types of techniques and put each one on a jumbo ATC.

The first heart is the faux metal / gold technique I further adapted and used in a recent piece.  I've have fallen in love with the burnt orange / turquoise colour combination lately.  So stunning in real life.  Here I used Golden fluid acrylics to mix up the colours before applying to the Matt board.

The second heart is rust technique, which isn't faux, it's real rust.  Its created by painting the heart with iron filings and then applying vinegar.

The third heart is faux tin, that I've also used on a piece recently.  It's a simple heat embossing technique that has the shine taken away by distressing with black acrylic paint.