Tuesday 22 December 2009

Ice Birds

Having at last managed to set up a blog, I've made a little canvas with the themes of white and dangly bits for the Graphicus December Challenge. Whether I can work out how to link it will be another matter!




I started out with a 4x4 canvas and stamped a background pattern with gesso to get a bit of texture. I then used a baby wipe to apply white acrylic paint over the canvas. The background is completed by some patches of Ranger Rock Candy crackle paint with white rubbed in the cracks and a smear of Stickles for icy sparkle.


I stamped the birds onto Ten Seconds Studio metal using StaZon ink and went over the stamped lines with a teflon tipped tool to indent them. Then working from the back I embossed the bodies using a paper stump. I've added a little icy blue colour with sharpie pens and then swiped with white acrylic.


The stamps are from an Elusive Images Curly Birds plate, as is the bird cage which I stamped three times onto frosted shrink plastic using white Brilliance Ink. (I learned that direction matters when doing this. Images stamped across the plastic shrink in different proportion to those stamped lengthways, but you probably knew that!). I punched holes for threading before shrinking the plastic. The birdcages are threaded with beads onto nylon thread and hang from rings screwed into the bottom of the canvas.

Friday 11 December 2009

The First Post

Well here goes with my first post....
I had decided to enter the November challenge on the Graphicus blog to make something with a resist technique and/or metallic colour theme. Then I read the instructions and discovered I'd need somewhere to post a picture of my entry, hence this blog. Needless to say it has taken me ages to get to grips with creating a blog - I've spent far too long playing with the layout and colour options in Blogger - and so missed the challenge deadline and never even finished anything to enter.

My namesake at The Kathryn Wheel has recently posted about making an Art Calendar. I think I'll start one for 2010 so hopefully I'll have something to share soon. I've just to tidy the mess in the kitchen left from making 12 gifts for a Twelve Days of Christmas swap before I can start. We're opening the presents we swapped one per day from 12th so I'll have to keep them secret until Christmas as I don't know what day everyone will open my gifts.
So I've got something to show meanwhile here are my first attempts from a couple of years back at altered book pages for round robins run through the sadly now defunct AlterNatives group on Yahoo, with apologies for the poor quality of the scans (digital photos are something else I need to learn how to do)...

A page for a green themed book.














And a couple for alphabet themed books: