Life Path Challenge week 4

I'm up to week 4 of the Life Path Challenge at Tea on the Terrace I'm really starting to get into this now and the more pages in my journal I complete the more eager I am to continue. I'm enjoying the process of art journalling and at the same time I'm asking myself some important questions which I'll be able to look back over at the end. This weeks question is "What one thing do you plan to do this year which will matter in 10 years - eternity?" and my answer is simply to start running again.

I truly encourage anyone else to head over to Tea on the Terrace and try it out for yourself. Coleen provides you with the prompt each week it's up to you how you choose to answer it. You may make a journal entry, an altered book, tags or fat book pages - anything you like but at the end of a year you'll have a book full of answers to questions you may never have asked yourself.

Gothic Arch "Wedding"

I came across this photo of my parents a little while ago when I was sorting some photo's from my Grandmothers collection. I've been meaning to scrap it in some way for a while now and this weekend an opportunity came up in the form of a Gothic Arch.

The heart too is a brand new sizzix die cut which I hadn't used so it was a real treat to get to use it for the first time on this project. The heart was cut from a piece of red mount board and painted over thickly with gold acrylic paint. I dried the paint with my heat gun and in some places the paint bubbled up giving it a very distressed look.

This is my challenge this week on Gothic Arches

Creative inspirations card.

This is a card created for this weeks challenge on Creative Inspirations. The sketch was provided by Maxine and I'm sure it's one I'll be using again and again.

Go over and take a look at the other DT members cards and have a go yourself and you could be in with a chance to win $25 with Peachy Keen Stamps.


http://www.creativeinspirationschallenge.blogspot.com/

A new digital layout.

It's my week to set the challenge on Scrappy Accents and this week I've decided to challenge everyone to use book pages in their work.

I did this layout digitally but scanned the book page into the computer and created some die cut flowers for the page. I've written a small tutorial for Scrappy Accents for anyone who wants to make their embellishments using photoshop.

One mask, two pages.

Today I had fun creating journal pages. One was for The life path challenge on Tea on the Terrace and the other is for Scrap a la Fraise journal prompts.

This first one is for The Life Path Challenge and this weeks prompt is one favourite thing. So I didn't have to choose between the children and husband, I decide to eliminate them from the challenge, this meant that my favourite thing of course just has to be art!

The ghost image was made by stamping an image onto paper, cutting it out and laying it down as a mask. I had intended to journal into the space but decided to leave it as I liked the look of the naked book page underneath.

The second page is for the Scrap a la Fraise challenge to hand make your page elements. I decided that instead of throwing away the mask from the first project, I'd recycle it into the second one. It was covered in paint and glimmer mists and had quite a pleasing effect. The flowers are stamped onto book page and glued in and the lettering also came from the same book page.

DaVinci's man all pimped up!

This little ATC was made for the Wednesday Stampers challenge, set by Belinda which is to be inspired by Da Vinci.

I've always thought of this image as iconic and one day hope to own a stamp of it (this is printed out). The background is alcohol inks with a crackle stamp over it and the rest is collage and doodling. I pimped him up a bit with a little leaf for the sake of decency and gave him a fetching hairdo!

http://wednesdaystamper.wordpress.com/

Shabby Chic

This weeks challenge for Gothic Arches is 'Shabby chic'. I had so much fun doing this one and I hope it shows. It was crying out to be made in box card with lots of gesso, distress inks, and crackle paint. Not forgetting the by now usual bit of stitching over.

http://gothicarches.blogspot.com/

My Etsy shop.

At last I've managed to open an Etsy shop. At the moment I only have two things in it but that'll soon change.

I've cut the tape and I'm happy to declare the shop open!!

Design Team for Creative Inspirations

I'm happy to announce that I've been invited to join the Design Team for Creative Inspirations. I'm grinning from ear to ear and doing the happy dance as I type (difficult). It's a wonderful challenge site with a very talented team and I look forward to working with them all.

http://creativeinspirationschallenge.blogspot.com/

Wishes for 2010

For 2010 I'm going to embrace further the idea of keeping an art journal. I have kept one in the past but only added to it when the whim took me, which wasn't that often. My last one took two years to fill which just shows the level of my commitment to this art form. This year I've vowed to keep three.

The first is a project I'm following with a group called Scrap a la Fraise in France. Caroline is giving us bi-monthly prompts to decorate the pages. The second is with a good friend of mine called Coleen who lives in the Ukraine and has a blog site called Tea on the terrace. Her prompts are in the form of questions we should ask ourselves on a weekly basis. At the end of the year I should end up with a journal with lots of questions and answers about me. The third journal is my usual art journal, done as the whim takes me and filled with "whatever" pages.

It's only the beginning of january and I know it's alot to take on, so I'm well aware that some weeks will go by without anything being added to any of them, but as long as I'm prepared for that then it should be fairly relaxed.

This page above is the first question asked by Coleen which was asking what I can do to increase the joy in my heart and happiness in my life" and my response is to stop procrastinating and get on with doing rather than saying!! I'm good at saying, I could do that but bad at following through!!

So this year is the year of "go do it"!

The Wednesday stampers challenge this week is also to create a piece of art based on my wishes, so I've entered my page for the challenge.

Here are the links;
http://scrapalafraise.canalblog.com/
http://www.teaontheterrace.blogspot.com/
http://wednesdaystamper.wordpress.com/

From plastic bags to atc's.

A short while ago I posted the link to a great tutorial for fusing plastic shopping bags together to create mini album pages. I had a go at this technique with different results. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. I think the main problem was with my reluctance to turn the heat up on the iron resulting in some pretty poorly fused material.

Anyway, since I'd use most of my plastic up in bad experimentation, I used my only good piece to make some ATC's.

This first picture shows the reverse of the atc with all it's holes and pits but I really don't mind that too much as the result needs to be quite urban and decayed. I painted over with gesso before painting again with some acrylic paint.


I embellished with pictures and prettied the whole thing up with ribbon and flowers.

They were surprisingly easy to sew over even thought they were quite thick and tough.

The picture below shows a tear in the plastic adding to the interesting effect.

This picture shows some of the texture you get from the melted plastic.

Here's the link again if you fancy having a go at this technique.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9pe5oXYYxU

Aquamarine birthstone.

I think things are more or less back to normal now (whatever "normal" is) following the Christmas break. I'm glad to be back into the challenges again, one of them being the Gothic Arches challenge.

This week it's "Birthstones" as the theme and mine is an aquamarine for march. It's a colour which I do absolutely love but use rarely. So here's my arch for this week. Hope you like it.

http://gothicarches.blogspot.com/

Cold cold winter.

This is my take on the sketch provided by Tammy on Scrappy Accents. The criteria was to use lace, rhinestones, a circle and a paper clip or staple.

The pictures were taken recently on a weekend sledging in a field behind our house. This cold snap is certainly fun but the sub-zero temperatures are making my hands so dry and sore. I cover them in cream and aloe vera but nothing seems to help. I suppose it won't now until the spring thaw!

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year everyone and happy new decade.

I've a good feeling about 2010 and I'm sure many good things are going to come out of the coming year. One good thing is the start, today of my post as DT member at Scrappy Accents. This is the layout I submitted as part of the challenge.

I'm looking foreward to the next few months of challenges and getting to know lots of new people. Click on the link on the right and join up, say I sent you, and get to know the other members of the team.