Archive for March, 2009
Friday, March 27th, 2009
I’m totally obsessed with bird images lately and of course I’m always going to try to work a fairy in somewhere 🙂 so I decided to put the two together in my latest set of ATC’s. The base is dark brown cardstock and vintage music sheet and I added a vintage image of a bird with a little fairy princess wearing a crown sitting on the birds back. I wanted the bird sitting on a nest but couldn’t find a good image of a bird nest and don’t have a stamp the right size but I did have some fake grass so I took a small amount and squished it into a sort of nest shaped, I think it really added alot of dimension and realism to the cards. I also wanted some text so I took very thin strips of white core cardstock and ran them through my label maker and then sanded the letters so they’d show up better.
“Fly Away”
“Take Flight”
“Soar High”
Tags:ACEO, artist trading card, ATC, bird, fairies, fairy, flight, fly, music sheet, nest
Posted in ATC | 4 Comments »
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
One of my favorite companies for collage supplies is Artchix Studio, you can check out their website here:
http://www.artchixstudio.com
and the owner Helga has a wonderful blog as well: http://www.myartisticlife.typepad.com/ where she has art challenges and her current one is a Paris theme so I thought I’d post one of soldered collage pendants for this challenge. If you have a blog you might like to participate as well, see her blog for more info.
I love Paris as a theme and for this piece I used a page from a vintage French text book for the background and layered on top an image of the Eiffel Tower on black cardstock and then added an image a couple in love and the word “love” cut from a vintage book. I also stamped a postage cancellation onto the front piece of glass itself using Staz-On ink. The Eiffel Tower and couple images are both from Artchix collage sheets.
Tags:artchix, challenge, Eiffel Tower, France, jewelry, love, Paris, soldered
Posted in Announcements and Acknowledgments, Collage Jewelry | 5 Comments »
Friday, March 20th, 2009
I recently got a super cute stamp set of forest animals and made some Artist Trading cards with them. I layered brown and black cardstock and then added a layer cut from a vintage children’s story book and stamped tiny stars on the book paper. Then I stamped the images, cut them out and mounted them with foam tape and then added Tim Holts’ distress Stickles glitter glue to each image. It adds a nice bit of color and chunky glitter but it’s more of an aged glitter look like German glass glitter than more traditional “sparkly” glitters, it’s really fun to use. Just a note I find it takes quite awhile to dry though so keep that in mind when using it.
“Sing” The first one is a deer in the forest, I stamped a tree trunk onto a scalloped I die cut and added a cute bluebird in the tree.
 “Frog Prince” This next one is an adorable frog, I added a big gold crown to him. I stamped the crown on a thin metal gold sheet and then embossed it with a stylus tool then cut it out.
“Whoo?” The last one is an owl, he’s sitting on a stamped branch with cut out paper leaves.
Tags:ACEO, animals, artist trading card, ATC, deer, frog, glitter, owl, prince, stamped, stickles, tim holtz, woodland
Posted in ATC | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! We always celebrate in my family because we’ve got a lot of Irish ancestors and it’s also my brother’s birthday. When we were little we always left a piece of cake out for the leprechauns 🙂
Sadly I don’t have anything green to share but instead it’s blue. It’s a bird shrine box. I took a small wooden box with a hinged and latched lid that also has a wire screen in the front and painted it blue then used Tim Holtz’ crackle paint and distress inks to age the box. I added a tiny tag to the front door with the word “fly” cut from a vintage book. Inside I made a tiny collage from an image of a blue jay on some vintage music paper and over the door added the words “three blue eggs” also from a vintage book. My favorite part is the tiny wire nest I made and glued inside. I took a very long piece of thin blue wire and ran three blue speckled beads onto the middle and just started wrapping the wire around and around and then pushing it down around the sides of the beads to form a nest shape. It’s the first one I’ve made and I think I’ll probably be going to get lots of wire to make more:) Then finally I glued three vintage game piece to the bottom for feet.
Tags:3D, altered, bird, blue, blue jay, box, collage, crackle, egg, nest, shrine
Posted in 3D and Assemblage, Altered Boxes, Misc. Collage | 2 Comments »
Friday, March 13th, 2009
Here’s a pretty little collage I made this week. I got some really neat pewter crown charms and added one to an image of a sweet girl along with the word “queen”. I mounted her on paper from a vintage Italian book and black and brown cardstock. I aged a very cool metal embossed frame I had with some brown ink and mounted it all on a piece of chipboard for some stability and added a metal hanger to the back. I think it’s got a simple but very elegant look to it.
Tags:charm, collage, crown, embossed, frame, metal, mixed media, pewter, queen, wall hanging
Posted in 3D and Assemblage, Hanging Collage, Misc. Collage | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2009
I really liked the look and feel of my bird cage ATC’s and wanted to do something similar on a larger scale so I did a 5″ x 7″ on a canvas board. The background is vintage music sheet, the cage is stamped on a transparency sheet and the bird is an image from an old nature guide. There’s alot of embellishments on this one including the tiny tag tied with hemp string, an old cancelled German postage stamp (I added another stamped cancellation to it myself) a skeleton leaf (which is a leaf that has had everything but it’s “bones” bleached away), a piece of old wooden measuring stick, a brass book page marker and a piece of tattered fabric that I stamped an Emily Dickinson quote on. I named the piece “Hope”.
close up:
Tags:art, bird, cage, caged, canvas, collage, emily dickinson, hope, music, quote, sheet, vintage
Posted in Collages on Canvas | 5 Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I love Alice in Wonderland, the books, the movie, the artwork, it’s one of my favorite inspirations. Awhile ago I got some stamps of Tenniel’s illustrations from Alice in Wonderland from a company that is sadly no longer in business so I’m glad I got them when I did. Â Anyway I got them out the other day and made some cool Artist Trading Cards (ATC’s) with them.
All of them are 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ on a base of cardstock and vintage children’s book pages. The images were stamped and then colored using Prisma colored pencils and a blending solution called Gamsol (you can get it from Inky Antics: http://www.inkyantics.com/acc1.htm) you use an artists blending stump to blend and soften the color pencils, I love the look and control it gives.
The first one is the White Rabbit, holding his pocket watch. I stamped some clock images on the background page and added a real watch crystal with some real watch parts inside, they move when you shake the card 🙂
The next is Alice dressed as the Queen, wearing a gold crown and holding a golden scepter, I colored them with a gold gel pen so that they are a shiny gold. I also added some red roses (already painted red by the cards) and also a gold charm of a castle.
This last one is my favorite, I love the part of the book where Alice drinks from the bottles and grows large and then tiny. Here is Alice after she’s large looking at the bottle, it’s an actual tiny glass bottle with a cork stopper filled with tiny blue beads and glitter and I tied around a tiny tag that says “Drink Me”.
Tags:ACEO, alice, art, artist trading cards, ATC, collage, queen, white rabbit, wonderland
Posted in ATC | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
I recently got a really cool stamp set featuring bird cages from Catherine Moore: http://www.characterconstructions.com/ , I love her art work and her stamps are great!
I made a few ATC’s (Artist Trading Cards) with them. I started by making a base ( 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″) for my card from black cardstock and vintage music sheets, I then added a vintage bird image. Then using black Staz-On ink I stamped the bird cage on a transparency sheet and attached it to the card with tiny brads. I then stamped part of one of the words on a tiny tag, it says ” (cage ‘d” and tied some hemp string around the tag and added it to the card with foam tape. All three cards were done the same way except the one with the quote, I turned the transparency over and stamped in white Staz-On ink a quote from Emily Dickinson that says “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul”. I love old bird images and think these cards came out really neat.
If you don’t know alot about ATC’s here’s a helpful link:
 http://www.artist-trading-cards.ch/
Tags:ACEO, art, ATC, bird, birds, cage, caged, collage, emily dickinson, mixed media, small
Posted in ATC | 1 Comment »
