Skype Collaboration - Wooden houses

It's been so wonderful to have skype sessions with my two lovely friends Nikki (Addicted to Art) and Alison (Words and Pictures) during lockdown and really it's been the only time I have sat and created anything. I've spent so much time in the garden and, since we have been allowed out more, Ken and I have spent at least two days a week visiting National Trust places and beautiful gardens, so between that and walking on our local Ranges to try and keep fit (a bit!!) there really hasn't been much time left. 

When wondering what we could do for this session I showed the girls some little houses Ken had cut me from wood and we agreed we'd each have a set of three and couldn't wait to see the outcomes.

As I worked on the painty layers and decided to add some small windows and doors I began to get the feel that these belonged in a farm yard, what do you think?

Photo taken outdoors in the garden.

Process steps

*Seal with gesso using a palette knife to spread it over.

*Scrape cobalt blue and grey acrylic paints randomly over the walls and dry.

*Sand the sides.

*Scrape on some resist paste and give a coat of white chalky paint and gently heat to wipe away leaving some of the previous colours showing through.

*Use a blending tool and foam to add some yellow oxide and tita buff , both mixed with a little glazing medium - this ages the paint a bit.

* Rub with some dry kitchen towel, a wet wipe and buff the walls before scraping some white chalky paint randomly down all the sides.

*Paint the roofs black.

*Sand the edges again and rub in some brown distress ink.

*Outline where you want the windows and doors with a pencil then cut away the paint layers with a sharp knife. Darken them by using sharpie pens.

*I knocked in two rusty nails for chimneys.

Photo taken indoors in a light tent. They could almost be in a snowy setting.

Side view straight on.

Photo showing side windows

Nikki's version. I love the gorgeous tissue layers, the beautiful bright colours and the  sequencing of the phrase over the three layers.

Alison's version. These are very much in her beautiful shabby, cottage garden style and the added stamping, painted flowers and rusty elements really bring them to life.

Please click the links to be transported over to see more details of these fabulous wooden house sets.

xxx

More 'Lockdown' creative time

Thank you to Alison (Words and Pictures) and Nikki (Addicted to Art) for another fabulous creative and chatty session on Sunday. We all worked on our journals with me creating a panel to add to a collage in my vintage journal.

I have to say having a couple of crafting buddies who ca get together in this way gives us a very therapeutic window of time in this pandemic lockdown and provides us with an opportunity to catch up and enjoy just being with other people we know and love.

The background panel started with a layer of tinting base scraped across a piece of card with some washes of burnt sienna, raw umber, paynes grey and titan buff and dried before adding the stars. These were created with one of Tim's shifter stencils and the above colours as well as quinacridone gold, raw sienna. burnt umber, carbon black, titanium white and pyrrole red. I used a small blending tool and foam to layer the colours through randomly.

I started collecting some pieces together to begin the collage .....

...... working just on the panel to begin with. 

When I was happy with that I then brought together more oddments to build the page collage. All of the bits are from snippet boxes I keep, both of papers, words, fabrics and die-cuts. I love using up leftovers in this way.

If you have a moment please pop over to see the fabulous designs by my lovely intrenet companions.

Nikki

Alison

xxx

A shorter Skype session with friends - mixed media board

Last Saturday my great skyping buddies Nikki (Addicted to Art) and Alison (Words and Pictures) and I met together for a short, just for fun 'do what you want', session to keep our hand in with creating and making and at the same time had a lovely catch-up.

I decided to use four words to work with that come from the first four days of the Creative Expressions FaceBook Mixed Media Mayhem challenges for May. Bright, Crackled, Stencilled and Distressed.

I created a background of brayered layers of Andy's chalk paints and white gesso adding in some stamping (that more or less got covered up :o) ).

The CREATE was stencilled using white texture paste and when perfectly dry I replaced the stencil and dabbed some of the chalk paints over it to help it blend with the background and outlined it with white posca pen. 

I painted the industrial wing with the  mustard and ocean breeze paints, let it dry then scraped some clear crackle glaze in random places. When that was dry I painted on white antiquing cream, left it to dry and rubbed away to reveal the cracks. Next I stamped with the grey haze.

A small round circular piece of Tando greyboard was painted with grey haze and titanium white paint mixed and Andy's eye transfer rubbed on.

The flaming heart was painted with grey haze, wash od the haze and white dabbled on, stamped with white tinting base and then splattered with ocean breeze and haze mixed.

I just used my fingers to add layers of the paints to the ring and splattered with grey haze.

      

Once put together =

It would be great if you popped over to see the other two projects - we had no theme this time - just to do what we liked, so these are very different. Here are their sneak peeks.

Nikki

Alison

xxxx

Products used

Andy Skinner Chalk Paints by Creative Expressions - Ocean Breeze, London Brick, Grey Haze, Mustard Seed.

Andy Skinner embellishments by Tando Creative - Industrial Wings, Flaming Heart

Andy Skinner stencil (Inspire) and stamp (Create)

Andy Skinner Transfers - Poe Diversity

DecoArt - Clear Crackle glaze, White Gesso, Tinting base, White Antiquing Cream, Titanium White Media acrylic paint

Out of limitations comes creativity - Skype session

Last Friday I had another fabulous skype crafty session with lovely friends Nikki Acton and Alison Bomber.  We have these sessions every now and again where we capitalise on having a longish space of time to work cooperatively together. Our previous encounters have seen us choose the 'next steps' in turn but Nikki pushed us to do something completely different this time. We agreed to work on tags and to collect our materials together first and then allow ourselves the freedom to just create with the limited supplies.

Each of us could pick two things to work with. It went like this - Nikki - 4 colours of paint,  Alison - a stamp set  Brenda - a stencil, Nikki - any item purchased/acquired recently, Alison - 4 colours of ink,  Brenda - your choice of die-cuts/punches. 

We gathered our choices together and showed each other what we had chosen and also agreed we could have a wild card to choose one other thing along the way and each of us could you each others' choices as well as our own. These ended up with Nikki choosing a white posca pen,  Alison chose Words  and I chose rub-ons.

Here were my choices -

Andy Skinner stamps and paints

Tim Holtz dies/die-cuts

And so off we went creating our own masterpieces, deciding our own steps as we went along and  even though we were in lockdown, we could still enjoy each others' company.

I took a few photos straight from the desk, so not the best!

The tags were sealed with the white paint, blended with  grey haze and brayered with mustard seed.

Next I used a palette knife to scrape on titanium white and then mixed some of that with leftover grey haze and splattered it all over before again using the brayer and white.

I used my stencil and created patterns on each tag using different colours and used the stamps also with paint to add more interest

I brayered a little more white, sanded the edges and blended in burnt umber drawing ink.

I took the die-cut wildflowers and used all the paints to create washes to colour them up and I also brayered white over a few of the blooms.

The borders were give the same treatment as the flowers and I die-cut the wreaths from coredinations papers.

As we were coming towards the finishing stage I used words as chosen by Alison and some rub-ons that I chose as my wild card.

We all agreed we could add some twine in the tag holes and once finished I found there was only one thing I didn't use and that was the bird die.

Thank you to both Alison and Nikki for their time and contributions to the day and making it fun to create with each other on video calling.

If you would like to see both their finished tags you can find them here

Nikki

Alison

 Please pop over and leave some love.

xxx

                  

A crafty day with friends.

What is better whilst we are in self isolation and, for us, a complete lock down, than to craft with the added bonus of doing it in the company of two lovely friends. No we didn't meet up in one of our houses or rent a room somewhere, in this amazing digital age we can connect over the internet and enjoy each others company on a Skype Day.  Five hours of nonstop crafting with fun and laughter, chats to catch up and some silent concentration as we focused on our projects in front of us.
I ended up very happy with the outcome.

We didn't make any plans ahead of the session, although that morning I decided to use a large mdf board (40x30 cms) and I looked at my Pinterest colour palette board to choose the paints I would work with.

From there, and our collaborative style of making the session work, we began.

Process Steps

1. Seal the substrate - I used a coat of tinting base.

2. Alison - Use tissue paper and/or tissue tape.
I used some of Tim's typography collage paper.

3. Nikki - Use a stencil for some texture.
DecoArt make a fabulou large baroque pattern that I used with modeling paste.

4. Brenda - Add some text/number stamping in any gaps.
I took a couple of small stamps to use with black archival ink.

5. Alison - Add more than one colour paint in any way you'd like to.
I used heirloom, lace and primitive chalky finish paints by dabbling and spritzing, then I blended chestnut, restore, everlasting and cherish to add more brighter and darker tones.

6. Nikki - use something to create a resist.
I randomly rubbed Andy's resist paste over different areas.

7. Brenda - use a colour medium to reveal your resist areas.
I went back to the everlasting chalk paint mixed with oddments of colours left over and brayered through, dried and rubbed back to reveal some of the darker elements beneath.
8. Alison - add some more stamping but not text and numbers.

Again a random small patterned stamp used with the chalky finish paints.

9. Nikki - Select a focal point and gather elements together.

10. Brenda - Alter/colour up/prepare elements for your focal point/s.

11. Alison - highlight or refresh the original background before adhering the embellishments.
All I really felt I needed to do here was to splatter a little watery white to add just a little more interest.

As always when we have one of these sessions our own inimitable styles shine through and even though we've all taken the same steps, our choices and decisions have made each project unique and incredibly different from the others.
Please take a look at Alison's and Nikki's sneak peek photos and pop over to their blog to see the full project outcomes, you won't be disappointed.

Alison

Nikki

Another last look at my piece.

xxx