Ranger Eggs

Ranger has a fun challenge on their blog! Decorate eggs in any of their four signature designers, Tim Holtz, Dina Wakley, Dyan Reaveley and Wendy Vecchi's, style and download pics and be eligible for prizes! I picked up some plastic eggs at the Dollar Store and have had a couple of creative days. 

My first one is Tim Holtz inspired. After all, I JUST took a class with him at the fabulous Whim So Doodle! I started with a piece of his linen textile and applied Texture Paste thru the Speckles stencil all over the fabric trying to mimic the candy Robin's eggs. Once dry, I applied various colors of Distress Crayons and smudged with my finger. I need to be less aggressive with smudging with my finger on a bumpy surface like Texture Paste though, since I caused a blister to rise on said finger!! Once this was complete, I covered the egg with the fabric. The I used some of the Lace Trimmings and colored some Crinkle ribbon with Distress Stains. Once that was dry, I fashioned it into a bow and attached it to the top of my egg. Then I went through my Idea-Ology stash and added a few hanging trinkets to finish off the egg.

Second up is an egg in the style of Dina Wakely. I used her heavy body acrylic paints to paint the egg. Then I applied more paint thru her leaves stencil and also added some paint cap circles. I painted one of her Scribbly Birds with her heavy body acrylic and added it to the egg. 

 

SDC228-Hues of Red and Pink

It's Wednesday and that means it's time for SDC228! Sue is our hostess this week and she had this to say about the challenge.

 "With Valentine's Day around the corner we have all seen hues of reds and pinks, I challenge you to create a Stampotique Valentine's Day creation inspired by reds and pinks"

I used Distress Paints in Candied Apple, Picked Raspberry and Victorian Velvet for my background. Then I used Dina Wakely's  hearts stencil and used the same three colors from Distress Ink Pads and a blending tool to stencil hearts here and there. Schmurfy and Polka Dot Dog play the roles of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and the quote is straight out of the 70's! 

 

Stampotique Designers Challenge SDC 201

Astrid is our hostess this week for SDC 201  and she wants us to"Give Wings" to whatever stamps we use.

With the monumental Supreme Court ruling this past week on all 50 of the United States having to allow and recognize Gay Marriage, and why can't it just be "marriage", I decided I'd do something to recognize this. 

Working in my small Dyan Reaveley journal, I used Dina Wakley's wonderful Heavy Body Acrylic Paints for my base, then added some stencil work which I highlighted with my White Signo Uniball pen. I made my own wonky houses with some Gelli Prints I had laying around. I used Roc Nicholas' Dog and Stacked Love stamps and added wings to both with her Flying Love stamp. The wings have glitter on them, just because I needed some sparkle somewhere and they are also pop-dotted to give them some dimension. 

 

Compendium of Curiosities III-Distress Watercoloring Part 2

January's not even over and the year is already flying past! Can't believe it's been two weeks since the last CofC challenge!

This time over at Linda's we are watercoloring and you really need to go see what the Curiosity Crew has done with this challenge! Yep! We've gone back to our kindergarten days and are coloring. But with Distress! And you know by now that I can't tell you HOW we do it. You gotta go to Tim's and get your own copy of his fabulous book so you too can do these wonderful techniques! Speaking of Tim, he and Mario have put together a wonderful gift box for one lucky player. And The Funkie Junkie is providing a shopping spree for another lucky player.

I decided to do Valentine's Day with some traditional and non-traditional colors. And with CHA happening last week and all of the Ranger designers in the house at the Convention Center in Aneheim, CA, I decided to pay homage to all with this challenge. So there is a little of Dina, Dyan, Tim and Wendy (in alphabetical order!) on my tag. I used Dyan's Spray Inks for my base. Then I used some Wendy Translucent Embossing Paste thru Tim's Hearts stencil. Dina's Collaged Hearts stamps using the  Distress watercolor technique and a rogue,  Roc Nicholas Stacked Love stamp also done in the Distress watercolor technique. A few Chit-Chat stickers (highlighted with Diamond Stickles!), an enameled tag with remnant rubs (I "borrowed" Candy's technique and scratched away some of the parts of the remnant rubs before I rubbed them on the enameled tag) and some black Fude Ball highlighting around the hearts complete my tag.

12 tags of 2010-August

It's time once again for Tim's 12 tags of 2014. You can find his sample tag here.

I wanted to play with Dina's All The Gals stamp set, so that was my starting point. I used a few of the words from the stamp set as well. I used the film strip to highlight one of the words. 

My fingers are inky and I am happy!

 

Say "yes"

I've been working on these two pages in my Dina Art Journal for over two months now. Life kept getting in the way, but I was needed, so my art had to take a back seat. I didn't know where I was going when I first started laying down ink and paint, but I would do a layer, get interrupted and walk away. This went on for two months. Then the other day, Dina did a video using her new acrylic paints and posted it to her blog and she used her Scribbly Birds stamp set, so that was the inspiration behind the birds. Then I found this fabulous quote and knew I had to say "yes!" 

 

12 tags of 2014-March

Where did February go? I know it's the shortest month of the year, but dang!

Oh well. Time for Tim's March Tag of The Month. This month, we are using a technique that we learned in Creative Chemistry 2 and is also in the brand spanking new Compendium of Curiosities III called Ink Smudging. It is a really simple technique and give a shadowy effect to your stamping.

I used Tim's Regal Findings stamp set with the tree and Dina Wakley's brand new Scribbly Birds stamp set and sentiment. There is a tiny egg at the bottom that's pretty hard to see and it is a discontinued CTMH stamp set called Easter Eggs.

12 Tags of 2013-September

The calendar may say it's September, but it's still blazing hot here in Florida! We are still approaching 90 degrees every day with our summer cool us off afternoon thundershowers slowly waning away. It's been a wet summer for us, but we needed the rain.

Tim's got a GREAT tag this month! It uses his new layering stencils. I just took a class last night at Whim So Doodle in St Pete with the always fabulous Dina Wakely and got 6 of the I think 10 stencils that are available. So this morning I got inky again after being very inky last night!

I started with Distress Stains in Wild Honey, Peacock Feathers and Peeled Paint and then followed along with Tim's instructions for layering the different stencils. The ones I didn't have that he used, I jsut used others out of my ever growing stach of stencils. And taking a cue from Tim's lead, I punched a hole in all of my stencils this morning and put them on a book ring and will get some cup hooks they next time I am out and hang them where I can access them easily. Then they are out of the way and I'm not bending them up!

I've got a couple of "Manly" birthdays coming up, so I used the new Brett Weldele/Tim collaboration stamp set, The Chemist, for my main image.

Silhouette Mermaids

Don't fall over from shock! Two posts in the same week from me is hard to believe lately.

I got all 6 of Dyan's new Spray Inks and her new Ocean Backgrounds and Under The Sea stamp sets last month when Whim So Doodle got them in. And when I was there last month for Dina's class, I got HER silhouette masks. I combined the two since Dina and Dyan love each other so much and played in my Dyan Journal. I love the vibrancy of Dyan's new inks. So lush! The White Linen ink is how I achieved the look on the silhouettes. And the stamps are pretty fun to play with as well. I decided to turn the silhouette lady with legs into a mermaid! There's also lots of Signo Uniball White pen work around all of the sea creatures and stencils.

Ranger Contest

There is a Contest going on thru the 25th over on the Ranger blog. And of course I had to try my hand at it! The challenge is to use Ranger products in Valentines Day colors. And while my tags aren't Valentines, I do have a couple of co-workers having birthdays this month so I used the colors and opportunity to make a birthday tag for each of them.

I started with Tim's new Distress Paints in Fired Brick and Spun Sugar on the tag and misted pretty heavily with water to get the paints to move around. Then I dried the tags and used one of Dina's stencils with Picket Fence Distress Paint and one of Dyan's stencils with Barn Door Distress Stain. Added a bit of black to the tag with a spray ink top smooshed into some of Dyan's Black Marble Spray Ink. I then used one of Tim's new Mini Blueprint Stamps  on watercolor paper and used my Distress Markers to color everything but the flame and that is Stickles for that bit of bling! I used Fired Brick and Black Soot Distress Paints to paint the numbers with and left a bit of the silver showing on each. The 17 and 26 are the dates of the two girls birthdays. I used Tim's idea for using a piece of Tissue Tape folded in half and crumpled to make my "ribbon" with.

Dina at the Doodle

I had the pleasure of taking a Dina Wakely class last week at Whim So Doodle in St Pete. If you've never taken a class with Dina and ever get the chance, I highly recommend you do. Not only is Dina a great lady, but she's also a "no rules" sort too, which makes her A-OK in my book!! Also joining me was my new "craft class" buddy Donna Gibson and we got deliciously inky and painty together.

We made an interactive art journal-y piece that I finally got finished up yesterday. I find it quite amazing that some of my layers of paint from class over a week ago are still sticky. Hoping that as the acrylic cures that the sticky-tackiness goes away. The lady on the front is my first foray into Dina's "magic pencil" as she calls it. It's pretty cool in that it goes on like a pencil, but once you wet it, it turns into more like ink. The trick is not to wet all the lines but to leave some of them still looking like pencil. As we were finishing up for the night, Dina was telling us to make one something that would be the "flow" between all of our pages. She like circles. And she spotted a piece of art on the wall that had birds on it. And she said, "Take this picture. You think you can't draw but I bet all of you think this bird is cute. You can draw this bird. Just try it." So I did! He is the bird at the bottom right hand corner of the third picture. The little yellow one. So the birds are my "flow" from page to page. I came home and drew three different size birds. I cut them out and used them as a template and cut about a gozillion out of old book pages and a page that we also created in class with acrylic paint, spray inks and stencils. I used the magic pencil around them as well. There are also a few bird quotes on the pages. Dina uses a big loopy script on her art that you can kinda make out a word here and there, but not every word is meant to be read. So I tried to follow that lead and mine aren't necessarily going in the "right" direction, but that's the way I wanted it to be. Oh, and the orange piece on the second page? That spins and has four different stamped images around the circle.

Had a great time, Dina. Come back and see us soon!

Accordian Book

Dina did a wonderful tutorial last week Here at Stampington and I HAD to play! I started with Fresh Lime and Cut Grass Spray Inks. Then followed along with the rest of Dina's instructions, making it my own of course!

Halloween Out of the Journal

I felt a need to make my last canvas for Dina's Out of the Journal challenge something Halloween-y. I started with a page from an old songbook that I picked up at the thrift store and crumpled it up, then opened it and used Vintage Photo Distress Ink all over it. Then I painted over the distress with neon green and orange and black just to tone that neon down a little bit. I cut out
t!m's 'Brolly man and cut his head off (!) and used one of t!m's grungeboard skulls and used Picket Fence Paint Dabber to paint it. I added some black tulle here and there on the canvas. Made my own template for the overhanging tree since I don't have one and schmeared modeling paste thru my template. When I painted the limbs brown, I guess it reacted with the other colors underneath and with the modeling paste because it turned purple. And the more brown I applied, the more purple it got. So I'm goin' with purple tree branches! Then to kinda cover up some of the purple, I added some cheesecloth that I tore into strips for "spider webs", then I stamped and cut out a few of Dyan's spiders  from Bits of This. A couple of the spiders are black widows with their red sparkle bellies! The cat in front of the house and the bats are also from Bits of This stamp set.

This has been fun Dina! Hope you do it again next year.

Love

It's week 4 at Dina's Out of the Journal challenge. I went really simple this week. John keeps telling me that less is more, so I thought I'd try it and see what I could come up with. I used a piece of scrapbook cardstock that I wasn't real crazy about and gesso'd over it along with the rest of my canvas. I dripped some Distress Stains in Vintage Photo and Crushed Olive along the outside edges. Used a graphite pencil around the cardstock to make it stand out a bit. The heart and wings are cut from a Tim Holtz Sizzix die using GrungePaper which I painted with Paint Dabbers. The Love banner was done with Maya Road pennants and I stamped the letters on cs and applied them with Glue and Seal. The flower on the bottom is from some mesh ribbon that I whip-stitched and gathered to make the flower and used a bling-y embellishment from my stash. Simple, but I kinda like it!