Alice...

One of the first cards I received when I started trading ATCs was with an Alice in Wonderland theme, and it is one of my favorite themes so far. This one is for Amerasu over at iATCs for the July partner swap.

I'm thinking I should take a pic of my Alice collection and show it off, there are really amazing things in it :)

Home and Heart

Ok, last piece for the Mixed Media PAT over at iATCs - well at least until I get done with Mermaid #2- This one is for Shelly, and her theme was "Home is where the Heart is". I went with a whimsical style for this one, trying to make it fun and colorful.

*I started with a piece of fabric, the light blue with color circles on top, I read somewhere that you can add some sealer over the fabric to make it stiff and to avoid fraying. I had it already prepared and it saved me time.

*I sketched the shape of the house on top and added a couple of hands of gesso.

*I used my acrylics to paint the walls with bright yellow and the roof with a combination of red/orange/yellow.

*I outlined the house, roof and the shape of the heart with black ink.

*I added bronze dimensional paint inside the heart...I dropped the card face down on the floor when I was cleaning up, picked it up again and waited for it to dry before I can fix the boo boo.

*I added some white acrylic around the color circles in the background.

I'm still considering on adding a border with the same dimensional paint around the card...not quite sure yet.

Mermaid Fiasco

Yesterday I told you about how sometimes when I play with collage and mixed media I'm in for a bit of a gamble...sometimes it pays off, and sometimes you get this:


Meet the Mermaid Fiasco... This poor card started its life as a paper cut, which I was quite happy to try. I searched high and low for a piece of black paper and couldn't find any in my whole stash, quite brilliantly -yeah, right...- I decided to use a piece of blue paper.

I then started to work on cutting the design, which turned out to be quite time consuming and difficult at times.

I finally finished and started on the background, scrunged up white paper over cardstock and covered with blue metallic paint. I added the paper cut and it got completely lost over the background, I thought that I could outline it a bit and started adding white and black ink until I got to a point where I just had to step away and admit that this time I was way over my head... I'll have to start from scratch for this little beauty...ugh...

Portrait of a Fairy

Ok, so this is what I picture the portrait of a fairy looks like ;)
This one is for Deb.

*I started with a vintage playing card that had a character from one of Jane Austen's books -I cannot remember which character though-.

*I gessoed over the image, added light peach and purple squares of tissue paper all over the rest of the card, and finally rubbed a bit of metallic blue paint over it.

*I painted over the original image with my acrylics and added two butterfly wings from a rub-on I had lying around (I think I need to seal them though, so I can make sure it doesn't peel off)

*I ended it with acrylic blue squares and rectangles outlined with black and white ink and some pieces of metallic paper on top.

I like to play with collage and mixed media a lot, granted it does not always comes out as I had earlier planned...check in tomorrow to see what I mean.

Mixed Media Butterflies

One of these is going to Anita in iATCs, for the Summer PAT. She is in my Mixed Media group and she asked for butterflies, so I started working on one and ended up with two :)

Here's a short walk through of how I made these:
*I used some watercolor paper as my base, and did a quick wash with yellow and red watercolors.
*I altered the images from a greeting card, it was a blue butterfly with the 2 yellow smaller butterflies on the corners. The image was too large so instead of wasting half the image I did 2 ATCs from it.
*I first added a watered down gesso coat over the images- I just wanted to give some tooth to the paper so I could add color on top.
*Next was a very translucent coat of metallic paint -blue and yellow- over the entire butterflies' bodies.
*I added the inside details with acrylics, white ink, and black ink.
*I finished it up with a transparency -text on one and music sheet on the other.

I worked on more ATCs during the weekend, and a larger project from my figure drawing class. I'll post them later on during the week.

Queens!

These are my latest ATCs for the Flower Queens/Fairies Swap at iATCs. I had to work fast on these ones because they are due on August 3rd, I need to get them out of here by Monday to make sure they'll arrive on time.
These are done in watercolor paper, I applied a first layer of marker, went over it with my Prismacolor colored pencils and finished with white drawing ink.

A New Addiction

After a couple of weeks of constant rain the sun finally decided to make an appearance, we have had two wonderful days of sunshine and they have been greatly appreciated. I finally had a chance of taking pics of the latest blooms in my Mom's garden and they are just fantastic. Our pomegranate tree is full of fruit which soon will be ripe enough to eat and all the rose bushes are blooming.
Take a look at my new addiction ;)

I have always had this attraction to knitting and sewing, but for the life of me I cannot knit nor sew a button.
A couple of weeks ago comes my Mom with a new hobby she is going to try, using a knitting board. I instantly jumped on the idea but had to wait for her to complete her project first, a salmon scarf which she finished but then work got in the way and my project was pushed in the back burner.
I finally decided I wanted to give it a try so I looked online for instructions on how to use a knitting board and started trying it out with the yarn I had recycled from an old sweater. It is not the most beautiful scarf ever; to be true I'm not sure I'll ever wear it, but it let me get a feeling for the knitting board. After finishing that one, I got this brown yarn and started working on a complete piece which I finished last weekend.

My favorite part is getting different effects by using different stitches, this one is a ribbing stitch and it made the scarf quite warm and full. It was quite a fun and fast project to work on and I can see more scarves and different stitches coming during the following months.

P.S. The latest issue of Art Trader Magazine is out and is full of great stuff, click on the cover and enjoy all the cool articles and art in this edition.