Guest designer: Stencilgirl

Delighted to be this week’s guest designer on the Stencilgirl blog! Pop over to https://www.stencilgirltalk.com/2020/11/mixed-media-painting-tutorial-with-StencilGirl-stencils.html to see my project, with stencils by Carolyn Dube, Kae Pea & Mary Beth Shaw.

Use it up, wear it out

I’m an awful hoarder. By which I mean I’m brilliant at it, especially craft things. I acquire ‘stuff’ that is far too good to use straight away & must make its way into deep storage until the right project never comes along.

But I’ve been earnestly watching lots of Marie Kondo during Lockdown & trying to adopt some of her philosophy of letting go of ‘stuff’ if I’ve not used it within a certain time. And today, I used some stuff up barely an hour after creating it!

I tend not to clean my craft mats (or anywhere) as often as I should, & because the layers of dried on paint were starting to make them unusable, I took some sticky tape & lifted it off, like I’ve seen done to clean up gelli plates. I got some unexpectedly lovely results. It seemed a shame to bin them, & I found myself packing the tapes away for some future project that I simultaneously knew would never happen. 

So I unpacked them straight away, found a background I’d been working on, and started layering the tapes over.

I layered over the top with some stamping & mark making, & then a layer of matt medium, to take the shine off the tape.

I was pleased with the overall look, and it was easy, quick & mindless to achieve. And most importantly a bit less stuff hanging around!

A reminder to myself...

 

I’ve had this fine, floaty lady in my stencil stash for a while & finally got to give her an outing. 

I collaged lots of papers & washi tape for the first layer, then stamped & daubed acrylic paint. Over the top, I scraped several colours of Izink Ice, a translucent gel.

I scratched into the top layer of Ice while it was still wet. It gives great texture to your work, & the colours glow like an Instagram filter! 

One dry, I stencilled my lady a few times using a Stabilo All Pencil. I went over the outline using a Dina Wakley Scribble stick, which I wet a little to thicken the line.

I finished off scribbling some highlights with a white gel pen & collating some words from a Dina Wakley tissue collection. 

I love the dark & grungy feel, it’s so rich & intense!

ConcerTINa class by Seth Apter

 

One of the good things about Lockdown has been the increase in online workshops by some of my favourite artists. This week I took a class by Seth Apter. I was lucky enough to take one in person with him last year. He is a great teacher & a lovely, uplifting person.  I was booked on another workshop with him when he came to the UK in May - of course that had to be cancelled. But Seth has been busy putting together a series of great, stand alone, online classes to fill the void. 

This latest class saw us take a small tin & alter it with distress & ageing techniques.

I had this one in my stash, left over from the great “suspending things in resin” craze of the early noughties - the best before date was December ‘07 😀. Never throw anything away!

After we’d altered the tin we set about making an accordion folded mini book to stow inside it.

It was a lovely class & great to have it there to refer back to. You can still buy it on Seth’s website to watch & do at any time.

Soul Mantras online class by StencilGirl

 

I took StencilGirl’s great online class ‘Soul Mantras’ this weekend. It was a lovely, relaxed guide through creating layered, collaged art, using parts that you create yourself with as much (or as little!) meaning as you want to give them.

I used vintage book pages, painted papers that I made using simple repeated patterns in black and white paint & some gelli prints. Once stuck in place, I painted and stencilled over them. There is layer upon layer on those pages!

The final layers are some Izink Ice in Black & ‘Baby Poo’, as Seth Apter calls it, and a set of his Paperartsy stamps (ESA13) over stamped randomly.

Stencilled wall art

After 17 years of living with someone else’s wallpaper, carpet & even wardrobes (bought for £20 off the former owner of our PREVIOUS house, ‘just to tide us over for a few months’) we recently had our tired and tatty bedroom re-vamped. Fitted wardrobes, complete redecoration and all new fixtures and fittings. It was like being on 60 Minute Makeover. Or rather, 6 Week Makeover, which is how long we had to decamp into my son’s bedroom, with all our stuff.

They finished the weekend before the Covid lockdown started in the UK, so I haven’t yet been able to shop for finishing touches (I like to do that in person rather than online & I’m still not going out except for the weekly food shop). 

But I knew I wanted something on this wall, to break up the wash of dark teal. My decorator suggested I buy a painting & he would accent it with some of the dark teal paint. And doubtless charge me £200 for the privilege. Err, no thanks.

So I’m currently working up the confidence to paint a large abstract piece for that wall, but I’ve never done anything large before, & these things take time etc, so in the meantime I thought I’d stick with what I know, & work small. 

I watched a fab video on using stencils on a gelli plate to create multiple layers in a single pull, & thought it would be good for creating several 4x4 pieces. Naturally, I can’t for the life of me find it now. It might have been by Carolyn Dube, but I’m not sure - if anyone can connect me with it again, I’d be v grateful. I promise I’ll take better care of it next time.

I used Carolyn Dube’s alphabet stencil to randomly stencil letters on the gelli plate using Paperartsy Fresco Finish in Buff. I let it dry, then placed a Prima Moroccan themed stencil over it & stencilled through it onto the plate in teal, blue & copper - colours I thought would match the wall well.

When that layer was dry, I stamped some text using a permanent ink. Finally, I painted a layer of white paint over the whole plate & immediately pulled it up, using inexpensive mixed media paper. It brought all the layers up with it beautifully, and created a print with depth & interest.

For finishing touches, I collaged some tissue paper into the corners & stamped & embossed some textural stamps.

I mounted the paper on cheap 4x4 artist’s wood panels & painted the sides to match the wall.  (And, yes, I know I really should have ‘staged’ that bed a bit better. But, meh... 🙂)

We locked down before the blinds could be fitted. Nearly six months later, I still have raggedy paper at the windows. Crack den chic.

Random!

 

Strange times call for a flexible approach. I feel a multitude of things are currently happening that I have little to no control over. & that’s ok. I’m just leaning in to it all!

Lots of gelli printed deli papers collaged into my art journal & then I used some old Ranger alphabet masks & Golden Titanium white paint.

Key fob

Right. Settle down, I made something.

This is a key fob for my locker at work. Delightfully, it features pictures of me. I used the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone. I'm using that at lot at the moment. You can only take so many pictures of the cat staring at you before it gets dull (I know! I wouldn't have thought so either, but it's true) so Hipstamatic perks things up a bit.

I took some of these tags, some ink, paint, book pages, crackle glaze and just a smidgen of wine (a lot of wine. It's mostly all made of wine, if I'm being honest) and made these.

Incidentally, this represents an excitingly subversive act for me, as I intend to leave it dangling from my locker & all personal effects have recently been banned from our office. I'm really sticking it to The Man. Regular readers, however, will recall that I have previous when it comes to guerilla crafting, having made (and subsequently been instructed to remove) a desk calendar which contravened at least three sub-clauses of the dignity at work policy.

PS Hello again! I've really missed you*

*I have not missed you

"Dead, dead artistic and good"

I've decided to take part in Journal Your Christmas after all. Here is my journal.

For the fact fans among you, I am embracing the oft overlooked 5.5 x 8 inch format. This is because I am experimenting with a more journally, notebooky sort of feel this year and consider portrait format expressly suited to a more textually biased approach. *strokes beard, sagely*

Meh, actually it's because I made the basic album two years ago, during one of my tedious grown up art stamper phases and, surprise surprise, never actually did anything with it. So I've titivated the front with a bit of Christmas stuff, et voila, one JYC album. Quick and dirty win, I think.

I expect 5.5 x 8 is going to open up a whole new world of pain when it comes to getting photos to fit right, but never fear, I do like a challenge*.

*No, I don't

Big. Letters.

Mmm, big Christmas letters. Bought them in Hobbycraft, covered them in book pages and threw some stash at them. Stop me if I'm being too technical for you.

Love the "L". The "L", I can't get enough of.

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Not so that "O", though. That "O" may have to go.

Am buzzing along on 3 hours sleep in 36 hours. 4 year old has some sort of chest infection and can't sleep for coughing, bless him. Feel a bit jitttttery at the mo. Expect I will start being able to hear my hair growing soon or something.

Ages since last blog post,. Been so long Twittering, appear to have lost ability to speak in full sentences. Like Geoffery Palmer. In Reggie Perrin.

This is a re-working of Suzanne Torr's canvas class at last week's excellent ATDML retreat. Suzanne's canvas was gorgeously shabby chic. Sadly, my execution of it was decidedly less gorgeous. More importantly, the glue I used didn't hold things on very well (Herma repo - durrrrrrr), so by the time I got it home and unpacked it, bits were bubbling up or falling off.

I couldn't re-do it in its original form because in getting them off I damaged part of the photo and some of the embellishments. So I abandoned the orginal design and scraplifted the canvas from the Foof-a-Life book, using the base cardstock from the class.

The one on the right is me as a bridesmaid when I was about 3. I look quite demure don't I? Twenty minutes later I told the vicar to shut his gob, I forget why...

I made this hanging for this month's UK Art Raffle. The theme was circles, so I used a Tim Holtz clock mask that I got at the weekend. My friend bought them by mistake, thinking they were stickers. Ha! As any fule kno, masks are used to create relief effects and of course you cannot use them as stickers!! Oh she may have appeared irritated, but trust me, one day she will thank me for pointing that out at length several times.

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Rrrrrr, I'm getting well and truly in the Christmas mood though, so come on December! I've signed up for Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas project (a page a day between 1st December and 12th night) and am using acrylic 8x8 covers for it. I've made some of the pages in advance, but I'll wait to make the others up until I've got a few entries under my belt and I know what direction I'm going in. Or alternatively, if the whole thing falls into disuse by oooh, day 8, then I've not wasted too much paper on it. (But of course that is not going to happen because I am on top of Christmas this year and absolutely will find the time each evening to sit with a small alcoholic beverage and reflect on and record the day's seasonal events for posterity.)

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I have also bought an artificial Christmas tree. I have mixed feelings about this, because I have always had a real tree at Christmas. When I was growing up artificial trees were one of my mother's key indicators for common-ness, (together with watching ITV and buying anything from the ice cream man) and while I have always fought against such nonsense I can't deny that artificial trees just don't seem right. Until earlier this year my FIL worked at a local garden centre and we always got a really nice, big tree for free from there, but he has retired this year (without so much as a thought as to our ongoing tree needs I might add!) and so we are left to fend for ourselves, tree-wise. I can't be doing with spending £30 each year on something that's going to shiver all its needles off by New Year. Plus the disposal of the real tree was getting to be a bit of a headache. My husband, invariably in a bad mood with Christmas by that time, always insists on chopping it to pieces to get it out of the door. By the end it's like that scene from Shallow Grave when Christopher Ecclestone goes mad and starts frenziedly hacking up the body. By contrast, wrestling an artificial tree back into the box in which it arrived will, I am confident, be a doddle.

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So I got one from B&Q (WHOOP! WHOOP! - "common" alert!). It cost £30 (WHOOP! WHOOP!). Apparently it is a "Luxury" model and has "Cashmere fronds" (WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! etc).

I received these lovely houses back from Sarah's house swap this week.

Thanks go to: Pip, Billie, Chicken Licken,Pinkfairy, Kasia, Clare Brown,Lorraine R, Evvy2, Mrs McF, Julie Wilson, Julie Garfield, Sheila King, Sid, Sue Cook, Jen Van-Cauter, JeanJulie thornton, Tracey Doorbar and couple of people who didn't sign theirs.

I really like the look of them all together, so I'm going to frame as many as I can, the rest will be going on my desk at work.

Thanks again Sarah for your hard work in organising this - I really enjoyed it :)

My houses for Flo's Little Boxes House swap

This is my favourite one so far. I inked the background with distress inks and stamped it with Banana Frog stamps . And then decided I hated it, so I went over the whole thing with Blonde Moments mica powders (I wonder Jackie, have you used yours that you bought at Ally Pally yet? she asked innocently), then set them with a glimmer mist and stamped on top. And then discovered that the finished project IS THE WRONG BLUMMING SIZE!!!

I cut several house templates from my cricut and picked up the wrong one to trace round. This is far too big. Oh well, better it's my favourite one that I get to keep than one I hate I suppose.

More houses for the swap.

Invoke Arts stamps on Costco papers, inked, painted and embossed.

I have joined Flo’s house swap. Grrr, I’m all excited and motivated now!!! I’ve to make 21 of them, around ATC size, decorated however you like. It’s nice to get your teeth into something quite big that can be achieved in bite sized chunks.

Mmm…chunks…

In other news I’ve gone on a diet, can you tell? Apparently Paul McKenna is going to make me thin. The secret appears to be eat what you want, but only when you are hungry. Not a problem! I am hugely hungry most of the time, so this is going to be a piece of cake! Several, in fact. I have to grade myself according to how hungry I feel. Right now I would say I am feeling very hungry, at least an 8 or 9 so Paul feels that I should eat, so must go eat now, ‘k, bye.