Foxglove's Mixed Media

Welcome back, everyone!  I have two projects to show you today.  The first is a star-themed artist trading card, and the other is an abstract landscape artist trading coin. First off, the star-themed artist trading card: I began this card the way I do a lot of my cards - I glued down a bookpage and gessoed lightly over it.  I then added a light wash of fluid acrylics in Payne's Grey and Ultramarine Blue (DecoArt).  When it was dry, I added stars to the background using the Tim Holtz star stencil and Distress Oxide in Faded Jeans.  Lovely!  I set the color with my heat tool, however, the Oxides are reactive to water in the same way the Distress Inks are, so I wanted to do something to keep the ink from rubbing off or getting smeared, so I pulled out my Art Basics 3D Gloss Gel by Prima Marketing.  I used the stencil to go back over the original star shapes.  Because the gloss gel is a "wet" medium, the Oxide color blended in with the gel....

Hello and good morning, everyone!  I am excited this morning because this year I am going to try and actually join in Daisy Yellow's ICAD challenge! (Only partly because my first name is Daisy!  Us Daisys need to stick together!) If you haven't heard of it before, it stands for Index Card A Day and runs from 1 Jun to 31 July.  The point is to do something creative every day on an index card.  If you are interested, you can find more details her blog here: Daisy Yellow's ICAD 2018 . This week, it seems her prompts are all about fair ground rides and attractions, with today's prompt being "Rollercoasters".  I was in a bit of despair because I really wanted to join the challenge, but I don't really know how to draw - so how do you do a mixed media rollercoaster theme?  (I should note that you don't HAVE to follow the prompts, and she also has more generic themes. You really just need to do something creative with an index card, so my stress was reall...

I first heard about Artist Trading Coins (or circles) from the trading site ATCs For All.  A wonderful crafty artist Craftyhodges first posted about it on her YouTube channel here . She explains it, but for the purposes of this blog, it's a 2.5-inch circle that you art up, exactly like Artist Trading Cards (ATCs). I am in the midst of creating some more, so I will eventually share some pictures of the process, but in the meantime, here's a photo of what I submitted to the trading forums. Top Left: I stamped the bird onto Japanese text paper and colored it with Tim Holtz Distress Inks. covered paper with a layer of Mod Podge and set it aside to dry.  I then re-stamped the bird onto plain paper so I could mask the bird.  I then stamped the cherry blossoms and colored them in with Faber-Castelle brush markers. I glued it to a cardboard base to give it some thickness (formerly known as a Mt Dew box) and drew sketchy lines around the outer edge. Top Right:  I do...