Foxglove's Mixed Media

Hello, everyone!  Welcome back!  In today's post, I will show how I made the second of four Valentine's coins.  These are for a swap where four people each had their own theme.  The first coin was a bacon and egg theme, and this coin's theme was a cat, so I chose to use a Crazy Cat from the Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous Mini Crazy Cats and Crazy Dog stamp set. I do have a video of how I made these coins, so if you are interested in watching that, you can go here or scroll to the end of this post. Sorry for the poor photo - I just couldn't get good lighting.  Anyhow, I started by punching out 2.5" circles from mixed media paper and bookpages.  I glued the pieces together and then used a wash of white gesso by Liquetex gesso over the bookpage to push the text into the background.  As you can see in the photos above, you don't see much of the bookpages any more. I stamped the cats from the Tim Holtz stamp set onto the Canson mixed media paper, an...

UPDATE -- The Halloween ATC was one of the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Winners!   Thanks to the SSS Design Team! Happy weekend, everyone!  I hope you are enjoying it - they never last long enough. Today, I am sharing two ATCs for a swap.  If you are new to Artist Trading Cards (ATCs), these are little works of art that are 2.5x3.5 inches.  Basically, they are the size of a baseball card or a poker card. The themes for these were based on the profiles for two different people.  One person liked blackbirds and Halloween, and the other liked the color turquoise and the Tim Holtz crazy dogs.   These are the cards I came up with: I started both of these cards the same way: I glued bookpages from an old book to Canson watercolor paper.  When it was dry, I lightly brushed gesso over the bookpage to push it to the background a bit.  I don't want to cover up the page completely, and you can still see the text peeking through. On...

Hello, everyone!  Sorry - I couldn't resist the urge to throw in a Wizard of Oz reference.  :-) Today, I have an artist trading coin, four inchies and four twinchies to show you.  For those who don't know what these are, the "coin" is a 2.5" circle (you may also hear the term "artist trading circle", the inchies are 1" square, and twinchies are 2" square.  I do want to apologize in advance - I don't have has many in-between photos today.  I use my phone to take pictures of my projects in progress, but for some reason, the phone doesn't always save the pictures.  They just disappear.  I don't know what's going on with that, but it's getting pretty frustrating.  Anyhow...moving on... I will start with the coin - I used my 2.5" circle punch to create the circle from Canson mixed media paper. I pulled out my Distress Inks in Iced Spruce and Peacock Feathers and mushed them onto my craft mat.  I spritzed them ligh...

Hello again!  I am back, this time to show how I made the Artist Trading Coins pictured below.  The Coins continue to be all the rage amongst the mail art traders, and I personally really enjoy working on a round shape. Aren't they cool?  I love how they turned out! (I say that because most of the time, I don't know where I'm going when I start a project, so sometimes there's no telling how something will turn out!) Anyhow, I started with a 5x7 sheet of Canson mixed media paper and Ranger's Tim Holtz Distress Inks in various colors of blue and the Iced Spruce color.  I mushed one, two or three colors onto my craft mat, spritzed lightly with water, and dragged the paper through the wet colors.  By dragging the papers, I get a nice smooth blend of colors.  Because I had so much ink left over, I pulled out some blank Artist Trading Card mixed media paper to sop up the extra inks.  I dried the papers between each layer, did another drag-through w...