Foxglove's Mixed Media

Hello, and happy weekend everyone!  I am back (again) after taking a break to study for a computer certification course.  I am happy to say that I passed, yay me!   This time around I made four artist trading coins for a monochromatic white (with some silvery glitter.)  It's hard to get the right angle to show the details of these coins, but I did my best.  For three of these, I put down bookpages and gessoed over it with white gesso.  I wanted to have that extra bit of interest, but I also wanted to keep to a monochrome color scheme.  The coin in the top left doesn't have a bookpage background, though, because I goofed on the original, then forgot to do the bookpage step when I redid it.  C'est le vie!   Here are the tools I used:   --2.5" circle punched from Canson Mixed Media paper --Stencils: "Persian Gate" from The Crafter's Workshop (this is the one in the photograph); "Wildflowers" from My Favorite Things...

Hello all!  Happy Wednesday!  Today I am sharing three artist trading cards, all using washi tape. (Because if you hadn't read my last post, I LOOOOOOOVE washi tape!) I also have to apologize - these photos are taken with a phone, and some of the pictures I take disappear somehow.  I KNOW I've taken them because I see the little thumb image, but when I go to search for it later, the image is gone.  Right now, I don't have a more professional set-up, but I am hoping that by Christmas, I will have the ability to make videos, and hopefully better photos. Anyhow, these three are part of a swap on ATCsforall.com, where players make ATCs based on a person's profile.  (See my previous post for the first two cards I made for the same swap.)  Person 1 liked bare trees and an night scene with a moon, Person 2 liked flowers and whimsy, and Person 3 (the person hosting the swap) likes mixed media with a lot of texture. So - back to the ATCs!  I'm sure y...

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 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...

Hello, everyone!  I've been working hard on some trades, but I won't show what I've made just yet.  I want to until the recipients have received them before I show them to everyone else.  In the meantime, I've also been working on some watercolor artist trading cards I've made: For the Lunar Moon (as always, I make two in case I make a mistake), I started off using the Donna Downey Bubbles stencil to draw a large circle. I wet the area inside the circles, and then layers watercolors in shades of red, orange and yellow.  For the 'craters', I dabbed shades of blue and a light purple while the paint was still wet.  When it was dry, I painted in the night sky and used a clear stamp to create the tree branches across the moon.  I finished by using white gel pen to create the stars.  The process for the planet was the same, except that it's all done in watercolors with the white ink splattered around to create the stars.  Th...