Mixed Media Place: March 2015

2015-03-30

Searching For...

"You don't have to be perfect..." - we need to hear this reminder from time to time, don't we?

Today, we have Anai sharing not only her beatiful new art journal page but also some very important thoughts on creativity.

Enter Anai's fairytale garden...

Today I'd like to show you a page from my art journal. Nothing very special - just something I was creating in the evenings. No rush. Just some freehand drawing (very far from perfect...) and playing with paints. :)

I just thought it would be a good idea to show you this little experiment. You don't have to be perfect with mixed media. You don't have to be perfect in your art journals. What counts the most is the power of creativity and expressing yourself. :)

I started with a drawing with India ink. I like it a lot. It's very black and waterproof.

I wanted to create some strange world - with very dark sky, golden stars and giant flowers. Like some kind of a magical garden. Which can be scary and beautiful at the same time. I think that searching inside of our souls can be scary and beautiful in a very similar way. :)

I used a lot of water here and my Twinkling H2O paints which work beautifully as watercolors.

I wasn't even trying to stay within the lines. :) It's much more interesting not to!

The top of my page is covered with black chalkboard paint. I love how dark an matte it is. And it also makes a good background if you are planning to write on it with a white marker.

The gold stars are painted with a Silks paint. It's hard to catch in on the photo but they are really shiny.

My last step was to make some splashes with a Twinkling H2O paint. I love this effect and (as you can see) I usually have a problem to stop splashing. ;) But hey - the whole idea for this page was about having fun and doing things the way my soul tells me to.

Hope you liked it. :)

Maybe some time, when you are not sure what to do - you will just take a pencil or a marker and do some freehand drawing? It's so much fun!

Materials from Mixed Media Place:

2015-03-27

Art Is Good For You

Are you ready for another beautiful mixed media inspiration?

Do you have a box of treasures at home? Maybe it's time to take a look inside? ;)

I have a box filled with all kinds of trinkets and interesting little objects.

I reach for them from time to time when I create my projects and this time I also found inspiration in my special box.

I didn't do any careful planning. I just had a blank canvas (30x30 cm.) that I covered with a layer of Gesso and some Modeling Paste applied through a stencil.

And then my Muse went away...

I created some other projects in the meantime and decided to come back to my canvas.

I sketched a dreamy profile with a pencil and then went over it with a black pen.

It made me remember how much I love drawing, I promised myself to do it more often.

Are Lindy's Stamp Gang sprays among your favorites, too? I used two shades of blue and I also sprayed some mist that I created mixing blue Mica Powder with water. It gave a nice metallic effect.

And then I reached for my box of treasures...

I chose old paint tubes, old paintbrush and a rusty pen nib. I also took Prima embelishments (metal and resin) and some Mechanicals and painted everything with gesso and sprayed with the same mists I used on my background.

Then it was time for stamping the backround with Finnabair and 3rd Eye stamps.

I glued my embellishments using Magic Glue and Glossy Accents and voila...

...here's me... dreaming about tomorrow...

Materials from Mixed Media Place:

2015-03-24

Be Adventurous

An adorable little girl chasing butterflies in the garden - welcome to the Magical Mixed Media World created for us today by talented Athanasia!

Hello, dear friends!

Spring is here and I'm in a great mood these days - I want to make colorful projects and paint a lot of flowers and butterflies!

When I was looking for a photo to suit my mood, I found a beautiful one with my daughter we took about 2 years ago at our summer house. So, I decided that it was the perfect photo to make a layout about Springtime. Here it is:

For this project I used two shades of colors: greens and purples. I tried to match the colors of the mediums with the colors of the photo and I think I found the perfect shades in the Lindy's Gang Stamp sprays.

I used the Starbursts Salt Water Taffy and Jazzy Jivin' Purple to color all the flowers (paper and stamped ones) and the Starbursts Frolic in the Forest and Ponderosa Pines Olive to make the background. (see below to find the links to the colors)

In order to make the background, I used a flourish stencil with white gesso. After it was dry, I made A LOT of splashes with the LSG sprays. I also used the Deep Green Ecoline in some spots and a few stamps with the black StazOn ink.

I really enjoy doing such techniques, especially the splashing is my favorite one!

The next thing to do, was to deal with the photo. Because of Maria's pose, I got excited by this idea to make her hold something like a kite. She actually didn't hold anything, I don't even remember what she was doing at that moment.

Anyway, at first I was going for a kite, but then I found these big butterflies in my stash and that was it! To make it more realistic I made two tiny holes on and under her hand and put a thread through them. It's like she is holding the thread for real, don't you think?

I also made a loop around the head of the butterfly, because she caught it with her lasso. :)

To give more depth to the background I glued a few embellishments and some flowers under the photo. I painted them in the same shades as the flowers in the photo with the sprays, but that wasn't enough for me.

So, I decided to make a small fence with some wooden sticks and green wire. I really like how it turned out. This fence was the perfect place to put the title of the composition "Be Adventurous' - it's a sticker I got from the 7 Dots Studio Nature Walk collection.