GPP Crusade 21 – Irresistible

Michelle Ward has once again challenged us to a brilliant crusade for this month, over at the Green Pepper Press Street Team. She knows how to take the simple things and turn them into great art! This month is crayon resistance rubbings with paint wash to create exciting background papers.

This captured my imagination! I had paper; my boys have LOTS of crayons; I’ve got paint – all ready to go… What I had trouble with is the textures to do the rubbings with. I tried rubber stamps and couldn’t get a good impression. The paper crinkled around the stamp and I didn’t want to press too hard in case I wrecked the rubber. I didn’t have any fancy wall paper.

Then I remembered I had a collection of Fiskars texture plates for dry embossing. These worked wonderfully! They were flat enough to hold the paper still and made from a hard plastic, so I could rub hard and get a good impression. As crayons are very colourful, I wanted to create colourful rubbings, so used a combination of colours on each sheet. This could also be because I was a little impatient – by doing lots of colours together, it would be easier to see which ones worked more quickly. The texture plates that worked best were the ones with the least amount of raised pattern; the lines and waves, bricks and scale patterns were my favourite. After the plain paper ones, I did some rubbings on text pages.

And now for the fun part – the painting. The first effort with a cheap black paint didn’t work too well. The rubbing weren’t hard enough and the paint was too watery. The second attempt was much better, although the results were mixed – some crayons worked better or were rubbed harder; various paint thicknesses worked in different areas; some colour combinations worked better than others. Here are some samples – I’ve got tones of pages!  I love how the yellow “popped” out.

Now I’ve got lots of brightly coloured pages – what to do with them? I’m completely at a loss! I did use some of the extra paint left over to cover an altered book spread, so I used that as a base. Added Gesso to blend the colours and sponged with chalk inks.

“Worship” was stenciled using Fiskars cutter templates and pencil, going over it with black texta. The letters were overlapped for dramatic artistic effect, and because it wouldn’t fit! The “True colours” letters were traced onto the back of the rubbings page; but turning the stencil over, I could stencil in reverse so I didn’t get pencil on the coloured side of the paper. Cut out with scissors and edged in black. Adhered with Xyron.

I don’t think this spread is finished but I’m not sure where it will head next. I was thinking arrows and borders, but I’m out of creative time this week. I’m heading off for a three week holiday on Saturday; caravaning from Melbourne, Victoria to Queensland. We’ll take the boys to Sea World and find some warmer weather. My artistic creativity will be reduced to my Pandora’s box of goodies!

Hope I’ll be back to catch the end of next month’s crusade!

Until then, rally on, valiant Art Crusaders!

Michelle

GGP Crusade No.19 – Stencils

April’s GPP Street Team Crusade this month is Stencils; what fun! how easy! fantastic results! Here’s what I did.

1. Decided on a large flower, which can be used as a stencil and mask/template. As I’m doing more altered book layouts, I need bigger images than I had been using. I created one petal, folded in half to get symmetry. I then used this one to create seven in total. I stuck these to the back of my cutting mat with on/off tape. Each petal is about 2″, the whole flower, just over 6″ across.

2. Using a recycled beauty product box (knew it would come in handy for something!) I traced the flower onto the plastic sheet with a Sharpie pen, then cut out with a craft knife (didn’t even know you could get a “Stencil burning tool” until Michelle told us!) This gave me a stencil and a template for each petal. I numbered each petal and template so I could line them up later, if need be (I AM an engineer, remember, lol)

3. To use the stencil for a layout, I used chalk ink and a sponge to lay down the bottom layer onto a prepared page. Using each template, I cut out text and music and an old engineering maths book (oooh) and sponged one side with the same chalk ink. As the templates have writing on them, it made it easier to line up the petals, so the text or music would be straight in the final design. Stuck the petals on with Xyron. Added text “Stillness”, which was the theme from this morning’s meditations, a border and petal highlights with a Tombow pen.

There, all done! I’m pleased with the outcome; quite tranquil. I might add that the reason I’ve got so much time to create and meditate at present, is that my company is out on strike, so I’ve had lots of time on my hands.

Hope you find some time to create, and be still!

Michelle

[Editors Note: For more uses of this flower stencil, see Disappearing Act – Sept 2011]