GPP Street Team – Crusade No27

This month we are thinking about Shapes for the Green Pepper Press Street Team Crusade. While I don’t have Michelle’s collection of circle punches, I do have a two, as well as a Fiskars cutter with circle templates, so that seemed like a good place to start.

I covered a new spread with Gesso, let dry in the sun while I was pulling out all my circle things, then added a layer of red paint. Once this was dry, I used one circle as a mask and painted black around it, giving me a negative, red circle. Then I used an old bottle lid to “stamp” some circles. It was going to be some random circles but became more like a patterned border. The lid was from a medication bottle and had the “push down and turn” bit inside the lid, giving it two circles at once.

Work in Progress

I then did a rough lay out of the circles I had cut and punched. I took a photo of it, so I could remember where everything was, then ran the small circles through the Xyron so they were easy to stick on. I added the larger circles with glue stick, closed the book and left it to dry.

My plan was to then add some detail, as Michelle had done, but my white pen has dried up. I tried stamping a circle with white ink, but didn’t like it, so I rubbed it off (just as well I did that Gesso layer, it came of really easily). I was also going to add buttons but didn’t want to add too much bulk to the spread. After eliminating the possibilities, I decided it was finished.

Circles Layout

Here is some detail:

Detail 1

Detail 2 - Top Border

I’m planning to have some time this week to experiment with a more complex shape. I bought a Pazzles cutter last year and have barely used it. It will be able to do all sorts of shapes and sizes, I just need practice using it so it’s not so scary.

Thanks again to Michelle for another great crusade.

Happy creating,

Michelle

GPP – Crusade No. 25 Gesso

I’m back for this month’s GPP Street Team Crusade! This month is all about Gesso and it’s fabulous properties for creating resistance paint backgrounds. I’ve used Gesso a little before and had discovered some of its properties by accident. This is a great chance to delve a further into the sticky white “paint” with deliberation, rather than through sheer fluke!

Firstly I found a nice clean spread that already had some Gesso on one page, where I’d wiped off the brush from another project (I just HATE wasting that last bit of paint on brushes). I have a paint brush dedicated to Gesso, so I added some more with a criss-cross pattern [right hand side]. On the other page I stamped some swirls (from Buzz and Bloom) with Gesso brushed on. This was left to dry completely.

First Layer with Gesso

Next some purple and red acrylic paints were applied randomly across the two pages. I was a bit impatient here (and painting on the floor as my art table is such a mess!) so the colours are a bit too blotchy. I then squirted the pages with some water and used paper towel to swish some off. This worked better when I left the water to sit for a while – it created the whitish spaces on the RHS. I also found that the paints blended better over the Gesso background.

After paint and water spray was applied

The left-hand side didn’t work as well – that didn’t have any undercoat, so the paint tended to adhere to the page and the stamped swirls, rather that create a true resist. Next time I’ll paint with acrylics first, then add the Gesso images.  The RHS came up really well. Here is a close up:

Close-up pic of resisted area

You can still see the criss-crossed Gesso underneath. I have found that the underlying brush strokes in the Gesso often show through, so you need to keep that in mind.

Yet again Michelle Ward has created another fantastic artistic challenge – looking forward to many more into the New Year.

Hope all of your Christmas crafting projects are progressing well (that’s where I’m off to next!)

Michelle

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