Magic!

This piece has magic built into every part of it from the background to the magical font making app.

First of all there’s the magic of the water-soluble neocolour crayons and the way the colours blend together when you add water. There’s the magic of what happens to those wet colours when you add sea salt crystals and leave them to dry. Then there’s the magic that happens when you add digital elements and start playing with blending options!

But do you know what the biggest magic of all is? This iPad app at iFontMaker that enabled me to create my own font. A big thank you to Elsie from A Beautiful Mess who blogged about it last week. I was so excited when I read her post – I bought the app and sat up till 3 O’clock in the morning playing with it! It was so much fun!

If you like the font in the image click on the link Funtime font to download it.

Altogether a truly magical piece!

Doodle Magic!

This catch-up on the Life Book Course came from Lesson 20 with Jodi Ohl.

I started out by colouring the background using Derwent Inktense pencils. For the doodling and text I used a uniball eye pen, then coloured the doodles using neocolour crayons and a graphite pencil. The two stamps were hand made using pieces of fun foam: I stamped the butterflies using a distress ink pad, and the star using a Staz-on ink pad.

I’m still toying with the idea of adding more doodling. What do you think – do you think I should?

Freehand Mandala

Playing catchup with the Life Book Course, today I followed Tam’s Freehand Mandala class from week 36.

I hand drew it in pencil, then coloured it using Derwent Inktense Pencils. When I had got to this point with colouring it, I couldn’t decide whether to colour the rest of the background in or to leave it as it was. So I scanned it in to the computer and added some digital backgrounds to see what they looked like. This is my favourite – it really seems to make the colours pop!

After all that, I decided to leave the original as it is. But it was fun playing.

Playing…

Today I felt like playing digital! I took the last two hand drawn mandalas that I created and played digital blending with them – great fun! I think my favourite is the top right one. Which one do you like best?

Another Seed…

Here’s my version of another Seed of Life mandala from the talented Guada.

I had a lot of fun making this one! I drew it in pencil then coloured it using a mixture of Derwent Inktense Pencils, Lumiere paint, acrylic paint, graphite pencil, uniball eye pen, and uni paint marker. The colour was built up in layers which gives it extra depth. Thanks for another brilliant lesson Guada!

Celebrating!

I really enjoyed this weeks Life Book lesson with Samantha Kira Harding. Each layer had its own special meaning and took courage to cover and move on. But I’m so glad I did – the finished piece has so much depth.

This is the first scan taken after the first three layers. Layer one was journalling done using Derwent inktense pencils. This was followed by a layer of white Gesso which made all the journalling colours run and blend together creating a lovely soft background colour. Layer three was a mixture of alcohol inks shaken from the bottles to create nice ink splodges which I swooshed around with a tissue to spread the colour further, and a lino cut which I stamped over the top using distress inks.

This next scan – done on my lovely new A3 scanner – was taken after the next two layers. It took a while for me to pluck up the courage to add a layer of Gesso to everything and even more courage to start doodling over the top of it, but I’m glad I took the plunge! The doodling on the right page was done using graphite pencil and neocolour crayons followed by a flower collage and face outline drawn in pencil.The left page got a collage of tissue paper.

The final scan shows the finished piece. The face on the right page was painted using neocolour crayons. The left page had a machine stitched border added and journalling done with a gel pen. It took a few days to complete, but I’m really pleased with the end result. Thank you so much Samantha!

Seed Of Life

I’ve just finished colouring in the mandala I drews for the first part of Guada’s free Seed of Life course.

I love her classes and the meditative discipline of creating these mandalas. I drew this one in pencil then coloured it using Derwent Inktense Pencils and a graphite pencil. I’m looking forward to starting this weeks lesson.

Collage Lady

Being without any internet for the past few days, I have had more time to get messy with paint and gel medium! Collage Lady is another catch up from the Life Book Course.

Loosely following Mystele’s week 22 lesson I created a collage from torn magazine pages using a picture of a woman as the central focus. I then used a mixture of pastels, gel medium, neocolour crayons, journaling and acrylic paint to add colour and depth to the work. I must add that the painted lady bears virtually no resemblance to the collaged image underneath!

I had great fun making this piece. Thanks for the lesson Mystele and for the new techniques I learnt!

Badger

We’ve been battling with our internet provider this week and have been without service for nearly two days! It’s just come back up so I’m making hay while the sun shines!

I wasn’t in the mood for crochet (this weeks Life Book lesson) so I thought I’d play catch up with one of the previous lessons I’ve not looked at yet! I chose week 25 by Juliette Crane.

I loved every minute of doing this picture of my totem animal – so much so that I kind of forgot to follow the instructions and ended up with something rather different from Juliette’s wonderful whimseys! I drew the outline using water soluble graphite sticks, then coloured Badger in using neocolour crayons. I used the neocolours to create the background, then added some distress ink to add a bit of depth.

Landscape

The leaf I used to print with on the post Newspaper Collage created a rather unusual pattern which I thought looked rather like a tree. So I thought I’d have a go at creating a landscape made from leaf prints.

This is the result! I started off with a layer of white gesso to which I added a wash of colour using neocolour crayons.Then I added acrylic paint leaf prints to create my landscape, finishing off with with some tree trunks created using an old credit card. Quite effective I thought!