Life Book 2014 - A Happy Affirmation

 

The theme for Life Book 2014: Week 2 is "A Happy Affirmation" with Micki Wilde and is intended to be a quick, fun representation of the things we want more of this year.  Painted on Strathmore mixed media paper with watercolour pastels, pencils and ink.

Life Book 2014 - Inner Artist Guardian

This is the first project for Life Book 2014, the Inner Artist Guardian.  She is the protector of my artistic freedom and is there to protect me from my inner critic.  Through a guided meditation we were also led to discover our colour for the year.  I was very surprised to find my colour was orange as it's not a colour I ever really use, nor wear.   I was not at all surprised to discover that my word for the year is forgiveness!

This year for Life Book I decided to do all my work in a Strathmore Mixed Media journal.  The page is prepped with gesso and then drawn with graphite and coloured with Caran d'Ache watercolour crayons. The above is a scan of the original, for the life of me I could not photograph it without the reflective elements taking over!

 

Hot Chocolate Tag

Technique: Stamping

Materials:
Holly Cheer Cocoa digital stamp
watercolour paper
Tim Holtz Distress Inks:
* Sage Green
* Aged Mahogany
* Vintage Photo
corrugated card
eyelets
ribbon

Tools:
printer
scissors
blending tool
aqua brush
corner punch
eyelet setter
Big Shot die cutting machine
Tim Holtz Alterations
* Tags and Bookplates die

The details haven't come up as nicely in the photo as I would have hoped, but this really is a lovely tag.  The combination of rustic corrugated card, with the lacy scallops on the edges, the soft vintage colouring from the distress inks, and the hand made 'designer paper' featuring the word chocolate, it all fell into place beautifully.

Create the base tag and a square book plate out of corrugated card using your Big Shot and the tags die.  If you have a sizzix and don't have the tag die yet, it's awesome!  If you don't have a sizzix or similar you can cut a tag from corrugated card manually.

Print or stamp your image onto water colour paper.   Using an aqua brush and the distress inks listed, colour in the mug of cocoa.  When finished, cut your image out.

You can download the word art I created here.  It's nothing flash, simply the word chocolate in a font called Everyday Ghost repeated down the page.  This part didn't pick up well in the photo, but it's repeated in a very pale sepia colour except for the word that is framed by the book plate, which is in a dark brown.  I printed this onto a piece of linen card, used the punch to create the decorative edges, and then aged them with vintage photo distress ink.

Once your components are complete, its a simple matter to glue the layers in place.  Set the plate into place over the word chocolate and secure with co-ordinating eyelets.

I made this tag especially for the Winter Wonderland Challenge this week, the theme this week is "The Foods of Christmas".

Mumu

Technique: Digital Stamping

Materials:
Mumu digital stamp from Mo's Digital Pencil
Tim Holtz Distress Inks
water colour paper

Tools:
aqua brush
printer

Isn't she lovely! I adore Mo's characters, so joyful.

I printed Mumu out on water colour paper, using a laser printer. I bought the laser printer with this purpose in mind, inks that don't run!

My colour palette at this stage is quite limited, this is what I used:

Skin: Tattered Rose
Blouse: Spiced Marmalade
Skirt: Faded Jeans
Shoes: Walnut Stain
Hair: For this I used a black water colour pencil

If you do a google search for distress ink water colour you'll find several different sites with techniques, and youtube has several video clips also.

Mumu was my very first attempt at colouring. The most important thing I learned from this was that the light in my dining room is terrible! I can see in the photo several places that I should have blended more.

That said, I am very happy with the results for my first attempt!