Sunday 31 May 2015

Fabulously Finnabair !!!

Hello my friends.....

I have had the most fabulous weekend at Art from the Heart taking two workshops with the amazingly talented Finnabair!!!

Ania is an amazing teacher and a super cool lady who is obviously very passionate about what she does. 

I attended two workshops on Saturday and created two lovely canvases.....


I don't usually create with lots of dimension but Ania explains everything so clearly it makes it easy to achieve spectacular results.....


Haha beavering away adding all the elements for the texture before painting !!

 
The second workshop was my favourite, a three dimensional canvas called 'The Artifact'
We covered lots of techniques and I got to try lots of products that I hadn't used before (the graphite sand was amazing)


Work in progress!!!!


Ta dah ...... All finished. Everyone did a fab job. 

If you've never been to one of Finn's classes and get the chance I would highly recommend them. 

A fabulous day with a fabulous teacher and a fabulous bunch of ladies in the class......it doesn't get better than that !!!

Wednesday 27 May 2015

Decorated file folders !!

Hello all you lovely people out there, Tracy here with today's mixed media Wednesday for The Mixed Media Mojo design team.....

I was recently involved in a 'Happy Mail' swap with some ladies in the USA and we had to send a decorated envelope with some goodies inside for the recipients. I didn't have any envelopes big enough for the items I wanted to send so decided to decorate some file folders and use those as my envelopes...


I started by gessoing the folders on all sides, once dry I started adding random colours of acrylic paint covering all of the outsides of the folders. 


I continued by adding some stamping and stencilling and painted in some circles to add interest. I then painted in a white panel on the front for my address label....


I used a white gel pen to add some finer details like highlighting the stars and scribbling some words into the background. 


I finished off by using a photocopy of  a previous red haired girl from one of my journals cutting her out and gluing her down on the front of my file folder. I finished off by going over the whole thing with matt medium to seal everything and make it more hard wearing for the long journey across the pond. 

This was such a fun project to do and I can let you know now that the recipients were over the moon with their decorated file folders and even better they can recycle them into a storage solution for their 'most important' papers of course. 

Thanks for dropping by today. I hope I have inspired you to give this great project a try

Bright and painty hugs
Tracy
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Saturday 16 May 2015

Painted Canvas Shoes

Hi lovelies !!
Tracy here with today's post for the 'A Sprinkle of Imagination' Design Team !!

So I've had a few days off from the day job this week to have a bit of a spring clean and whilst going through the wardrobe found an ugly pair of black pumps that had hardly been worn (because they were ugly, I don't like ugly things....see where I'm going with this !!). Well I was just about to toss them away and thought I might be able to do something with them........

Ta da !!!........


Not looking so ugly now ay !!

I started by covering all of the canvas parts with a couple of thin layers of gesso allowing the layers to soak into the canvas and build up slowly....


Once completely dry I added my base colours using Dina Wakley's fab acrylic paints in Lime (used for the tongue see pictures of completed shoe), Turquoise and Magenta, again applying them in thin layers to build up the colours, I used Dina's fabulous brushes for this job. The bristles are stiff enough to get into to all the fabric of the canvas and give a good coverage .....


Once I was happy with my colours I started to sketch my design, first in pencil and then went over in a black waterproof marker, I decided for my first attempt not to try anything too complicated and just go with simple shapes and patterns....


When I was happy with my design I took a small brush and black and white Dina acrylics and began painting in the detail tidying up after with the black waterproof marker.....


I used a splatter stamp and some black archival ink to stamp onto the pink parts surrounding the lace holes and down the back of the shoe and then used a white fine line paint pen to add my finer details, sealed with 3 thin coats of modge podge and allowed to dry thoroughly, finally I raided my ribbon box and found the perfect piece to use as my laces

I'm sure you'll agree that they certainly don't look ugly anymore !!!!





Thanks for stopping by. Hope you are inspired to give it a go. Have a fabulous week

Tracy
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Tuesday 5 May 2015

Doodles with Dylusions !!!!


Morning my lovelies, this is my latest post for the 'A Sprinkle of Imagination' design team..... 

WOW !!!!!

Have you seen the new dylusions acrylic paints yet ???

Fabulous colours, very versatile and work perfectly in conjunction with the existing sprays !!!

Just got my set and couldn't resist having a play to see what they could do.....




These colours are just amazing !!!





For these pages all I needed was the fabulous dylusions paints along with a black, white and gold gel pen. 
I painted the colours on randomly in my large dylusions journal and allowed to dry completely. Once dry I started to add doodled flowers with a black gel pen, continuing with white highlights and adding some more of the paints in some of the flowers to make them pop. Easy peasy and you don't need lots of supplies to give it a go !!!

I love these new paints, the colours are vibrant and fresh and the consistency is perfect for drawing and sketching over. I think I'm going to have a lot more fun experimenting with these !!

Have a fabulous day my arty friends

Tracy
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