Crafty As L

This past week, I’ve not been making cards but have been trying out different art media.   I've only really done watercolour painting so when I saw this  acrylic workshop run by Charlotte ,  to create a contemporary seascape, I was interested to see how to use acrylic paints.   Plus, I love a sea scene! The first painting was done using a paintbrush to blend the colours, starting with the sky. Then the sea and the beach were added. Finally, clouds were added using a palette knife.  One of the beauties of acrylics is that you can just paint over the dry paint if you want to add more to the painting. For the next masterpiece, we used the sponge side of a scouring pad to blend the paints for the sky and sea, then used a brush and palette knife to add the details.  I really enjoyed this workshop and would like to try more acrylic painting now. The second media new to me is pastel pencils.   I’d watched Jason Morgan’s YouTube  video ...

Recently, I attended a workshop to make a book cover, which was run by Helen Murchie, one of the ladies from my textile group.   It was a really fun workshop and I learned loads. To begin, we painted Bondaweb with water and then acrylic paints.   As we were on a time constraint, we dried the pieces from the underside with a hairdryer, which was a very messy process.   For future makes, I would paint them and leave to air dry – a perfect project for this hot weather! After placing the Bondaweb paint-side-down onto black acrylic felt, it was covered with baking paper and then melted onto the felt with a hot iron. Once cooled, the Bondaweb backing was carefully removed, revealing the paint pattern on the felt. The next step was great fun and involved scattering threads and sequins all over the painted felt.   This was then covered with organza, covered with the baking paper and heated with the iron on a medium heat, to melt the adhesive onto the organza, sandwic...

At my art group, we have a competition each term and this term's theme is “Fauvism”.   In its most basic form, it is art made using intense, non-naturalistic colours.   I’ve just bought some large animal stencils so thought I’d try them out with some non-standard animal colours. I used a couple of colours of turquoise and pale green acrylic paint, which I applied by dabbing with a sponge over the stencil. I’m loving my turquoise giraffes! I repeated the process with the zebra stencil too, trying out the paints on black and white card. The sentiment was from a Creative Stamping set from a few years ago.   After backing with dark green card, the panel was adhered to a 7” square card blank. The other two were trimmed down with the zebra mounted on a 5” x 7” card blank. I decided that I didn’t like the one on the black card so turned the card over and applied Distress Grit Paste through the stencil, topping with sparkle embossing powder, which was heated whilst t...