Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Handcarved word stamps

I'm still practicing my stamp carving! With a lot of patience, you can carve word stamps. The first one is a printed, scratchy type font.

...and this one is a cursive calligraphic font. This one is my favorite one I've made so far :-)

Monday, March 12, 2012

RRD Rebel Challenge #9

Rogue Redhead Designs has issued the next Rebel Challenge for this month and it's to make a gate-fold card. I find that card structure to be one of my go-to types of cards because it's simple but just a little different. My cardstock base as well as the ivory cardstock has stamping done tone-on-tone using Distress Ink with the text from Relish Reading. I cut a small panel from the ivory cardstock and embellished it with a sentiment from the same set and a flower from Floriculture and attached half of it to the left side of the gate-fold base.

When the card is opened, the rest of the sentiment is found on a matching sized panel attached to the right half of the gate-fold lined up so it's directly underneath the top panel and not seen until the card is opened.

Here is the card completely opened using more stamps from Relish Reading with fern fronds from Floriculture.

The challenge will run until April 8th - all the details are on the RRD blog post HERE. Why not join in!

Friday, March 9, 2012

Letter Love

Another exceptionally good online class is one called "Letter Love 101" by Joanne Sharpe. She ran the class throughout the 29 days of February with a new lesson each day. (It is an ongoing self-paced class, so even though it's no longer February, you can still join in and have all of it available to you.) I love playing around with hand lettering and this class was a fantastic one for giving you a lot of ideas so that you can create your own embellished alphabets. I loved her motto for the class - Play, Practice, Write, Repeat.

Aside from learning lettering skills, another part of the class I loved was creating a colorful journal for backgrounds for all your newly developed lettering skills. This is the pile of papers I created using Adirondack colorwash, water and stencils

Here is the cover of my journal.

This is a close up of what I thought was one of the coolest parts of the background paper I chose for the cover. Colorwash is very reactive with water, and the flowers were created by spraying just plain water through a flower stencil creating a ghost effect. I loved this!


Here's my fun inky journal opened and with a mix of pages all ready for some hand lettering!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

GC #141 Chestnut Theme Challenge

The challenge this week at Gingersnap Creations has a theme of "Granny's Photo Album". I have created these stand-up houses with inspiration from old family photo albums.

This is my Great-Grandma Selma who lived in Erie.

To make the project I cut out two house shapes from chipboard, giving one a window, and covered them with patterned paper and an embossed and sanded paper roof. I essentially assembled everything as a triptych using gaffer tape between the pieces to create a flexible hinge.

Here you can see it fully opened. I added stamping with a Hero Arts stamp and a computer generated phrase - it just had to be "over the river and through the woods"!

And this is Great-Grandma Ida and her house in Pittsburgh.


All is constructed in the same way, just using a different shaped house. That's the fun of hand cutting your house - you can make it any size or shape you'd like. You can see I used a postcard image to cover the back of the photo.

How are you inspired by Granny's Photo Album? Link your project to the GC blog post HERE by April 1st when the challenge closes then between April 2nd and 9th, visit the GC blog again because you will get to vote and pick the Ginger Gems for the Challenge! Also as this challenge is sponsored by Retro Café Art Gallery, one randomly drawn winner will receive an ATC and inchie fun kit from them - a very cool prize you can check out on the same blog post.

As Gingersnap Creations comes to a close at the end of this month and this being my final post as a Ginger, I'd like to thank both Shar and Ali for creating and running such a wonderful group! So many talented artists have connected and become friends through this group and I feel so lucky to have been a part of it.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Green Paper March Collage Challenge


The first week of each month Mary Green of Green Paper runs a collage challenge and I had a chance to play along this time because I had a fun idea to try. With the challenge you have to use at least a portion of each of three images she provides. You can see the images on her blog post HERE. I had the idea to make a dress form doll using a hand cut dress form out of chipboard painted with raw umber paint. The first image of the girl was easy to use. From the second image, I cut the strips of music into kind of a flower petal shape and added them to a few more strips of music and patterned paper and lace to create her skirt. The third image was trickier....it had a teeny tiny pink flower that I cut out and used with a scrap of patterned paper and lace for a hair adornment.




The close up of the skirt shows all the various petals given an edge inking with distress ink and a little flip of a curl for more dimension. Adding things bit by bit to build my doll sure was a lot of fun!

Saturday, March 3, 2012

More handcarved stamps

My last post about handcarved stamps was all about chevrons, and here are other variations. You can decorate the individual pieces with interesting patterns.

Then you can also position them to create flowers:

...and starbursts:

Friday, March 2, 2012

more from my art journal...

Another page I made with inspiration from the Über media - gesso class.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Handcarved chevron stamps


Here are more pages from my stamp carving journal. These stamps are all based on a chevron design.

For this one I used a Crafter's Workshop stencil as my design template.

This last one lends itself to combining for a great all over background.