Creating

If you would have asked me a couple months ago, if I would be elbow deep in paints... I probably would have laughed. I've always wanted to paint, but never thought I could or should. But here I am creating in a whole new medium, which is not really all that far off from digital scrapping, if you break it down to its basic form. You have your base, your papers, your elements.. one is just a whole lot messier than the other!

In the last three days, I've done three mixed media pieces. And I've had a blast. I have mixed feelings about each piece. I love them and there are things I would change about each piece too. That's how I feel about most of my scrap pages as well. I didn't feel the stress I thought I would, that I felt when I tried paper scrapping. Maybe its because I knew I could paint over or reprint if necessary. At one point, on the last piece, the quote just wasnt working.. so I pulled it off leaving behind a mess of glue. And it totally washed off with out messing up the paint. I thought that was majorly awesome. And a learning experience for me. I don't have to settle. I like that.

The first piece, is a Rose Collage. I extracted Roses from pictures I took in my Mother in law's Garden. The Center Rose is not extracted, but I did take it through Lightroom and apply a bright preset on it to give it a vintage feel, then when I transferred it using a transparency, it gave it even more of a wispy feel. I used a newspaper print paper from Cilenia Curtis's Summer's Edge kit, and tore that up into strips, glueing that down along with strips of paper with Rose quotes on them. This piece took me a good amount of time as I let each layer sit and dry. But it was worth it, even if I was overly cautious. I think it turned out rather lovely. The little block at the bottom was added at the end. I thought the bottom looked empty, so created the rose block using Cilenia Curtis's Vintage Love Alpha, added some rose font behind it with some more extracted roses.. glued that down to a painted wood block and attatched that to the piece with wood glue and walla! The piece was done!

This next one, I did for my Husband.. or inspired by my Husband. He said that every time I looked at this particular picture I took of the lake, it reminded him of hope. So we started calling the picture Hope. So I wanted to expand on that. I found the paper behind it online, printed it out and tore it up in strips. I tried to paint the hardboard to look like the picture, but I'm just not a good painter. My husband says it looks cool, so there is that! I printed out that picture of the lake and the strips of words on sewable inkjet fabric sheets my mother in law had left over from a quilting project. After getting everything glued down I glazed over it with gloss medium to give it a shine, but have since decided it needed more and have added some poly to it. I have mixed feelings about this piece. Sometimes when I look at it, I really like it.. like it just hits me and looks awesome.. and then other times, I just don't know.

This next piece, I did just for the fun of it! I first did this as a post card. I actually have it printed for sale, and its adorable! I wanted to work with fabric, and I thought this would be a good test of that. So, I pulled out the post card as a visual, got some blue fabric and went to town! I did this one on an 8x10 canvas instead of the 12x12 hardboard. The fabric actually glued down wonderfully and stiffened with the glue, which I wasn't expecting and actually really liked. I added the little green grassy things by cutting up Styrofoam to make stamps, which was a ton of fun! I printed the pond sceen on fabric that I ironed to freezer paper and ran through my printer!! That was pretty awesome!! I wish I had used a heavier fabric though. This one became rather fuzzy as I used it, and I didn't like that. I decided because of that to paint over it. That ended up being the sinker that tied it all in. I reprinted the little froggy on just regular printer paper and reattached him ontop of the now painted pond sceen, and a cute little froggy fishing hole was born! Oh you can't see them, but there are little beads in the water that I sewed in the canvas to look like fish peeking out of the water! Way too darn cute! ;) (added the up close and personal photos so you could see the little beads)