Dreams, Fairies, Angels

Hello Artsy Folks    

                                                                                                                    

I am new to the world of multimedia, just discovered this wonderful world at the beginning of this year.

I am not sure if there are rules to it but ideas have not stopped coming to mind and I have discovered I love trying them out. 

This canvas below,(yes, it is a canvas, 31x40) has been a vague idea lurking in my mind for a few months. I know other artists that are great planners and are detailed and organised in their purchasing and planning, I am the way other type that has somewhat of a vague idea and no matter how hard I try to plan every tiny square inch of the canvas the ideas are totally locked up until I start getting my hands dirty, only then do further ideas and creative messes come to mind.

I started this canvas by covering it with texture paste, messing with it a bit,  and painting it with shimmery paints of browns, gold, steel grey, highlights of silver etc, later I thought it looked too boring and needed more aggressive texture, so my theory was that wall filler paste ( not sure what the right name is , as here in Taiwan everything is labeled in Chinese characters)  would work just fine, as I wanted whatever I was going to add on top to be embedded into it. The next step was to create vintage books..... all the addons are embedded in the wall paste, after it dried I  chipped and painted it in shades of vintage blues, browns, golds  and light highlights of various colors.

 To not bore the readers, I will give light details to the add ons....

I have created book covers in the past but not out of leather and I needed something to represent leather, over the cloth covers, Air Clay!! It can be smashed and squished onto anything. I did my best to make it resemble old ripped leather and painted them with watered down acrylic paints, mimicking the shades and highlights or ripped leather.

The pages are made with texture paste.

First title that came to mind and why I have entered this work here... 

http://mixedmediaplace.blogspot.ie/2015/07/creative-gym-exercise-10.html

...is Dreams, I get a lot of ideas and inspiration in and from dreams without them I do not know how my life would be. I just love how anything is possible in the world of dreams.

Second and third titles are Fairies and Angels, have not seen them yet but the idea of a beautiful world with peace, love, no sickness and were the impossible blends into ours and is full of magic and with winged friends inspire me.   

                                   

Can you guess what the frame is made of?

Glasses are made out of craft wire and cobwebs for decor

 I have 3 daughters a chewer Maltese dog and a kitten, and naturally there are always dolls that get chewed on or given over that have lost their playmate, so instead of giving them a funeral and burying them I fix them up by adding wire joins maybe changing their hair, painting them over or renewing them to fit whatever their new post will be...

This one had the sweetest face and is serving as a book fairy/book worm. I read another artist say that when she was young she imagined that fairies lived in books, and I thought that was the sweetest thing, so did her up with joints, vintage lace, rose petals, made her some tiny slippers and added gloss over her sweet eyes and lips and added nail jewels to her dress and bits of ripped paper. There are a lot of Cicadas passing on here at this season so found some on my runs about and used their lovely wings.

This camera does not do macro so details are missed but the cobwebs have glitter and tiny drops of gold, the roses are also rimmed in gold and have thin "spider" threads on them the white butterflies  are just because I love them and I can just imagine them flying out of old books.

I found this white glitter that shimmered a neon lilac color which added a perfect magical hue

So we come to the end of this creation, it was fun to create and I hope you enjoyed taking a peep at it.


Have a great day!!

Happiness

Hi there scrappies and friends!
I have been having so much fun with these canvases, just trying out different ideas that come to mind.
Here is my entry for the competition in Scrap Around the World for the month of June and here is the link....
http://scraparoundtheworld.blogspot.tw/2015/06/june-2015-challenge-26-by-veera.htmlthe month of 
... and here  is the mood board

The quote is what inspired me, as it is something I remember  was a lesson learnt in my younger years. I also noticed traces of a tea party in one scene so based it around that theme.
I had the thought to make the canvas into a sort of magical tablecloth look with vines etc.. but trying to stick to the mood of the summer colors on the board.

                                              So here is my canvas....the size is 31x40

It is summertime here now in populated Taiwan and on trips to work I would pass beautiful luscious vines of Morning glories throwing themselves over the golf course walls along the roadside, which gave birth to the idea of trying to find a way to mimic them, so those on the canvas are the 3 that turned out the right size although not as graceful and soft it was fun giving it a go. The books I also made using texture paste for the pages and the covers are painted cotton fabric covering cardstock.                    

     ....and here is a close up of the photo I put together in PS with my happy wee one and my tea pot.

                                                         
                                          ...and a few details embedded to the canvas.

Some ingredients to this canvas are dried vines, wire, crushed eggshells, crackle accents, glossy accents, lot's of paint, lot's of glitter, the paper leaves are also upraised and patterned in texture paste, there is also a lot of gold paint all over plus clear paint, and the roses are from I Am Roses.

Hope you enjoyed this bit of canvas... have a great day!

Moments In a World

Here is my entry for the month of July for the challenge in ...

Scrap Around The World 

http://scraparoundtheworld.blogspot.tw/2015/07/july-2015-challenge-27-by-pamela-ellis.html

This is the mood board  that is just full of color, life and invites the mind to travel and create.  

The first inspiration when looking at the steps and reading the quote  was to scrap one of my hubby's pictures from Nepal but they were just too difficult to get ahold of before he left to go back there, so I am entering this canvas which was my second option as it does not seem to match the other art styles for this month but if it is accepted  perhaps it will inspire new ideas.

Here are some shots taken with my vintage OLYMPUS camera.

The original idea to create this 30x 41 canvas came while looking at a water color painting I did a couple of years ago of red poppies, a thought came of how interesting it would be if they popped out of the paper like they were coming to life, the excess drops also made a blur of a tiny fairy holding onto the stem sooo ....  this is how it turned out, The poppy theme turned into some other magical flower , but the idea is different and fun if anyone else wants to give it a go.

The idea was to create an outcroppings of poppy stems in the background sort of bending and swaying. The lower half was to be a wild undergrowth of plants and flowers.  My guess was that this could be achieved  with gauze and white paste. So the first layer was glueing the gauze down but pulling and pinching it along diagonally down the canvas. Next was bunching and gluing more gauze as the undergrowth, and sprinkling coarse sand here and there, when I ran out of gauze I used my  paper mache technique to fill in the gaps. Took about 36 hours to totally dry. 

Next was covering it all in gesso (if I were to do something different it would be loosening up the gauze a bit somehow before gluing it down so it would not be so rigid and I would have added another layer of gesso over the gauze.) I then painted the background layer over layer with watered down acrylic paints and after the background was dry worked on the foreground. 

The long stems are paper wrapped wire, brushed with glue and coarse sand added for texture and painted over with gesso a couple of times then painted. I also made a lot of small plant stems with leaves for layering over the tall stems along with the small wild flowers. 

I tried 3 different  techniques for the larger 3D petals, my first idea was to make them the same way I created the mermaid tail here..

http://anneelisabeths.blogspot.tw/2015/04/currents-of-sea.html

..but that took a few days so I tried glass petals, but it did not seem to blend well, then I tried paper petals but it also did not seem the right choice, so moved back to my original idea  of using cheap, thin, ripped tissue painted over with a mixture of gesso and talcum powder. This takes LONG as we all know what happen with tissue as soon as any liquid touches it, so it is a delicate process of layer upon layer until it keeps its full form on it's own This takes a couple of days so it is good to have other projects going along beside you or in my case I was working on the little fae boy. I usually find a place to hang the petals then layer them gently every hour or so as it dries. Finally paint them and glue them on the canvas, then paint over again, shade and highlight as needed. The centers are paper mache and the darker inner petals are strips of gauze inked black, dipped in black glitter and highlighted with gold paint.

So that is the basis of the journey with this canvas. 

These small flowers are from I am Roses with some added shimmers and glitter

Thanks for looking and have a great day.

Enchanted Beginnings

 Here is the mood Board for Scrap Around the World for the month of May and the link to their site.

http://scraparoundtheworld.blogspot.tw/2015/05/welcome-to-our-annual-epic-event.html

This mood board was released May 1st which happens also to be the birthday of my eldest daughter, so I was very inspired by the whole theme. I was drawn to the corner picture of the basket of roses as my daughter's second name is Rose.

 I am entering my work here for this months competition. The canvas is 40x31 and it was built around this photo one of my talented sisters took of her some years back.

                                                              Here is the canvas...

                                                                  A Fairy Nest...
I was thinking it would be something similar to a Magpie nest with feathers trinkets, flowers soft fabric, old softened leaves...
Yes, I am a Mom of a 16, 12, 3 year old and I do like Tinker Bell movies, Keeps me young at heart.

The roses are from I Am Roses. I thickened the stems by wrapping tape around them, painting them black and adhered black inked sand to make a thorny type texture.

                                Peacock feathers collected while visiting a Bird Park in Brazil...

                                                                 Magic Pixy dust...

                                                       I liked how this corner turned out...

                                                     Cherry blossoms from I Am Roses ...

                   Thanks for looking, never give up on your dreams, and have a great day.

Currents of the Sea

 My first canvas made of this sort,

One of my loves as a child was water, swimming in it playing in it and after seeing the film "Splash" pretending to be a mermaid and loved playing at beaches, the feel of the sand under my feet, being buried in it and of course digging and building in it and with it the look of the ocean and it`s secrets and creatures. 

I started by glueing down palm fibers, mashing down and molding gauze as the sea bed. Glueing collected shells from the beach, flowers and sprinkling it all over with coarse white sand.  

After everything is gessoed over I always paint the background first with layers of watered down acrylic paints before adding the foreground details as it helps set the mood and color tones.

I built the mermaid bit by bit ..... 

...The hair fins and tail are made with ripped tissue brushed with a mixture of gesso and talcum powder then molded to the the desired shape. It hardens to a cement like texture. 

Sometimes tissue tends to form willingly on it`s own into lovely shapes...

                                         
                                     

I have previously entered this work at SATW and I am also entering this work here. 

http://artasticchallengeblog.blogspot.tw/2015/07/and-then-it-was-july.html

Hope you have enjoyed your peep here, thanks and have a great day.

As a child I remember my Mom had a great love for Batik fabrics,  once she took us to a factory in the Philippines and they showed us how they prepare and make all those lovely patterns and designs. I was young, about 8 so I do not remember the whole procedure but I do recall them dying the fabric, drying it, then dipping it in wax, drying it, crinkling it, then doing the same procedure, with other colors.
 I was thinking the other day how I could replicate somewhat the same crackled/crinkled look but with paper. I tried it with baking paper (as it is a bit waxy), food coloring and alcohol. At the end I rinsed the papers, dripped dried them, and finally scanned them at 600 dpi.
Here are some interesting looks and patterns that resulted from my experiment.

I had designed an Ocean themed paper in PS and had it printed out for a scrap image I was working on but  was not entirely pleased with the look.
Here is the finalized background paper. I am hoping to do others with a Mermaid/sailship themed look. 

Hope you like it and thanks for taking a look. Have a great day.

A Gift I made for my dear father on his 79th birthday...

Sorry the picture is unclear, I was rushed and did not get to check the image on the computer before sending it off, it is a multimedia, inverted canvas full of great memories of the places we lived and things done.

                       


  A roll of film I created in photoshop. I selected images of our childhood and placed them on the film, then had it printed out on clear plastic and cut into strips.
 My father worked for a TV company in Norway, doing lighting, filming and still does great photography. A very talented man, Thus the mini vintage camera, old reels of film etc.

I have fond memories of my Dad and Mom reading us Bible stories when my older brother and I were  very young so I created this Bible by scanning a page from mine and downsizing it to the size needed, added pages, distressed the edges, and placed it in a leather cover, et voila.