Using Left Over Paint From a Pour

Morn'n. One more post about the paint from rock painting.

As you may have learned from past posts, I do not like wasting things. Along this vein, when we were doing rock pours last year, I was in a state with the amount of paint pooling under the rocks after a pour. So I ran into Zoo's craft room and pulled out a bunch of circle punched paper and 8 1/2' x 11' white card stock. I went ahead and dipped the circle punches in the pooled mixed paint and then used a plastic spoon to pick some up and smear or drip onto the various card stock.

The resulting paper ranged from cool to baby poo. Zoo's sister thought I was insane and I told her she would be receiving a baby poo card from me in the future. Below are the cards I made with the various punches and paper.

     

Dot Mandala Painting

Good morning. I am back for more computer torture and will attempt to shrink my pictures again today with a quick post on some dot mandala painting I attempted. As I said yesterday, I am very much a beginner at this painting technique but have enjoyed the process and the finished product.

When out at Zoo's last year, we had purchased dowels of every size from her local hardware store. I cut a piece about 3-4 inches in length from each of them for both of us. When doing my first attempts at home a couple months ago, I could not find my dowels and ended up using small corks from the Dollar Store and pen ends to do my wing-it trial pieces. So the pictures from yesterdays post were done with found objects in my craft room (except the last photo, which was done last month at Zoo's with freshly cut dowels and things).

Having cut new dowels and following a beginner YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rub1aoqnuFY&index=19&list=LLrPw3KR7TMCTKUPVvRy-_3g&t=0s) away I went. It took me a bit of time to figure out what size dowel would work for the sizes of dots in this woman's videos but after a piece or two I was getting the hang of it.

                 

When I returned home from out West, I made a few cards with the small squares of dot painting I had done. They were quick and easy to make and turned out cute.

Practicing on the small black pieces of paper prepared me for the next day's rock painting with Zoo and her sister.

I know I will do more dot mandala painting in the future and will watch additional Shwetart03's videos to inspire and teach me how to do better.

Have a great weekend!

Metal Blog page for real

After practicing with the metal tape, Zoo and I were to do a page in our AAJ2 using this technique. I once again pulled out a variety of things from my collection and went to town. I wanted to use drywall tape, fun foam embossed to look like waves on the water, my tree punch and left over twig punches from Zoo’s punch. These things all reminded me of nature and the great outdoors so I figured I would do a camping theme. Growing up we did a lot of camping and fishing in remote areas and to this day, I love exploring in the woods, hiking, scrambling up and over hills and mountains (I dislike bugs a little more now though).

I started with the drywall tape diagonal across both pages, as the walking path. Then I added the road using my 1999 Lyuell Harlow LG611 Stone Wall brass embossing plate. This I experimented with in my Big Shot. I put the metal tape on strips of card stock, ran it through the Big Shot, and then applied it to the page using more metal tape. Being a very thin brass plate it and then layers of tape on top, it didn’t show a deep embossed effect but doable for this. I thought I needed a defining line between the path and the road so I used the beaded string to make the road edges. 

                  Next, I started on the lake. I used the fun foam with waves embossed in it (purchased at the Dollarama). I cut it to fit up in the corner and wanted to find something in my stash to act as a rocky shore. I had purchased, from the fabric store, a set of two 80’s patches with antique brass half domes sewn on them. They were 99 cents and so I bought one for myself and one for Zoo. They reminded me of the shoulder patches in the Michael Jackson era and made my day at the time. Zoo, of course, didn’t have a clue why I had bought them or what the heck to do with them when she received hers : )        They did work perfect for a rocky beach, though, so this page was making me smile all the way during the process so far!

 For the grass, I used a million twig punches. Zoo needed a twig punch for some Christmas cards we were working on a year or two ago and I found one at Walmart here and sent it out to her. Before I send it, however, I killed my hands by punching out a million of them for my use. Well, I used up almost my entire stash in this project. The grass is made up of many, many layers of the twig punches glued on and then taped over. I found that my double-ended embossing tool worked the best to bring out the desired texture. I love the grass. I guess I am a little bit of a tactile person and running my hands over the grass and other areas on this page feels cool.

The tree in the upper left corner is made with my Fiskars tree punch. It was too small so I cut out more of them and trimmed the branches off and added them to expand the branch system. It turned out cute. The page needed a little something so I added a van cut out of card stock and taped over. I attached it using foam dimensionals on the top and glue and the two metal brads (bought from Dollarama years ago – yes… I love the dollar store!!!). 

 

I painted it with the black paint a couple of times until it had the effect I wanted.

I must say, that I do love this page. I had my book standing up on my table with this page open for weeks. Playing with metal tape is fun and inexpensive. Zoo and I will have to do more with it in the future.

 Enjoy! Red Bear : )

Metal Tape Practice

Hello again. Long time no see! Life… you know : )

Zoo found something on line about making boxes, frames and tags with metal tape. Ironically, this was at the same time that my husband and I were doing renovations and were using this product. Needless to say, I was intrigued to find a use for the tape that didn’t involve long days of ripping a building apart and months of rebuilding it.

The links she originally sent were as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4NI_8DdCJM&list=PLVqfrnNFxTJRqepNH0IgKvndDhPsLnBed&index=6 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCdZ1QfYVY&list=PLVqfrnNFxTJRqepNH0IgKvndDhPsLnBed&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGc7Nd_xCY8

We decided to experiment during one of our Skype craft sessions and began by rummaging through our supplies to see what variety of things we could try under the tape.  I found: metal and paper die cuts; sequence shapes; punches; chip board buttons; a button; a pink felt heart; bead string; raised red stars; and a wooden oval with the letter T cut out of it. I tried different numbers of layers to see how the tape would cover each thickness (I wrote the number of layers beside the objects glued to the page).

 I then covered the entire page with metal tape. Not knowing what I was doing, I put the tape on in nice even rows so only the objects show through.  This looked very blah when finished, so I added more layers and shapes of tape on top to give it some character. Finding things to push the tape into and around the objects was a challenge. I ended up using the lid to a gel pen and my fingers for the most part. Using my double ended embossing tool, I added details like a spider web, grass, etc.

When it came time to paint over the tape I used Crafters Acrylic paints purchased at Dollarama. I tried three colours per page and discovered that I prefer just plain boring black. The other colours I found just looked odd. 

Lessons I learned in this experiment were that: different size and shape pieces of tape gives the paint more places to sit to show off the object; tears in the tape going over the beads and wood objects can be hidden when painted; even one layer of paper shows up through the tape, so it is not always necessary to layer objects to be seen; and adding details with pens or other tools is fun and adds personal touches.

Have fun! Red Bear : )