Blue Twig Studio - March Product Review and Projects

Deco-Art Media - black gesso, transparent crackle
glaze, white crackle paste, and white modeling paste

I had fun with the products from Blue Twig Studio for March. As a design team member, I review various products and create a project(s) with them.  The products I'm reviewing this month are:

• Andy Skinner mixed media stencils - 
• 6"x6" "Have Your Say" alphabet stencil 



Andy Skinner Stencils - 6'x6" alphabet and 12"x3" tread

• 12" x 3" Tread Carefully 
•  Deco Art Media
• Black Gesso
• Transparent Crackle Glaze
• White Crackle Paste
• White Modeling Paste
• My own products added to create projects
• Matte medium
• Acrylic paint
• Dylusions Ink Sprays:
• Paper ephemera (magazines, music)
• Tim Holtz Distress Paints
• Luninarte Silks Acrylic Glazes
• Palette knife
• Stencil brush

Projects:  I created two pieces of art using these products. I started both on 8" x 10" canvas boards.

Collage Project:  

 I layered various pictures from magazines, music, and words in a
pleasing arrangement and glued them down using matte medium.  

 Next, I spritzed the board with yellows, pinks and purple Dylusion Ink sprays.

I spread the white modeling paste through the tread stencil 

with a palette knife to various areas of the collage.

I painted the dried white modeling paste with blue, maroon, and gold Luminarte Silk Acrylic Glazes.  I chose the Silk glazes, as they have a sparkle to them when dry. I added a light purple acrylic paint to the white crackle paste and spread that with the palette knife through the alphabet stencil.

Finally, after the paint and crackle paste had dried, I added the transparent crackle glaze over the eye, flowers in the vase, and cheetah heads. Unfortunately, in the photo, the crackle effect from both the purple crackle paste and the transparent crackle glaze do not show up. However, the transparent crackle glaze adds a wonderful sparkle to the collage.


Stenciled ZIA Project:

Initially, I covered the canvas board with the black gesso and let it dry. Next I spritzed copper, gold, blue, and lime green Dylusion Ink sprays using papers to mark off broad lines to spray.

Next, I painted various metallic acrylic paints and a few Tim Holtz distress stains in blue, copper, pink and purple through the Tread Carefully stencil with a stencil brush diagonally across the stripes. I painted a 2nd Tread Carefully diagonal in light blue, fern green, and pinks in the opposite direction.  

Next, I spread the white modeling paste with a palette knife through various 6" x 6" stencils that reminded me of Zentangle tangle patterns. Note: the lime green Dylusions ink bled through the white modeling paste even though it had cured for 24 hours.

Finally, I painted the modeling paste with white acrylic paint where the lime green Dylusion ink had bled through.  Unfortunately, in the photo, the Dylusion ink stripes do not show up very well through the modeling paste like they actually appear. I decided this project was complete, as it reminded me of a Zentangle, but done with stencils, paint, and modeling paste!

Product Review:  

       I enjoyed working with this month's products. The stencils are fun and will be used frequently. I can see the Tread Carefully, not only as a tread, but as animal skin, dragon skin, stones, landscape, and so on. The Alphabet stencil will come in handy for many mixed-media projects.

       Black gesso will be wonderful for making colors pop or to just do something different than using white gesso for a base. 

       The modeling paste spreads very easily with a palette knife through the stencils - even in small openings. It dries semi-transparent, as I could read some of the letters and music after it had dried in the collage project. However, I did find that the lime green Dylusions ink bled completely through the modeling paste in the ZIA project. A bit of the yellow Dylusion ink bled through the modeling paste in the collage paste, but not as dramatically as the lime green bled. None of the other Dylusions ink colors bled at all.

       The white crackle paste worked wonderfully. It mixed easily with paint, so color can be added to the paste. It spread easily with the palette knife through the stencil. Although, once I added paint, it bled a bit under some of the thinner lines in the stencil. I was able to remove the paste with a small paintbrush or toothpick where it had bled under the stencil in many cases.

       The transparent crackle glaze adds a nice sparkle. It is self-leveling, so it does not work under stencils. I tried it with the Tread Carefully stencil and it spread terribly, so I scraped it off with the palette knife before it dried. Therefore, only use the transparent crackle glaze on open areas. Also, I used a toothpick to pop any bubbles. One comment: it was hard to see if I had the areas I wanted covered coated evenly. I wasn't able to tell until it had dried. I did not try to add another layer in thinner areas. 

Thank you for joining me this month. The projects can be seen at Blue Twig Studio in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I hope you will consider trying some of these products. 

Keep creating.

Lynnita

 

Week 2 of Weekly Art Challenge - Blended Photos

I am still waiting on my Dylusions Journal to start the Documented Life Project (DLP) by Art to the 5th Academy.  For 2015, DLP gives a prompt each week to create an art journal page. I've been wanting to do more mixed-media art journaling and thought this would be a fun way to meet that goal. Posting my results each week will also help keep me on track. However, I'm off to a late start, since my journal has been back-ordered. Thankfully, I've found another place to order it and hope to have it by the end of next week. (Thanks, Deb!)

In the meantime. I've been continuing to play with my photo-editing app, Pixlr Express, on my Android tablet. The first few photos are ones I took while in Ohio in December and played with the enhancements, effects, and overlay features of the app.

Foggy, cold morning. Picture taken from the driveway looking east.

The same foggy, cold morning. Taken from the front yard looking east. 

Looking out through the ice on the driver's window of the car at a tree beside the driveway.

The program was updated recently with a "blending photos" feature that I've been exploring. This feature allows 2 photographs to be blended with different effects - darken, multiply, color burn, lighten, screen, color dodge, add, overlay, soft light, hard light, and difference. I'm still learning what can be created with these effects. These are a few of the photos I've blended.

Combined the first foggy morning photo with the iced car window photo,
using the multiply blending effect 

Combined the 2nd foggy morning photo with the iced window photo, using the difference 

blending effect. More of the texture from the ice shows in this combination. This effect 

reminds me of an interference pattern.

I blended the iced window photo with one of the "Draw Happy" faces I posted
last week (see post here). This makes me think of a mixed-media painting. I like
the texture and color the iced window photo adds to the black and white sketch.  

Combined the tree from the 2nd foggy morning photo with a palmetto photo I took last
year in CA at a quilting retreat. I used the multiply blending effect.   

I combined the above blended photo of the palmetto and tree with another of the "Draw Happy" faces I posted last week (see post dated Jan 10, 2015).   I used the "add" blending effect. I really like the results of this combination. I can see printing this on fabric to use for an art journal cover or to create an art quilt. 

It's exciting to create new "photos" by blending them. I really like the results and can see printing some of the blended photos onto paper or fabric for mixed-media art, fiber artwork or quilts.  I'm just starting to explore the tip of the iceberg, as I haven't even begun to check out all of the "Overlay"and "Effect" features of the photo-editing software after blending two (or more) photos. The sky's the limit!!


Keep creating!
Lynnita

Week 1 - 2015 Weekly Art Challenge

I want to continue doing a weekly challenge this year, but it's taken me awhile to decide what I wanted to do. I thoroughly enjoyed Blue Twig Studio's weekly sketch challenge last year and want to do something again this year.  I can see in looking over my sketches from last year's challenge (see posts here), that taking time to sketch weekly helped me improve my skills. Also, it was also a lot of fun! I enjoy creating Zentangles, too, and thought about doing these daily, with a weekly sketch thrown in. Even though a Zentangle can be created in a short amount of time, I was afraid it would be more than I could realistically accomplish when I examine everything else in my life at this time.

Another weekly challenge I had thought about participating in was a weekly photography challenge that would help teach photograph skills and editing photos. I would love to improve both of these areas. However, I don't have the required DSLR camera or Adobe Photoshop and can't afford either of them currently.  So that challenge is out for now.

Lastly, another area I want to improve is my mixed-media skills. I found an online challenge for a 52-week art journal called  the "Documented Life Project 2015" (DLP) at Art to the 5th Academy. They will be giving a prompt every week to create an art journal page. I thought this would help me explore my art journaling more, as well as, be fun to do.

After much thought, I've decided to to the Documented Life Project (DLP) 2015 with Art to the 5th Academy for my weekly challenge.  I'm going to be behind one to two weeks, as I'm waiting on my Dylusions Creative Journal to arrive via mail. It was supposed to be here in 2 days, but so far it's been almost 10 days. Hopefully, I can catch up in a short amount of time once the journal arrives. In addition to the DLP, I will post my sketches, drawings, Zentangles, photos and digital artwork as I create them - I am just not going to commit to having these done on a weekly basis.

With all that long explanation now out of the way, since I can't start the DLP without the art journal, this first week I worked on some digital artwork. I used Pixlr Express to create the following digital artwork made up of blended photos or photos and drawings. I took all of the photos myself and drew all the drawings. I hope to print some of these on paper and use in my art journal once it arrives!

Photo of a rose with the morning dew (see post dated May 21, 2014) blended with a photo of a palm frond. Both photos taken  at Vina de Lestonnac in Temecula, CA, May 2014. The palm frond creates an interesting texture across the rose and rosebud. Overlays added more color to the background.

Photo of winter berries covered in ice blended with a photo of a funny looking tree in the middle of a river. Both photos taken  in Toledo, OH after a snow storm on Dec 6, 2011. Overlays added the bubble texture, while the red lines bring focus to the berries and tree. 

Photo of the winter berries covered in ice (taken in Ohio, Dec 2011) blended with the photo of the palm frond (taken in CA, May 2014). I like the contrast of the radiating straight lines from the palm frond with the round berries and organic shape of the ice covering the berries. Overlays added more color to the background.

Photo of a carpenter bee blended with a photo of a yellow flower. Carpenter bee taken in Chandler, AZ  (see post dated Mar 20, 2013). Yellow flower taken at my parents in Lima, OH in July 2013. The flowers the bee was hovering over blended with the yellow flower to create a unique background. The carpenter bee seems almost transparent. 

Photo of sunset blended with Dragon Rider drawing. Sunset photo taken in Chandler, AZ 

on Dec 4, 2013 and dragon rider drawing created in Dec 2014 (see post dated Jan 1, 2014). 

I cropped the sunset photo and saturated the colors to make them more vivid.

Same blended photo as above, but the blending is reversed. I like the way the reversal 

changed the colors of the sky and changed the black/white drawing into colors. It 

creates entirely different emotions than the previous digital artwork. This one seems 

more fantastical and otherworldly to me.  What kind of planet has a green sky?

Another sunset photo taken July 16, 2014 blended with a fairy dragon drawing (see post dated July 30, 2014). The colors of the dragon are almost lost in the sunset colors and he seems transparent as well. I added a bubble overlay to give an appearance of a moon behind the dragon's head. 

Another sunset photo taken  Sept 17, 2013 in Chandler, AZ  (see post dated Sept 18, 2013) blended with Mesoamerican dragon drawing (see post dated  Jan 1, 2015).  An overlay created the starry sky. This was one of my favorite dragons to draw. I like how he appears to be soaring across a night sky, barely visible as the sun is setting and the stars are coming out. Only a select few that believe in dragons can see him!

I enjoy editing photos and playing with all the various features of the programs. The various overlays and special effects are fun to experiment with. I also like changing or enhancing the colors to create different moods with the digital artwork.  I'm beginning to feel fairly comfortable with Pixlr Express. The company keeps adding updates, such as this photo blending feature I focused on in this blog. I'm still learning all the possibilities with Adobe Photoshop Elements. I do not find this program as intuitive to use and I haven't found a good book to help with the learning curve. The company has online tutorials, but I'm always having to re-watch them. I'm learning this program slowly.

Thanks for stopping by!
Keep creating!
Lynnita

Word of the Year for 2015

I've never done a "Word of the Year", but have seen it on several blogs (see a couple here - Blue Twig Studio's blog and Catbird Quilt Studio's blog). People pick a "Word of the Year" for various reasons - a word to focus on rather than a New Year's resolution or to help make themselves accountable for accomplishing various goals throughout the year to name a couple reasons given.

Deb Prewitt of Blue Twig Studio's thoughts about a Word of the Year hit me the most. Since she wasn't following through on New Year's resolutions, she has chosen a Word of the Year for the past several years and makes it a part of her life - part of her vocabulary - everyday. She says:

     "This is key for me – to see how the word presented itself and how it just became a part of my 
        everyday life. And I also look at how it may have presented in unexpected areas of my life or 
        in ways that I hadn’t planned on. That is the fun part. Because once you choose your word of 
        the year – it will show up again and again and again."

It has taken me a couple of weeks to decide on a word. Several kept going through my head. The one that kept coming up time and again was 

COLOR

Color fits in with creating art. I can explore all the various ranges of color in my own artwork - from the rainbow to all the combinations on a color wheel - monotone, complementary, split-complementary, triad, analogous. Nature uses a multitude of colors in many unexpected and beautiful ways. Much can be learned from studying other artists. Also, neutrals add another avenue to explore colors.  

Even more exciting to me than color values and intensities is exploring the many moods and temperatures color provokes or implies. Most colors represent opposites. For example blue conjures up sadness, depression, as well as calmness, loyalty, and truth.  It makes one think of the ocean and the sky - vastness and the cold. Red is anger, but also excited and loving. It brings to mind hearts, passion, fire and heat.  Yellow can be cowardice, afraid and impatient. But on the other hand, yellow means intellect, optimism, and cheerful. One thinks of the sun, sunflowers, yellow ribbons of hope and warmth, 

Now that I've decided to focus on a word of the year, I'm excited about it and how it will appear in various aspects of my life in the coming year. 

Keep creating!

Lynnita