Some new and some old

I've been busy with Life Book 2013 and the Mermaid Circus workshop!

For Life Book 2013 I have finished Jane Davenport's Unstumpification lesson and the Quirky birds lesson of Tam. I still have a lot of lessons to finish but I'm cool about that.

This is Jane's Unstumpification lesson. I'm not happy with the background and the modeling paste I used for the blossom was too thick. I didn't have the light modeling paste that was required at the time I made this. Oh well, I know now how to make unstumpification figures! 

I loved making the Quirky birds! I started with Tam's idea of birds sitting next to each other on a small strip of paper (front and back, but I only did the front), but finally decided to make a whole page with 4 birds. 

The background of my page.

Halfway.

Finale!!

And a couple of months ago (before the FM kicked in hard again) I made a couple of pages in the back of my A Lovely Dream art journal I started for Suzi's class. I was inspired by Dyan Reavely's demonstration videos on You Tube for her new Ink Sprays.

I love how the next one turned out!!!

Decluttering in process!!

I know, I know .... it has been a while .... again!
It's because of Kelly Hoernig and her assignment for Life Book 2013: Let the games begin. I had to make a game board and playing cards with my goals for 2013. My main goal/word of the year for this year is declutter and right after I had finished the game board I started with decluttering my studio. I'm still not completely ready with clearing out and cleaning this very important space but it's going in the right direction! The thing is that I wasn't able to do anything creative in this room for a couple of weeks but this afternoon I finally managed to clear my two working tables! I can finally play again and continue with Life Book 2013. Yeah!!! I'm so much behind! And in less then 2 weeks I have this other online workshop starting: Mermaid Circus with Jane Davenport and Teesha Moore!! Very excited about that!!!

Here's my Game board:

and my cards: 

The goals are written on the back of the cards.

Home made reusable Doylie stencil

I just made a reusable Doylie stencil using embossing powder!
It was an idea that I had in my head for quite a while and finally took the time to put in to practice!

This is what you need:

2 papers (one for embossing the surface of the Doylie with the embossing pad and one for the embossing powder),tweezers, embossing pad, clear embossing powder, Doylie, heat gun (not in the picture).

You start with embossing one side of the Doylie.
For the back side of the Doylie you need your tweezers to hold the Doylie up in the air. (It's not working when you lay it down on the paper, trust me!) Just heat one part of the Doylie and wait till it has cooled down a bit. Then you can hold the Doylie between 2 fingers and use your other fingers to hold it more straight. Be careful though, don't burn yourself!! Turn it around frequently.
If you have missed a spot, go back with the embossing pad and some new embossing powder. Make sure that the whole Doylie is covered with a layer of  embossing for the best result!

This is how it looks when it's done!

And here is a background I quickly did to see how the Doylie would react on the ink and the water cleaning afterwards. Just fine!! 

More inspired!!

Finished another assignment for Life Book 2013! I'm not totally satisfied with the outcome but it was fun to do and that is the most important for me at the moment: having fun!

This is called True Intentions and the workshop is given by Monica Zuniga.
Actually I had to stamp all the different stamps on white paper but I chose to stamp them on tissue paper (I used the last layer of a paper napkin!). This is a technique I have just learned last week from Dina Wakley in Creative JumpStart 2013. She also gave some great advice about how to tear the stamped image out of the paper by using a (slightly) wet brush. Works great!! 

For the background I used Neo Color II and some white acrylic paint. For coloring the stamps I used Aquamarkers, Jellypens and Opaque Pigment Markers. The splashes are made with acrylic paint.

I used 14 different stamps. Because I used tissue paper I was able to use the reversed image of the hand and foot. I only had one stamp of each you see.

Inspired!!

Here's already something new to show you! Being on Life Book 2013 really inspires me to be creative!!

This was a very fun page to do and it is all about celebrating what is in your life already and setting goals for this years journey.
My main goal this year will be to declutter my house! I've also chosen this to be my One Little Word for 2013.  
Less than a week to go before I can start with the Body Stress Release therapy! I'm truly convinced that this therapy can help reduce the many physical problems I have with FM!

Life Book 2013

I finished week 3 assignment for Life Book 2013! This was really fun to do and it helped me to get out of my comfort zone a little bit. I worked very fast and tried not to think so much about where to paint, write, splatter and so on.

The flowers are made with ink sprayed coffee filters (the huge round ones) and aluminum foil. For the background I used all kind of different papers, washi tape, alcohol inks, paint, rub-ons, watercolor pencil and staples.

This workshop was given by Christy Tomlinson.

Something new to share!

About 2 weeks ago I started a free workshop at Willowing, which is owned by Tamara Laporte. Tamara is a mixed media artist originally from the Netherlands but now living in the UK. I liked the assignments from this free class soooo much that I signed up for her year long Life Book 2013 experience just last week!!! Lots of workshops the whole year round with lessons from Tamara herself, but also from various other artists from all over the world. To name a few: Christy Tomlinson, Jane Davenport, Dina Wakley, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer, Melody Ross, Monica Zuniga ... 

This is my warming up fairy for Life Book 2013:

It's not completely finished yet because I still have to write down positive thoughts about my art skills in speaking balloons (to replace all the negative thoughts that I have about my art skills!). That's why there's a lot of free space around the fairy. The background and the fairy are mostly made with Neo-color II and some Aqua markers from Letraset. 

And here are some photos of the altered mini album I made for the free class: Art, heart and healing.

Look who wanted to be included in the next picture!!!

A picture of me when I was a toddler. It's a laser photocopy transfer.

 Tamara calls these cute figures Whimsies. 

 A page with the 2 most important men in my life! And of course that cute little lady cat that makes part of my life as well.

 And this is my Invitation Angel of Love

What can I say ....

 .... only that it has been a while since I've posted something on my blog!! When I'm not posting anything here it's usually because I feel shit and this time that was also the case. 
Besides the fact that it's a year ago that my dad was very sick and finally died on January 12th and so this year we had to celebrate X-mas without him for the first time, the FM also kicked in hard this time, despite all my efforts to improve my condition. The weather has been terribly wet lately and in my case it makes it a lot harder to cope with the FM. But .... maybe that will change for the better in the near future, because a friend gave me an article about Body Stress Release. Just this morning I made my first appointment on February 1st with a BSR practitioner, who has her practice not far from where I live. So I still have to wait for a couple of weeks before I can start this new adventure. It seems that it is really working for a lot of the people with FM, so why not me?!
In the mean time I'm trying to distract myself from the pain with learning about new art journaling techniques and making some art on the moments that I don't feel too tired.

I entered the Creative Jumpstart 2013 by Nathalie Kalbach from Germany. There are artists from all over the world participating and showing different techniques for art journaling and/or scrapbooking. It's really fun!

I got inspired by an Australian lady: Louise Nelson, who's one of the teachers in the Creative Jumpstart and finished a scrapbook page with our cat Misty last night. I hadn't made a scrapbook page for a very, very long time! 

This is how the page looked after I applied some modeling paste and stamped into the wet paste.

When the modeling paste was dry I spray painted the entire page with watered down gesso.
When this was also dry (I used a heat gun!) I first spray painted with vibrant turquoise ink spray from Ranger Dylusions right on top of the page and then watered it down and allowing the ink to drip down by putting the page on it's side. I did the same with the next color: fresh lime (also Ranger Dylusions). I dried the paint in between using a heat gun. I had to repeat the ink spraying a second time. I forgot to take a picture of the sprayed background before adding photo and embellishments, so here it is when it was almost finished ...

... and here it's finished!

Hope to be back soon this time!