One of the new toys I got last year was a Big Shot die cut machine. Some might frown on these as being totally non-creative, since the shapes are cut out from a template. But, I enjoyed making them from different papers and fabrics, placing them on different backgrounds, and working on compositions.
On the left I have used the same shape in a positive and negative image. The backgrounds are painted with acrylic ink and stamped. I like this warm palette.
The two dragonflies on the right are cut from some fancy embossed paper I got from Cheap Joe's. I like the cool blue, green, and yellow palette.
These pages again feature a positive and negative image on the right. The left side has stamped and embossed butterflies from a stamp. I added Pearl-ex powder. They don't show up too well in the photo.
Here is something a little different. I collaged an image of a hummingbird on the left, and used a piece of wide lace on the right. The background has thick, textured gesso painted in several shades of blue and green. The reason for so much gesso is to cover up the stuff underneath it that didn't exactly work.
Here is another hummingbird, one of my favorite birds. I got a new gold-leaf marker and went a little crazy. The daylily, bird, and butterfly are all collaged images.
A final hummingbird is this guy with wings spread. These pages have a lot going on, including painted and stamped backgrounds, painted dryer sheet, batik fabric squares, collaged labels, and text and markings that are I practiced from my Hand Lettering book by Marci Donley and Leann Singh.
One of the classes in the 21 Secrets journaling class is about Chinese paper-cutting. I decided to try a papercut butterfly. I used a black and white scrapbook paper, and then colored in the squares. The background is cardstock which I painted with Micaceous Iron Oxide Paint (Golden). This paint gives a sparkly finish that is just beautiful. I got a tip about this paint from Sharon House.
This page features some of the painted Lutradur from my playday with the Anything Art bee. The Audubon flamingo was in the newspaper in a feature about the exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The Lutradur was painted, stamped, burned with a textile tool, and zapped with a heat gun. Underneath is a layer of fiery orange-red paint and also some rub-on glittery birds that looked just horrendous. Sometimes our first ideas just don't work, but they can be used as a first layer.
This peacock image was from an ad for Sharp color televisions. I painted the backgrounds in blues and greens. The right-hand page is again a piece of painted and stamped Lutradur. I added dots of gold paint to imitate the yellow spots on the peacock's tail. You can see that I used decorative scissors to cut away some of the page edges, giving a peekaboo effect of color. Yesterday, I mentioned that some of the pages are perforated near the center seam. I added a piece of blue painter's tape in the same shade of blue to keep the pages intact.
Finally, here is a watercolor landscape that I painted directly onto the Sketchbook pages with no preparation of gesso, etc. I may have mentioned that I hated this paper, and found it very unfriendly to wet media. Most of my pages were collaged, using Soft Gel Medium, Collage Pauge, or rubber cement. On this page I used a travel set of Pelican water colors in pans. It was done "En Plein Air," while sitting at my picnic table in the mountains and looking at the hills across the street. I tried to capture some of the gorgeous colors of the sunny autumn day. The flock of geese were added later. I have never seen a flock of Canada geese in the mountains, although they fly over my house here in central North Carolina at least twice a day. They like it here so well that they have ceased to migrate back to Canada at all.
That's about it- thanks for letting me share my sketchbook with you.
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