Happy Valentine's Day!

In honor of this day of love, I wanted to share some festive journal pages and cards. Some of them are oldies but goodies!  Hope everyone has someone to snuggle up with today!!

Flowers in Winter

I was inspired by one of Donna Downey's Inspiration Wednesdays where she took scrapbook flowers, glued them in her art journal, and painted over them.  I liked the idea so much that I made 3 canvases using the same idea. This is a great way to use your scrapbook supplies in a new way.

Purple Flower Canvas

Detail

I glued 9 various sized flowers to an 8x8 canvas, and covered the whole thing with gesso. Since I can't seem to complete any project without using molding paste, I added it to the sides and background of the canvas. After it was dry, (it was so hard to wait!) I added turquoise and magenta paint and it started looking purple. So I let everything dry and added glazing medium to the subsequent paint layers to create depth of color.  I ended by splattering some bright pink all over it.  After everything dried completely, I painted embossing ink randomly on the canvas and sprinkled ultra-thick embossing powder all over, then heated to reveal random shiny areas that look kinda like dew or raindrops. The pictures don't do it justice!  It looks so cool!!

Pink Flower Canvas

Detail

Turquoise Flowers

  

Detail

Detail

The turquoise is my favorite canvas.  The colors in the detail photos are more true to the real canvas. I couldn't seem to get a good photo of the whole canvas and wasn't willing to go out in the freezing rain for natural light!  I added gold metallic paint to the petals and that really brought out the flowers' details.    

I am entering these canvases in the Scrap Around the World blog challenge for February. Here is the link to their website:  http://scraparoundtheworld.blogspot.com/2014/02/january-2014-wall-of-fame-our-first.html

February Mood Board 

I LOVE the bright, springy colors in their mood board this month and that is what inspired me to enter my canvases.  Thanks for visiting and please let me know what you think in comments below.

Art Journaling

I've been working a lot in my art journal lately and wanted to share some finished entries.  I love the idea of an art journal and strongly believe every creative person should have one. This is the place where I play with new techniques and different color combinations, or try a new products, without the pressure of a canvas or scrapbook page. I have at least 2 art journals going at the same time because many times I have extra paint that I don't want to waste, or stencils that I clean off on one journal while working in another journal.  I've worked in Strathmore Mixed Media spiral bound journals but more recently love working in the Ranger Dylusions journal.   Ok, enough jibber jabber!  

Strathmore journal cover that I altered.

My altered Dylusions journal cover.  I highly recommend this journal since the pages lay flat giving me a larger area to work with since it is not spiral. Sometimes I tape the middle to keep the paint from seeping through to the other pages.  You can buy them here:

 http://store.scrapbook.com/pp-dr-dyj34100.html.

                        

 

I used my January Stencil Club peacock stencils to create these pages in my Strathmore journal.  Such beautiful stencils!! Here is a link for more info on Stencil Girl art stencils.  http://www.stencilgirlproducts.com/Default.asp

Below I used a The Crafter's Workshop arrow stencil.  

Ride

The bicycles are napkins that I glued to the painted background using  matte medium. Then used molding paste with the arrow stencil and glazed over the whole thing with Cobalt Teal Golden paint.

I started with a very colorful background and used a gate stamp and Dylusions vine stamps.  LOVE how this one turned out!

Used the December (I think) Stencil Girl stencils to record our freezing weather we had a few weeks ago.  It was below 10 degrees and our heat stopped working in the middle of the night!!! We had it working by the next day but I froze my tail off!!!   Record lows for South Carolina!

So, what do you think?  Let me know below.........