2nd Challenge

Hey Cheeky,
This challenge was interesting. I know you stressed about the colours, I was a bit stressed about the use of stencils, and the sheer number of colours you gave me. Seems so many. But like you I found it a good challenge. Yay us!

Right, so you told me to use the following:

• Colours - Blue, Yellow, Purple, Red and Green
• A set of stamps of birds
• Cat dies
• Acrylic paints
• Stencils
• Embossing/modelling paste
• Glitter. *glares*

Oh, and I had to do an art journal layout. I guess technically I didn't quite do that because this isn't in an art journal, it's just on a pad of K Mart watercolour paper (not the best for water colouring, but it worked for this) but my art journals are only small and I wouldn't have been able to fit everything on one of those pages.

First I gathered together my supplies. My paints are a collection of various brands, mostly Mont Marte, which is a low cost Australian art brand. I didn't use all the paints here, but I wanted an idea of what colours I had. Then I grabbed all my glitters as well. All laid out I realised you had pretty much given me a rainbow and that made me happy. Rainbow colour schemes are so simple, and it's a good way of making sure the colours will look good side by side. So that made me feel sooo much better because I had no idea what the hell I was going to do before that.

The glitters are generally from magazines. They usually come in little plastic packets that rip as soon as you open them. I have a collection of these tiny little bottles, I call them pixie bottles, and it's amazing how much glitter they hold. They look so cute all filled up with the sparkly dust of doom (aka glitter, aka unicorn poop!). When I was packing them up like that I wanted to keep the jars out somewhere so I could just look at the pretty, but then I remembered that I have three cats and the chances of the glitter staying in the bottles if they were in cat distance would be slim enough to make Kate Moss look like a plus-size model. So they are in a drawer. But they're still fun to look at some times. So shiny!

Doesn't mean I like parcels full of glitter, just so you know! *glare*

I have so many stencils. both from you and from magazines. I love them, but I don't always know what to do with them. So I wasn't sure what I could manage for this. Then I found this one that you bought me in  Turkey and got the idea of using that to create paper to cut the cats from. So that's what I did. And oh look - rainbow patterns!

I used the paints with the stencils, and having to figure out whys to use the paints without treating them like water colours was tricky. That's what I usually do - water them down and paint with them. But I hardly used any water at all, just a little bit sometimes when I needed to move the paint a bit more.

After I'd done the stencilling I cut out a LOT of the cats. The die I used has 6 cats on it, and I've never bothered separating them, so I could do all 6 at once. I think I put it through my machine about 5 times, trying to get a good variety of colours. Then I decided they needed an edge of silver, because you couldn't really see them against the background.

Oh yeah, the background. I started doing this while I was waiting for the paper to dry to cut the cats. I used the modelling paste, again by Mont Marte, and a Porta Craft stencil I bought from a  Hot Dollar store in Canberra. Porta Craft is another budget art and craft brand. The stencils are like ones I've had from you I think, bright blue plastic and slightly sticky so they don't move around too much. I did this sort of net pattern all over the place, in all sorts of different directions, and then let that dry. I used the heat tool and it bubbled up. I remember you telling me about that trick and it looked so funky!

The birds I stamped onto some cheap cartridge/scrapbook paper. I wanted a thick looking tree, so I stamped the two branch images over and over, at different places, and I'm happy with the way it turned out. I added in a couple of the birds as well, but you couldn't see them in between the branches. That's why I painted them.

To get a decent divide between the birds and the cats (because otherwise the picture would have been cats and feathers!) I torn the paper the birds were stamped on. I painted a line down the paper first with water, and then I was able to tear along that line. That trick is handy but I didn't actually expect it to work. Yay!

I used a sponge brush to paint over the embossed background, again trying not to water down the acrylics too much. Then I added a border in silver and with a bit of black.

I added the silver stripe because again there needed to be a divider, and I was glad I did because then I checked the list of things I was meant to be using and remembered the evil dust of doom. Dabs of glue, bits of silver glitter, and suddenly it's all shiny and pretty.

The cats needed something to sit on. At first they had just been clustered in that whole bottom area, but I decided they needed grounding. Hence the world's biggest cat climbing frame! If I could I would have had all the cats facing the birds, but that would have meant ditching half the cats I'd cut and cutting more because not all of them faced the right way. So I stuck with some of the cats pretending they don't care that there's a whole heap of birds in their line of sight. Probably just trying to lull the birds in to a false sense of security. Cats are like that!


Once all was said and done I was actually really happy with the way this turned out. It is a very different style for me. I would usually either try to do a scene, or have something that is just text for a journal page, so having something that is a scene without being realistic was a challenge. I think it works, but I'm not sure what. Hopefully you like it.

What are we going to do for the next one? *hugs
Mwah!
Dorky