January Planner Page

Hi everyone!  

It's the last day of 2016 and I treated myself to a quiet morning of watercolouring in my Planner... getting ready for the New Year.  I decided to use these pages as practise sessions for water colouring.

I wanted a "frosty" look to my January page... as these are the colours of winter in my part of the world.

These are the colours I used from the CTMH Watercolour Paint Set.

To prepare my page for colouring, I first painted it with a layer of clear gesso, as I knew I was going to be using a lot of water on it.  This ended up working well to keep the page fairly flat.  As I worked, and it dried, I kept flexing it and flattening it, and it dried very nicely.

I began in the center with January, and then I worked my way from the left upper corner over to the right, and the same for the bottom.  This kept me from dragging my hand through any wet paint.

I began with my lightest colours first and then added the darker colours.  I found I got better at painting as I got to the bottom.... I loosened up and was letting the paint fall where it wanted.  If it got too dark I added extra water and blended it out.  Sometimes I dabbed it with a paper towel to blot it up a bit... always with a "light" hand.  The nice thing about watercolouring is you can go back and fix things... so I went back and added extra depth here and there where I felt I had blended it out too much.  

To finish, I went all around the leaves with the lightest colour, adding lots of water to blend it out.  Once it dried, I added zentangle type accents with a white gel pen.

Thank you for stopping by and seeing what I'm up to today!  I hope the New Year brings you peace and prosperity!

Linda

Can you do a Layout in 30 Minutes????

The challenge that I did today, was fun….TOTALLY fun….even though I had to prepare for it like I was going to attempt to climb Mount Everest! 

Sherri, our SGC host at Swirlydoos this month, felt we too often use the excuse of “no time” to not do any creating, and she wanted to show us that we CAN create something in only 30 minutes.  Yes… you heard correctly… we had 30 minutes to create a layout!  Now if you know me, this was a HUGE challenge!  I’ve been known to dither over flower arrangements for over an hour… let alone all the other elements of a layout. 

Disclaimer:  After each layer of gesso and painting, I DID stop the clock while I threw the layout in the oven at 200 degrees to dry.  Once it was dry…the clock was re-started. 

I mulled this challenge over for a long time before attempting it.  LOL.  My first step was to study a video done by one of the designers at Swirlydoos, Cindy Brown, who claimed to love doing layouts in 30 minutes.  If you’ve seen Cindy’s work, it’s awesome… so that’s where I headed first, to see how she creates her magic… and yes… I might have watched her video 4 or 5 times before I felt confident enough to begin!  

My second step, was to use all the leftovers from the layout I made a couple of days ago.  You can go here to see it.  I figured I was being pretty clever with this idea… because I already had practiced putting the flowers together in clusters on the other layout.  Oh yes… I’m a sneaky one!

So I gathered all my supplies close to my craft mat, set the timer on my phone, and began.  Cindy has a very cool technique in the video for creating a layered mat under your photo and I began with that.  In her video she also uses some circle stickers on the background, so I used a punch to cut out circles from my scraps… oh such a time consumer that was!  I kept glancing at the timer, watching the seconds steadily ticking by.  Be still my pounding heart!

When circles and mats were glued down, the fun began.  Cindy creates an awesome effect with watered down gesso (which I had already prepared) and I couldn’t wait to try it.  I grabbed my brush and flicked and waved it with gay abandon… I loved watching the big white splotches explode everywhere!  To my woe though, I discovered when I was done, that my craft mat wasn’t big enough to contain ALL that gay abandon, and watered down gesso really FLIES through the air AND I hadn’t covered my wooden dining table.  More precious seconds ticked by as I grabbed baby wipes and frantically scrubbed down splatters of gesso that were everywhere!  

To get the soft peach look on my layout, I used my CTMH watercolor paints.  I find that #10 from the top is the perfect shade for the Charlotte paper pack.

Time was now running out on me, so when I got to the flowers, I threw the glue on them and smacked them down anywhere… it didn’t matter if two orange colored ones were side by side, it didn’t matter that I got a little extra glue on the journalling chippy and it looked sloppy, it didn’t matter if they didn’t look totally “balanced”… I just needed to get those suckers down there before that clock stopped ticking!

And you know what????  I did it!  I did it and I had great fun doing it.  (I mean who doesn’t love a little adrenalin rush???)  Not only that… I LOVE this piece…. And I feel like an artist!   

This is why I love scrapping challenges… they take you outside your comfort zone …. And they teach you something new!  

If you would like to see how some of the other girls handled this challenge, go here.

Much thanks to Cindy for the time she takes to put tutorials together, and the inspiration that she shares so readily!  You can see all of her videos here.

Thanks for coming on this adventure with me…. I hope I have encouraged 

you to try one of your own!

Linda

Round Robin Challenge

Hi everyone!  Today I have a layout that I did for the Swirlydoos Round Robin this month.  

To create this layout, I used the Charlotte paper pack from Close to My Heart.  The ladies' club that I host monthly, is using this paper this month, and I wanted to do a tutorial for them... showing how to use watercolor paints and the Springtime Wishes stamp set to create embellishments for their pages and cards.

The challenge requirements for the Swirlydoos Round Robin were as follows:
1)  Use black and white plus 1 color.
2)  Have lots of layers.
3)  Create texture on the layout.
4)  Embellish with flowers, bling or metals.

So let's start with how I created the embellishments.

When I first got my set of watercolor paints, I made a swatch book out of watercolor paper and numbered the paints in the set.  This took a while, but I found it was well worth the effort, because it makes it so easy to match the paints to the papers you are working with.

Here, you can see how I lay the swatches on my paper to figure out which ones I am going to use.  In this case, I used all the greys because I wanted some variations in tone.

This is how I loaded up my acrylic block to begin stamping.

To prepare your watercolor paper for stamping, wet it with water and then touch the paint to the wet surface and let it spread.  You can see that my swatches are "streaky"... that is the way I like them to look.  The variations in color give a more realistic look to your flowers.  By the way, the pieces of watercolor paper that I used, were all scraps that I had saved... so if your scraps are a decent size... DON'T throw them out!!  :)

CTMH has a coordinating die set for the Spring Wishes stamp set, however, because I stamped everything so closely together, I chose to "fussy cut" the images with a pair of scissors.

By stamping lots of flowers in both colors, I had lots of bits and pieces to play with and create clusters on my page.

I made the butterflies from an image I found on the internet.  If you would like the file I created, to print butterflies of your own, just click here.

The gold flower centers, and chipboard pieces are all from the Charlotte Complement pack and the gold Treasured Puffies set.

This picture is from New Year's Eve in 2015.  It was such a fun evening and I love the joy and happiness that was captured in the photo.  

For me, that is what scrapbooking is all about... capturing those special moments in life to treasure forever.

Thank you for stopping by today!

Linda