Bleeding Lovely Play Day

A couple of weeks ago I got together with Carrie (and her cats - thanks for the cuddles girls) for a play day.  Carrie had tweeted about her experiments with Derwent Inktense Pencils on fabric.  She said how great it was and that it might be even better with the Inktense Blocks.  As I have the blocks we decided to arrange a day to play.

I bought myself a couple of cheap t-shirts in Asda and decided to put a face on them from  Doodles Unleashed by Traci Bautista.  In it she has drawn some faces to download for you (as she puts it) 'trace, doodle, embellish...', so I did just that.

First of all I blew the face up to A4 on my printer and placed it under the t-shirt.  You couldn't really see the lines til the t-shirt was wet.  The fabric needs to be wet for the Inktense to work properly. 

Then it was just a case of choosing colours and following the lines.  I found that the wetter the t-shirt, the more intense the colours became.  The colours also bleed into the wet areas, so I decided to use this a design feature.  This was when I uttered 'this is bleeding lovely' with out thinking.  What I meant was that it was bleeding really well.  Hence the title of this post!!

Thanks to Carrie for taking all of theses action shots.  Most of them were taken from the opposite side of the table which gives them a fab angle!!!

And here is the finished article...well sort of.  When I took the piece of paper out from under the t-shirt and turned it round, the purple at the left side of the face had leaked through to the back of the shirt.  Just never gave a thought to the colour bleeding through to the back.  Bit of a DOH moment!!!  Next time I've got to make sure that I use a craft mat under the picture too so no colour will get to the back ;)

As I'd already 'spoilt' the t-shirt I decided to splatter the front with Inktense.  I used a wet paintbrush and flicked it off the end of the pencil.  I used the same colours that I had for the face - Fuchsia, Tangerine, Violet and Teal Green.  I think I'm gonna just bleed some of the colours directly on the back and do some more splattering and it'll turn out just fine (I hope).

Next I had a try at Screen Printing.  I've never done this before and *loved it*!!  The designs Carrie had were pre-made little screens of leaves, so I just went into the paint and scraped it across the screen onto a bag-for-life Carrie gave me.

You don't need much paint, at least definitely not as much as I used as this was the result.  Its supposed to be a skeleteon leaf, but looks OK almost fully filled in.

I kept going with some more leaves this time using blue and green.  It was just so much fun!

This is the bag as it stands at the moment - a work in progress.  I left it at Carries for me to play with some more at our next play day!




After all of the talk about the Inktense Blocks, I didn't use them but Carrie did on what she was working on.  Have a peak over on her blog to see what she did :-)

We had a fab time.  Thanks Carrie!!!!

Journal Journeys Challenge 06

At the beginning of the month Dawn posted the new prompt for the Journal Journeys Challenge.  This time, very appropriately, its 'Spring'.

I knew I wanted the page to be really fresh with lots of greens and yellows.  Now you know me by now.  I either take a glut of pictures or forget to take any.  This is a forget kinda thing!

Here's the finished article.

I did the background at home using Derwent Inktense blocks in 2 shades of green and a yellow.  I smooshed them around with water, dried it and took my journal to the Art Club.

I found the picture of the snowdrop in a Living North magazine that someone gave me.  it has *the* most fanatstic photos and this photo of the snowdrop is perfect as they are truly Spring to me.  I applied the picture and the wording using Golden Gel Medium (matte).

The wording is from a short story by Hans Christian Andersen aptly called The Snowdrop.  Its a lovely tale and worth a read.  I printed on tissue paper which I put through my printer taped to an A4 sheet of copier paper.  Because I have a kodak printer and the ink dries incredibly quickly you can put anything wet over it and the ink won't bleed.  Fab for doing gel transfers!

The stamps I used are clear one from...erm...Martha stewart....Anna Griffin...someone like that.  And the word stamp is from Inpression Obsession clingables and suits this page perfectly.  I always wonder how those gorgeous snowdrops manage to bloom in such adverse conditions.  I guess Hans Christian Andersen explains it all

Journal Journeys Challenge #2

After taking codeine to help with my painful legs I went on-line and entered myself in the Journal Journeys Fairies Challenge.  I only knew about it when Dawn e-mailed me.  Thanks Dawn :)

For the challenge I decided to do a gel transfer of an image from a CD I've not used before called Victorian Angels and Fairies by Joanna Sheen.  Its not in circulation now sadly but has some fab images on it.  Dawn had used the gel transfer technique in her journal and it gave me the incentive to use it too.  I'd not used one in my journal before and managed to tear my first attempt.  For the second one I applied a bit thicker layer of gel and worked just fine.  I'm sure there'll be videos on YouTube showing how to do it so I won't bore you here ;)

Because the gel was thick the image turned out a little murky and grungy but I like that.  I then painted the back of the transfer with gesso to make the colours pop a little more.  I didn't want to do a pretty, pretty fairy page.  That's just not me.

I coloured the pages with charcoal grey and 2 colours of yellow Inktense Pencils and activated them with gesso - my fave technique at the moment!  I chose these colours to tie in with the image.

Next I Googled Fairy Poems and found this sweet little poem.  The image shows a lady steeping into a fairy ring and all of the fairies dancing and presumably (can't hear them lol!!!) singing.  I copied the poem into MS Word, changed the font and made it larger.  I then printed it out, coloured them with the same charcoal grey Inktense pencil as the background and activated it with gesso again.  I then cu the words up and stuck them to the page and went over the font with a black extra fine Sharpie pen.

I stamped various fairies from Elusive Images (now Chocolate Baroque) onto white sticky labels and cut them out and placed them on the page.  I have to thank Lesley W for showing me this technique.  I'm not that good at planning what I am gonna do with pages so this is sooo much easier than masking for me and means I can do things like these fairies and colour them in afterwards.  I used one of yellow Inktense pencils for their wings and used water to move the colour around.

So here you have it.  My Fairies Journal Page for the challenge on Journal Journeys.

Please join in even if you've never journaled before.  Its a great way to relieve stress can be done with just a few pencils / paints and an old exercise book.  I'll be back for the next one Dawn!