Working with oxides

When it came to purchasing TH Oxides I decided to go for the reinkers. They are better value than the pads, and since Oxides are rather liquid anyway and work much like paint I felt I was going to be more versatile with the bottles.

Time to put those thoughts into action! There was a link to an inspirational video on the Paperartsy blog (here), and it looked like fun so I tried it.
It was fun! And so effective for large areas. Afterwards I still had ink left over so I flicked and spritzed with that and got rather messy.

I added some stamping on the background, stamped those flowers which I then embossed with a deep eggplant color.

Entering in:
Paperartsy: Topic 16: Reinkers.
TioT: Slap it on.
Eclectic Ellapu: September Anything goes.

Infusions

I hope this is a safe place to say that Infusions drive me crazy! They cannot be controlled and there are myriads of ways to use them. I watched videos on youtube (link) till I was cross-eyed and had to marvel at all the ways one has come up with.
Still, I had to try my own.

I started with deep-freeze pizza box cuttings. I sanded them a bit so they would have some 'tooth'. Then I topped them with white gesso, making sure some nice colors could peek through (mainly orange).

Next I sprinkled them evenly with Infusions (Jaded and Lemonade), activated them with water and sprinkled some 97-proof alcohol on them. My mistake. The droplets were too big and caused the color to pool along the edges. Next time I'll try with a mini mister.

But it still yielded some great details. I like the way the orange from cardboard peeks through.

And this is the 'finished product' with a great art lady stamp from Paperartsy.  'You are exactly where you want to be.' Yes, indeed.

entering into:
Craft Stamper:  Anything goes March
Paperartsy: 2017 Topic #3
Emerald Creek Dares: Splatter some fun

Time keeper's diary

Not everything that can be counted
counts,

- for time flows like a river, it flows fast and it flows slow, and all we can ever have of time are memories.

entering my view on Time into PaperArtsy challenge #13

Thank you for looking!

A red, white and blue summer

Red, white and navy are fresh summer colors. Add polka dots to the mix, stir in a bit of summer feel and vacation mood and you've got yourself some fresh looking cards.

Simon Says Wednesday challenge wants to see polka dots. No, actually they say "going dotty", a word that I took firstly for dots and secondly for being dotty, that made me add some delightful nonsense:

"Hi! Are you looking for something?"

"How weird. I seem to have my shoes on."

I was influenced by a few other challenges as well:

Wicked Wednesday ATC Challenge asks for red, blue and white. I think my atc's are not very wicked, but I'll enter them anyway, just because there are so few ATC challenges around.
PaperArtsy #12 calls for stencils. They have a lot of inspirational technique videos for us. I was very inspired by stencil bumping.
 Simon says Monday wants to see how we interpret summer,  Stamps & Stencils calls for vacation mood.

Background was first stenciled with red acrylics, then with navy chalk. The retro ladies are from a 1950's sewing pattern sheet for beach shorts, found text from a novel, and flowers were stamped onto a paper napkin and colored.
Thanks for looking!

Celebrate

Grade school - that was such a long time ago! Who is still friends with people from back then?

I have two pals from grade school that I have stayed in touch with. Now we all get to celebrate the big x-oh this year. One of them had birthday a few days ago, with her we have plans to lose weight and then go shopping for some new wardrobe. It might be a pipe dream, it might become reality - this card is hopefully perky enough to whet the appetite.

Background was done with a liberal amounts of white gesso through a stencil onto a thick and thirsty kraft card. Afterwards I used red and purple acrylics to paint. Gesso portion stayed translucent, the kraft card portion swallowed the colors up. There are great technique videos on PaperArtsy challenge page, I was inspired with the gesso one.

Entering this into PaperArtsy (stencils),  SDC-200, (greetings), Simon Says Wednesday (anything goes)  Use your stuff 200, (anything goes),  Take a Word (hot colors),

Turq Turq Turq - and how a word changes everything

Take a Word asks for the color turquoise,  PaperArtsy challenges us to add a word ( or more) and Moo-mania wants to see a bottle... Oh I had a field day, you may well believe that! I don't usually want to cram in too many challenges, but it seemed like match made in heaven.

"Exhibit 6"

Background is partly painted and sprayed with glimmer mist, then stamped with white, and partly a torn store tissue paper that happened to have a beautiful turquoise shade.
 Butterfly comes from a ephemera book by Crafty Individuals, a lovely turq and blue. I knew I wanted to use the giant bottle and create a terrarium in there. But the card still looked empty.
Most times you don't need words at all, they are just surplus ballast. But this time some words were needed. However, depending on the wording you will view the picture quite differently. What if it said "I like my new home" ? Wouldn't feel quite as sinister, would it? But I seem to have a sinister streak, so of course I went with "exhibit 6". (And also because a longer word would not have fitted...) I was quite happy to finally have a use for these alphabet discs.

Thanks for looking!