Last of the Coloured Gloss & Texture Paste atc's

I thought I'd post the last few pictures of the Coloured Gloss Card atc technique from the classes that were held last Tuesday night and Thursday morning. Some of the girls have done the painting of their Texture Paste covers from the first class and boy, are they looking wonderful!!! All that great texture and some really cool colour combinations have been created by the girls. These are the last few atc's using the Coloured Gloss Card technique.

"Encircle"... the girl is a Stampotique stamp - Prom Queen.

Here's another picture of "Encircle"...I took this one with my camera (the last one was scanned) as I wanted to show the little bees that I stamped with Brilliance Galaxy Gold as it's one of the very few pigment inks that will dry on gloss card. You can't see them on the scanned image, it just looks like I've stuck 5 swarovski crystals on randomly but I placed them in the centre of the bees. The colour in the one above is much closer to what it actually is.

"Full-orbed moon"... the moon is stamped with Brilliance Platinum Planet (how fitting!)

"Sanctuary"... the messy bit down the bottom is gauze. I drew a nest and it looked like a toddler had scribbled on my card so of course, it had to be fixed! Graphite glimmer mist sprayed on some gauze and then stuck down with some gel medium and it's all fixed, adds a nice textural element too!

"Sanctuary"...close-up

"Queen 3"... a Stampotique stamp - Glimmering Hope.

"Wild & Crazy"...another couple of Stampotique stamp girls (Glimmering Hope & Girl with a lunchbox). I tried out the new Ranger Distress Stickles in Frayed Burlap in the circles, looks kinda cool...not too glittery but very textural.

I posted the Texture Paste Covers off to the winners of my blog giveaway last week and also included an atc with them too, but don't tell the girls that.....it's a surprise! lol I also found an extra cover that I had made but hadn't painted so did another quick random draw and Debbi Baker was the winner of that one. I emailed Debbi and asked her what colour she'd like and she picked my favourite combo of Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold & Dioxazine Purple so hers has also gone postal along with the others. Here's 3 of the atc's that I sent to the winners....sorry Deb, you'll have to wait to see what you get as I didn't scan yours.

"What the hell"...

"In life"...

"Melancholy"...

I've been working on my next class, Embossing Techniques and will post these when I have some more samples done, the plan is over the weekend to get it all done & dusted! We'll see!!! I'll be using a couple of things for embossing that are not normal embossing items. Stay tuned.

...and the winner is.....plus Coloured Gloss Card atc's.......AND a canvas

It seems like there are quite a few of you out there who don't have a very pretty doormat and would like one of these instead, though a couple of you have said you'll use it as a journal cover.....whatever floats your boat! Using random.org the winners have been chosen for the giveaway from the last post.

The three names are.....(in no particular order) Lady Di, Sherry Goodloe and Katie Scarlett. I decided I might as well give away all 3 of them as I really don't need more than one. So the first of you to email me gets to choose which one you want. I do have your email addresses but what fun would that be if I just emailed you and said....
"you won" ....how boring!!! Hope you enjoy them and I hope you get the colour you want. ;-)





Tomorrow is the first of my Coloured Gloss Card technique atc classes and I've been busy today making extra samples and the raffle atc's for the 3 classes (dates up the top, to the right). It's surprising what colour you end up with when layering different colours of distress inks onto the gloss card, some are very unexpectedly beautiful, others not so (though you won't see any of THOSE here.....if in doubt, use Spiced Marmalade over the top and it fixes everything!!!) Because Stazon works so beautifully on gloss card, the stamping is what it's all about, besides the background colour of course!


"Servitude"...

"Eternal quest"...

"Will I love her"...

and a close-up of the wonderful black texture paste (again!) around the image of "Will I love her", which has then been rubbed with a little silver Rub'n'buff and mounted onto torn black metallic card...

"Sunshine and birdsong"...

"Collector"...

Two of my Uncles had their 60th birthday last weekend and for one of them I made an 8" x 10" canvas using a picture from the newspaper of his son taken when he was 8 years old. Paulie (my cousin) died tragically young when he was only in his 20's and it is still very hard for Paul (my uncle) to look at pictures of him....very emotional! I hoped that seeing Paulie's beaming smile in this canvas would show him in his true light, a fun-loving little boy who loved his skating and how cool to be in the newspaper when you're only 8! Yes, if you click on it it'll be bigger. I'm so glad I worked out how to do this, it used to really p*ss me off when it wouldn't work.

A free give-away (blog candy), more Texture Paste Covers & atc's, canvases

Texture Paste class at Scraptivate is over, I've completed 4 of the covers in the classes as well as made numerous atc's using various ways of applying texture paste. Because I do a sample of the ATC Technique Book Cover in each class, then also paint the previous dried sample, I've ended up with 4 of the Texture Paste Covers for the book. They are 6" x 8" in size and I've decided that I don't need them all so I'm going to give 2 of the new ones away.....your choice! You can use it as a cover for a book yourself or whatever you want, cut it up, wipe your feet on it, whatever! lol

All you need to do is leave a comment and I'll wait about a week before doing a random pick from the comments for the winners. Here are the new covers, (all paint by Golden Paints). Please remember to leave your email address if it's not on your blog and also remember to check back to see if you've won!

#1... (colours used are Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold, Dioxazine Purple, Interference Oxide Green)

a close-up...

#2...(colours used are Turquois Phthalo, Quinacridone Magenta, Iridescent Silver)

a close-up...

#3...(colours used are Phthalo Green (blue shade), Turquois Phthalo, Iridescent Gold)

no close-up...

Remember, all you need to do is to leave a comment below this post to have your very own miniature door-mat!!!....I mean "book cover"!!! (if you can't poke fun at yourself, how are you supposed to enjoy it when others do it!)

I also did some more atc's as samples and raffles for the classes. The effect of Glimmer Mist sprayed on dry texture paste is gorgeous, especially when the texture past doesn't cover the whole card as the card absorbs the mist differently than the non-texture pasted areas. Here are a couple of retro ones using the Glimmer Mists.

"Laser printer"... (Glimmer mist colour is Frost)

"Wisdom"... (Glimmer mist colour is Tigerlily)

"Portrait"...(using cuttlebug waste for texture paste scroll up the top)

Yesterday I had a catch-up with some of my arty friends, these are the girls who meet up (or try to!) once a month for a few entertaining hours of laughter, gossip, support and sometimes even art! We have made a committment to do better in the "art" department this year...starting with a shadow-box canvas. Anyway, for a Christmas gift swap this year we did 4"x4" mini canvases to swap. Here is the one I did that Lyn received. (I'll put up the one I received in my next post - can't find the camera.)

"Traveller"...

Lastly, here is an uncompleted 4"x4" canvas where I've used the Golden Crackle Paste over part of the canvas and just had a paint play with some greens and paynes gray. Not sure what to do with the rest of it but it'll come to me eventually. For now I'm happy just to look at the texture.

More Texture Paste, a sneak peek and tag!

The Texture Paste class that starts tomorrow at Scraptivate is the first of 3 Texture Paste classes that I'm teaching with this sometimes smelly, but fabulously textured stuff! I've done a few more samples and have created the ones that are to go into the book. This is how the atc classes will be run this year, you learn the technique, make up some samples in class and put them in your book, I supply the instructions to go on the opposite page. Anyway, you know all that so here are some more Texture Paste atc's.

"Snow White"...(quote courtesy of Mae West)

"Carpe rutila"...(this means "seize the spade"....love that quote too!!!)

"Vulgarity"...

The next set of 3 atc classes is "Coloured Gloss" technique. It's a way of taking plain white gloss card and colouring it, either in a single colour or blended. As gloss card takes stamping so well, we'll be focusing on using stamps to tell a story on the atc's. I try to get the girls in my classes to think before just stamping random images all over the paper....try and think what goes with what so even if you don't use words, the images relate and people can come up with their own story.

"Dwelling"...

"Three things"...(a Dorothy Parker quote....as I've said before, I'm not a man-hater, I just appreciate a good sense of humour, which Ms Parker has in spades!)

I received a blog award from Danielle, she's into cardmaking, scrapbooking & ATC's. Thankyou Danielle for this one that I haven't seen before, but I'm going to be a big party-pooper and not nominate though, I have a lovely list of delightful blogs to the right so if you're feeling inclined and have a few hours to peruse some spectacular work...feel free!

New ATC Technique Book Classes

I've been teaching at Scraptivate for over 2 years now so I figured it was time to recap some of the earlier techniques that I did in my atc classes. I always said I wouldn't do instruction sheets for my atc techniques but now I'm going to as we're going to build up a great technique book full of the atc samples that are made in class. Also, not everyone has a wonderful memory for techniques, (especially if they don't use them for 6 months or more...the techniques, not the brain!!!) so I thought I'd help out by doing instructions so they can refer back to them at a later date. Being my usual wordy self, I tend to "over-instruct" rather than give only sketchy details so I'm hoping the girls are happy to revisit the techniques months after they've been taught.


This is also linked to my goal for 2009. I'm not usually a goal-setter but this year I intend to put together a book with my techniques in it. I'm thinking along the lines of an e-book, mainly because I don't have a spare $10,000 to invest in a professionally made book and also the e-books are instant. I also have more control over how much detail I can go into as well as what pictures I want to include. I may end up making some hard-copies that will be for sale as well, these would be professionally bound and printed on decent paper but still cheaper than doing the whole type-setting thing. Comments??? Suggestions??? Thoughts???


So the first technique we are starting with is Texture Paste (Jo Sonja), also called Molding Paste (Golden) as well as Modelling Paste (Mont Marte) - they are all the same thing, they give texture and are fairly flexible still when dry. We are making the cover of our ATC Technique Book with Texture Paste and the picture below is my front cover of the book. It scans horribly, the colours are all out of whack so I may have to take a picture of it to try to get the true colour. I used Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold as a wash, then a wash of Paynes Gray, then dry-brushed with Interference Oxide Green (Blue Shade). It was this last addition of the interference paint that frightened the scanner.....it made the whole thing look like I'd also dry-brushed it with white paint, the reflective properties of the interference was that bad!!!

Inside the book will go either 2 or 3 atc samples that the girls make in each class and over a year, they should have a wonderful reference book full of their own work to look back on.

This first atc sample is made by using the texture paste with a cuttlebug waste piece as a stencil. I do love this scroll die-cut by Cuttlebug, it's my absolute favourite of all the die-cuts!

"Fable"...

For this next one I lightly scraped the texture paste on and used a foam stamp to get the texture, then spritzed it with glimmer mist when the texture paste had dried. Usually I paint over the texture paste but wanted to try the glimmer mist - perfect!!!

"Memory"...

Lastly, I used the black texture paste (Jo Sonja) that comes in a tube. This is a little difficult to get, but if you can get some, do! It's wonderful stuff! It has a nozzle so you just pipe it out. This is how I did the tree below. Piped the tree out, let it dry overnight, then did a wash of Nickel Azo Gold, dried it, another wash of Paynes Gray, dried it again, then dabbed on some Quinacridone Crimson in places, dried it again and finally a light wash of Titan Buff and dabbed some of this off with a paper towel. Rub'n'buff in gold rubbed lightly in certain places finished it off. Love my Golden Paints!!!

"Tangled Branches"...

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. It was a first for me without my Dad and Joan but it was very busy socially with birthday parties as well as the usual Christmas lunch and New Years Eve party. A fine time was had by all and we remembered our loved ones who weren't with us, but tried not to feel too sad as they wouldn't have been happy about that!