Born, never asked

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Spritz, Sprays and Stencils". How to explain my entry this week without typing a mini-novel that will bore you to tears? I'll try to make it brief!

I have been a huge fan of multimedia artist Laurie Anderson for over 25 years. I have seen her perform more times than I can remember, I have a signed copy of her career retrospective and she was even the subject of my final degree dissertation back in my college days. I'm sure that many (if not most) of you won't be familar with her work, it's definitely more "arty" than mainstream. She sings on some albums, tells stories on others and is a gifted violinist. Above all she is the queen of digital technology, frequently inventing the instruments she uses in her music. My piece this week is inspired by her track "Born, Never Asked", which I love for her emotive violin playing. If you'd like to give it a listen it can be found here.

I started out by making 2 stencils for this piece - the first was a block of numbers, used in the centre panel in the bottom row. The second was the lyrics of the song that inspired the piece, which are:

It was a large room, full of people. All kinds. And they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind that curtain?

I used that stencil in the top-left and centre-right panels. Oh, by the way, while we're talking about making your own stencils, it's an activity that definitely has it's pros and cons! Yes, you have a unique stencil of your own design that is perfectly suited to the project you're working on, and once made, you can use time and again. However, and it's a big "however", be prepared to spend hours picking tiny pieces of plastic out of the stencil and then even longer finding them in your hair, on your clothes, in your mouth and even in your food!

Ok, a quick skip through what I did on each panel, starting top left and working left to right.

• Coloured with blended Distress Inks, stamped with letters stamp and stencilled with text, both brown Distress Ink (I forget which brown). The hand was moulded from paper clay and coloured with Promarkers.
  
• Letter blocks paper from Tim Holtz's Lost and Found stack.
  
• Stamped the hand and coloured it with Promarkers. Edged the tile with brown Distress Ink (same edging on all panels).
  
• Coloured the tile with blue Distress Stain. Splattered blue and red Distress Stain on my craft mat and pressed the tile onto it then stamped the ticket.
  
• Photo from the Lost and Found stack.
  
• Covered the tile with Tissue Tape then painted it with green Claudine Hellmuth paint. Stencilled the text with red C.H. paint.
  
• Background is text blocks from Lost and Found stack. Coloured the base of a grunge block with brown Distress Ink then stamped dates image on it. Coloured the grunge T with black Distress Ink and fixed them both in place.
  
• Coloured tile with blended orange and yellow Distress Ink then stamped numbers grid on it. Stencilled numbers with Aged Mahogany Distress Ink.
  
• Coloured the tile with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink and stamped the dots with Dusty Concord Distress Ink. Used a black Distress Marker to edge the main details on the man stamp then stamped it on Kraft Resist paper. Inked it and stamped again on white card. Cut out the man's face and fixed it to the Kraft Resist image then fixed both onto the tile.
  
• Finally I fixed all the tiles together with the Tiny Attacher and mounted them onto black card.
  

Looking back at it now, it's clear to me that I was also playing around with ideas of scale - big hand/small hand, big numbers/small numbers, big text/small text. I confess that I wasn't aware of it while I was doing it, it must have been subconscious, lol I have a running joke with a friend of mine, any time we look at someone's art, whether it be in a gallery or on a blog, one of us, at some point, will say "Do you see what they're doing? They're playing with ideas of scale!". It's quite possible that that was rattling around somewhere in my head during the making of this piece.

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

It's a Guy Thing!

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "One for the Guys", so why not get creative and give this week's challenge a try?

I decided to make a journal cover using Ten Seconds Studio copper-effect metal.  I ran it through the Cuttlebug with the clockworks embossing folder and fixed it to some chipboard.  I then rubbed it with blending solution on an alcohol ink tool to remove the copper glaze from the raised parts, which revealed the silver beneath.  I rubbed on some black paint and then buffed it away in some areas and finally distressed it with a sanding block.

The text plate was created with layered strips of card which were then covered in copper metal and treated the same as the main cover.  Finally I stamped the text, cut it out and fixed it in place.

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Famous for 15 Minutes

 

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Anything Goes", so why not get creative and give this week's challenge a try?

My piece this week was inspired to some extent by the work of Andy Warhol, particularly his images in the style of this one of Marilyn Monroe. Needless to say mine is a little more grungy than his very graphic style! :)  Oh, that's also why I paraphrased his quote "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" as the title!

The two panels on the left use tissue tape as background, both taken from the Commute pack.  The lower background was coloured with distress inks applied with an ink blending tool and you can see that the colour is very subtle, tissue tape doesn't hold much colour that way.  The top panel was coloured with a distress marker which was then wiped with a wet wipe and you can see that much more of the colour has stayed visible.

The two panels on the right were stamped with Versamark ink and images from the new Tim Holtz set "Mixed Media".  I dried them with a heat gun and then applied distress inks on top, which is resisted by the Versamark, giving a ghosted image of the stamp.

Moving in a clockwise circle from top left, the men (Wendy Vecchi's stamp "Well Dressed") were coloured as follows:

1. Distress stains, which I didn't dry between colours, so that they would run together.
2. Uncoloured, with added white star brads.
3. Stamped in black then over stamped in red and yellow, offsetting the image each time.
4. Stamped and coloured with promarkers.

I think that of all the pieces I've made in recent weeks this one is by far my favourite - I hope you feel the same way too! :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Facing up to Studio 490!

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Inspiration Studio 490".  Wendy Vecchi releases some fantastic stamps under her Studio 490 label, and I particularly love these faces and the distressed lines background that I used.  The background was coloured with Old Paper distress stain, and everything else was coloured with Promarkers.  As ever with Promarkers, I stamped with Memento Tuxedo Black, to avoid the stamped image bleeding when it was coloured.

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Home is where art heart is!

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Anything Goes".  After moving to a larger home a year or so ago, I still have a lot of wall space to fill and have consequently been making a lot more framed pieces than I usually would.  This is one of those, destined for my kitchen I think!

The stamp is one of Wendy Vecchi's from her set "Residential Art".  I cut out 6 of the 2"x2" squares from the Retro Grunge pad and then stamped the house and text onto each one.  I then stamped them again onto white cardstock and set about altering each house and then cutting out just the house part and sticking it onto the stamped image on the patterned squares. 

Going from left to right, this is what I did:

• House 1 is red and yellow Claudine Hellmuth paint applied with my finger.
• House 2 was left white.
• House 3 was coloured with green Claudine Hellmuth paint and then parts of the house were coloured with a white paint pen.
• House 4 doesn't show too well in the photo, but it's very pale blue, with a slightly darker blue flourish stamped onto it.
• House 5 is coloured with Fired Brick distress stain.
• House 6 was coloured with Promarkers.  I knew they would blur the Archival ink I had stamped the image with, but I hoped it would make it look like it might have been on fire.  The "for rent" is a clear stamp from a set by 7 gypsies.

And there you have it!  I'm really pleased with how this one turned out, which is a good job, as I'll be seeing a lot of it if it ends up on my kitchen wall! lol  I think it should probably go above that bit of worktop to the right of the sink, before you get to the boiler, don't you agree?  :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Bottles and beads

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Bottle It!".  I knew I was going to use Wendy Vecchi's "all bottled up" stamp, but I thought I'd ring the changes by stamping it onto shrink plastic to make small embellishments.  Before I started, I had a vision in my head of them suspended from twisted wire with beads in it, so the end result is pretty much what I had envisaged.  I had thought at first that I might make a card, but in the end I decided to decorate this mini-journal :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

All Bottled Up!

The theme for this week's Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Wendy Vecchi Style". I've always loved Wendy's "All Bottled Up" stamp, so decided I would make a feature of it in my project.

I started by stamping the background lines in Fired Brick distress ink, and then swiped over them with Wild Honey and Antique Linen distress stains.  I applied Faded Jeans distress stain to my non-stick mat and spritzed it with water, then moved the background card in it, giving areas of dark and light blue colour.

The bottles were stamped separately and cut out, then swiped with Distress Stain to "fill" them and to colour the lids.  The "ART" stamp was applied with Walnut Stain distress ink and the bottles were fixed in place.  I tore a strip of white card and stamped the text with Black Archival ink and used my handy "fingerprint stamps" in Fired Brick Distress Ink.  The white strip was fixed in place and I created a mat which I edge with Fired Brick Distress Stain.  Finally the whole thing was applied to my 5x5 card.  I had a lot of fun making this, I hope you like it :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Studio 490 Style

Well, what a fantastic start to the new Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge we had last week! Over 200 entries - thanks so much to everyone who took part!! The theme for this week's challenge is "Studio 490 Style", which means in the style of amazing artist and designer Wendy Vecchi. Unfortunately I don't own any of Wendy's stamp designs, but that doesn't mean that I can't try to make something in her style! I've always admired her blog header, so I thought I'd make something inspired by it. (Check out Wendy's blog here to see what I'm talking about).
As ever, I designed the blank pieces on my computer, then cut them with the Cricut. After that, I used Distress Inks and a range of stamps, including some Tim Holtz, to complete my project.

Thanks to Simon Says Stamp there's another great prize this week, to be given at random to one of the entrants to the challenge - take a look at the prize pic below, it's really worth winning! Why not head over to the challenge blog for some inspiration and see how the other Design Team members have interpreted the theme? While you're there, why not think about entering the challenge? Go on, you know you'll have fun! :)