Challenge 219 Envelopes and Gelli Session

Challenge 219

This week's challenge is "Straight Lines all the time"; you can see it here.

I started out by drawing some straight lines across my tile.  Somehow the idea in my head was better than it turned out :), but that's OK.  So now I had my "string of straight lines" and went through my collection of tangles and chose some with straight lines.

Even though I like each individual tangle, and I really enjoyed drawing them, I'm not happy at all with the tile.  I think I should have taken a different approach... maybe next time :)

Envelopes

Here are the envelopes I received back from the Envelope Swap I participated in a few weeks ago.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

You can see the front (left) and back (right) of all 10 envelopes by artists

(left to right - top to bottom):

Mark Montano / Diana Klask

Sheila Goldsberry / Genevieve Crabe

Bertha Trujillo / Jan Canyon

Angel Kelley / PLA Schneider

Gloria / Terri Denise Oleson

Gelli Session

I have been looking forward to this long weekend so I could spend a couple of hours playing with my Gelli plate and not worry about anything else - great stress reliever :)

So... as usual, I got out some paints, different types of paper, new stencils cut from Tyvek and transparencies, some mark/texture making tools, the Gelli plate, of course.

This is what my work area looked like before

A few things I wanted to try

• would putting a Tyvek stencil with a hole in the middle be good enough to pass for a round Gelli plate or a smaller size Gelli plate
• Try some of the newly cut stencils
• print on a napkin layer - to use for collage - the layers are so thin they are supposed to look completely transparent once collaged
• print on labels - some small and completely transparent, others white with a blue bar across them
• print on some of the office supplies I got for free when people moved offices at work - tent cards, brochures, and conference / handout folders (they have pockets inside)
• print on tags, and cards I received but would never send to anyone (too boring)

This is what my pile looked like at the end of 3 fun hours (some are printed on both sides):

And this is what my work space looked like :).  I got a comment earlier that I only showed a picture of the organized "before" but should also show the very-messy "after".  So... here it is :)  Enjoy!!

Challenge 218 and Updates

Challenge #218 - White on Black

This week's challenge was to use a black tile and tangle with white; you can see the challenge here along with everyone else's entries.

It's been quite a long time since I have done anything on black; one of the reasons is that I always mess up and instead of doing highlights with the pencil at the end, I do "shading" as usual, and it just looks wrong!  Today I kept thinking to myself "highlights!", "highlights!", "highlights!"... and... it looks completely different than my other ones :).  I had fun!

Updates

The journal from a file folder I was working on last week... it went through a very, very, very ugly phase.  I almost threw it in the trash, but then thought... well if it is trash anyway, let me play with it, it certainly cannot get any worse. 

So I went crazy with it :) and now it looks completely different than it did last week, but it is growing on me.  Mind you, I'm still not happy with it but hope I will eventually "fix" it.  

I did not put all the pages in yet (and just put rubber bands for now), but will finish it in the next few days as we have a long weekend coming up :).  Here are some really bad pictures of it right now, just so you can see more or less what it looks like.  I will get better pictures when it is done and it is actually light out.

I also received the envelopes back from the swap and will try to take pictures and post - most had glitter on them, so I need to do something with that as I don't want glitter everywhere. :)

Challenge 217 and File Folder Journal in progress

Challenge #217

This week's challenge (here) was a duo tangle:  you can only use Dex and Bunzo tangles.  I found it hard, and I'm not sure why... maybe because they are so different I didn't know how to make them work together?  Maybe?

Anyway... here it is on a Bijou tile (2 in x 2 in).  The left side is the unshaded version, because I forgot all about the shading until I saw the scanned, larger version :).  I thought is would be fun to show them both.

File Folder Journal - In progress

For some reason I thought that using a file folder would be a really easy way to make a journal where I could play with my hand-made stamps.

OK... so far, it has taken a lot more work and thinking that I thought it would.  Mind you!  I'm having fun, but I don't think it will ever be as "quick and easy" as I thought.

So far, I have folded it and unfolded it about a hundred times ... lol... ok, maybe not quite that many, but... a lot!!  I put a couple of coats of gesso on the outside (it was patterned and it had a big purse design on it - you can still see it in some of the pictures).  Then I painted it with water soluble wax crayons - I just felt like it, no other particular reason:

Then I grabbed one of my designed stencils, and went at it with Golden acrylics and a bit of glazing medium.

I pounced the sponge over the inside pattern until the sponge was completely out of ink - just to give it a bit more interest and tie the pocket with the interior a bit.

Hopefully it will turn out well when it is finished, but you never know!

Challenge 216 Brella

The Diva's challenge this week (here) was to use the tangle Brella created by Bunny Wright. 

I am not going to have much time this week and I wanted to do the challenge, and play a bit in my mini accordion journal I posted about last week (here).  So, I decided to do this week's challenge in 2 of the pages - that's why it is so colorful :)

This is probably my shortest post ever, but it is content that counts, right?  :)

Enjoy your week!