A catch up...

Morning everyone,

I haven't shared some pieces I've made lately, it's been mad busy and I've not had much time to do my 'own thing', but I made a couple of samples for the recent Dare to Create weekend organised by Sue at Art Workshops, and Andy Skinner & Tracy Weinzapfel Stratton.

I was booked on to the retreat as an attendee, and it was a fantastic weekend all round. A huge thankyou goes out to all involved in the organisation for a lovely weekend.  I'll share my makes at some stage from there too, but these are the pieces I made myself for Sue for her shop for the weekend.

My brief was to make something that incorporated Andy and Tracy's style, so 'Skinzapfel' was the order of the day.  The first piece I made was a canvas,

I painted the base coat in DecoArt Media pyrrole red and cadmium orange hue, and then went over with crackle paint, leaving the heart shape and flowers empty in the middle.  Once the crackle paint was dry, I used a cogs stencil inside the heart with DecoArt texture paste through.  I then added sand texture paste randomly around the edges and over the cogs to distress them further.  This centre panel was then painted in Andy's Rust technique.  The outer colours were prussian blue hue and cobalt teal hue, and a little turquoise hue.  I stamped randomly with carbon black and Tracy's stamps on the blue background.

The hand drawn flowers were painted in pyrrole red and hansa yellow medium.  I went round all the edges with a Faber Castell pitt pen and smudged the black lines, and also some more prussian blue around the heart to give shadow.  A computer sentiment was printed and coloured to match, scribbled round and adhered to the canvas.

Finally I edged the canvas in a little prussian blue hue to darken it and bring the focus in to the centre of the canvas.

My second make I wanted to keep, it's very simple but I kinda liked it :)

I took a second hand mirror from a car boot, and painted in black DecoArt Gesso.  I then added plumber's aluminium tape to pieces of black card, and used a spellbinders Mbossabilities folder called Industrial, to run the card with tape on through the Big shot.  I cut the pieces of card into different rectangles, and adhered to the mirror with matte medium. Carbon black was then dry brushed into all the crevices and across the mirror, and wiped back with a slightly dry baby wipe, repeated a few times.

 I then stamped Tracy's stamp Vines of Love onto normal 3 ply tissue, cut out and separated the ply.  I adhered this to the mirror with matte medium also, going over the top of the tissue very carefully to seal to the mirror.  I added a stalk to the flower in blue green light and green gold, and painted the flower in quinacridone magenta and hansa yellow medium.  I made sure you could still see the edges of the flower by running round with a micron pen.

The only other thing was to dry brush the edges of the black gesso'd mirror with some metallic silver paint to tie it in, and it was finished.

I love the simplicity of this, and Tracy's style with the industrial look.

Hope you've enjoyed the steps through these, I certainly enjoyed making them.

Best Wishes,

Nikki
xxx